#1 :: Strong Leadership Starts With Self-Care, with Stephanie Morimoto - Asutra
You can’t pour from an empty cup. Our premier episode explores this issue with “active self-care” company, Austra’s CEO, Stephanie Morimoto. With an extensive background in both entrepreneurship and non-profit, Stephanie brings perspective on how 2020 shaped e-commerce, what we can do to take care of ourselves as leaders, and what happens when your products attract a sporting superstar who then joins your company as a co-owner.
Asutra: https://asutra.com/
Recorded on 10.27.2020
TRANSCRIPT
[Music & Intro]
Laurie Pillow: Welcome to the 100 CEO Project Podcast
Andrea Spirov: Today we're sitting with Stephanie Morimoto owner and CEO of Asutra, a line of natural and affordable personal care and pain relief products that are produced in Chicago. The company launched in 2015 and originally sold primarily through its website before launching in thousands of CVS stores nationwide. Tennis superstar and entrepreneur Venus Williams took an ownership stake in Asutra in 2019 after discovering the products as a customer and became the company's chief brand officer. Stephanie, welcome to the show.
Stephanie Morimoto: Thank you so much for having me.
1:16
AS: So how has Asutra been impacted by the crisis this year?
SM: Yeah, you know this is always such a tricky conversation to have because I think we've been really lucky, and we feel very grateful for that, as I'm sure you and a lot of your listeners know, as people were stuck at home during the pandemic they shifted a lot of their shopping to online from going to the store and since so much of our business is direct to consumer online, we certainly were able to serve our customers by serving them through our website.
And then the other thing is that, you know, with stress, and sleeplessness and health at the forefront of so many people's minds folks are searching for self-care and since Asutra is all about what we call active self-care, we fit the bill.
AS: I saw that. I saw IBM Research said coronavirus accelerated the shift to ecommerce by five years with online sales up 20% overall this year. So you started online though, correct?
2:14
SM: Correct. We actually started mostly online on Amazon. And our direct to consumer sales at our site were essentially zero when I bought the business in 2018. So our big push over the last couple of years has been to do a complete brand overhaul from where we started, so that we could better tell our story of active self-care, and then really focus on connecting directly with our consumers through our website and through our social media channels, as well as, as you mentioned, increasing our - or are actually growing - from zero our retail distribution.
2:53
AS: So was there a big shift in the types of products people were ordering before and after COVID?
SM: That's a good question. I would say our best-selling collection has always been our magnesium healing collection, so magnesium m is really good for overall wellness. It helps with relieving muscle cramps, provides a sense of calm, helps a lot of people get to sleep at night. It's actually the fourth most abundant mineral in our bodies and yet we don't tend to get enough of it through our diet because it's been depleted from a lot of the soil. So we don't get it through our food as much. So most people need to supplement and you can take it as a pill, but that can upset people's stomachs. Or you can absorb it topically or transdermally through your skin. So at Asutra we're big fans of topical magnesium we have it in spray form soap form in a bath lotions, creams, so we saw that continue to be our best selling collection and surged even higher, right people were looking, as you can imagine, for things that would help them feel calmer and help with pains sitting at their computer all day and also help them get a good night's sleep.
I would say the other collection that we saw a real uptick in are our natural sleep aids, so we don't do any ingestibles but we have a lot of lavender products that use lavender essential oils which help you relax and unwind. Whether it's a bath salt or an aromatherapy spray. We have a hugely popular silk weighted sleep mask filled with lavender and flaxseed that you can use for blackout. It provides acupuncture for your face, and people love to sleep with this thing and gift it. So we saw an upsurge in those sleep related items.
And the final thing I'll say which is really heartening, I think, is that a lot of people wanted to send gifts. They couldn't connect with people in person, so they wanted to show that they were still thinking about or caring for others in their network or for frontline health care workers or teachers who were dealing with so much of the pandemic. And so they would turn to Asutra to find those self care gifts that they can send as a symbol of that love to people that they knew.
4:58
LP: What's your favorite of all the lines you guys have?
SM: Yeah. Oh my gosh. It’s like choosing your favorite child. I would say I am really in love with one of our newest magnesium products called Relieve Your Pain. It has magnesium and 10% menthol, as well as arnica. So the magnesium as we talked about is great for you overall, the menthol provides that cooling sensation and then arnica is a natural herb for relieving inflammation, which helps with pain relief as well. I work out a lot. So I have a lot of sore muscles and then when I sit at my computer you know I get sore shoulders and neck and so I love the Relieve Your Pain because it has this kind of gradual cooling sensation that really helps relieve back pain, neck pain and shoulder pain in particular. And other product line I would say is what brought me to Asutra is our line of organic and natural yoga mat cleaning sprays, which I know sounds like a little crazy, but they're a castile soap base, they're really good for your mat, they're safe, and then they have different essential oil blends. So we have lavender. Our most popular eucalyptus is next. I personally love our peppermint as well so it's kind of like a nice scent and mood boost while you're on your mat and you can also use them for dumbbells or other fitness gear, which is great because so many more people are working out at home nowadays.
AS: I'm watching Laurie's face…
LP: Yeah, this is my world.
AS: And making my mental shopping list for gifting her because I can see she's excited about everything yoga.
6:31
AS: I'm interested in your purchase of Asutra and how you used to work for national education organizations. So what made you buy Asutra and sort of what skills and special sauce did you take from those education organizations and bring to the role?
SM: Great question. So, let me take a little step back, which is that I would say I do have roots in entrepreneurship. My grandmother who came here from Indonesia. She immigrated to Los Angeles; she brought with her a skill that was being a seamstress and over time she built a small business making patterns for big fashion brands. And then my grandfather worked his way through college and med school and ended up becoming a doctor - he was an eye doctor or ophthalmologist - and he built his own practice scratch, so I saw those examples of entrepreneurship early on in my family. And before working in education, I worked at McKinsey advising large companies, as well as at another organization helping women of color start small businesses. So I have a lot of roots in entrepreneurship, but I definitely went to education for a while and while I was in education, I did work more on the business side so I did fundraising marketing and business development. And even though it sounds like so many different things that I did before coming to Asutra, none of which were selling health and wellness products, I would say that the journey that I've been on has really helped me today because so much of what I've done over time is about understanding who you're connecting with what your, what problem you're helping them solve and then offering the solution right and communicating that to them in a way that makes sense to them that's easy to understand, especially when we're all so busy and inundated with information these days. So I think a lot of that has really helped and then of course there are the more technical or hard skills from accounting and finance to, you know, marketing to managing a sales pipeline, that I think transfer to any type of business.
8:28
LP: And we also understand that creating jobs and opportunities for women of color that that's definitely high up on your list. So specific to this year with the pandemic how have you been able to do that? Have you had to pivot drastically in order to, to keep doing that?
SM: Great question. Yeah, part of our purpose at Asutra is to create good jobs for people who need them here in Chicago, which is my hometown, and we've been really lucky we've been able to keep our core team actually intact. So, during the height of the pandemic when so much was shut down we did close - we have a warehouse here in Chicago where we make some of the products. We also have contract manufacturing partners, and then we ship orders from that warehouse too. We did close for about a month just to keep people home and safe. We didn't want them on public transportation, we didn't want them having to be exposed. And we luckily I mean thanks to our incredible customers who kept buying our products, we were able to pay everybody for a month, while they were at home, because we didn't want them to stress about not having a job or not having a paycheck, and when we were able to reopen safely. You know they were so excited to come back and then continue to be part of the team and make those products with love, so we were really fortunate, I would say that we were able to do that. We have a fairly small but mighty team so there's about 10 of us, but we also have a constellation of really amazing agency partners that bring incredible talent that we probably couldn't afford otherwise right so we've got agencies who do everything from digital advertising to PR to finance and accounting, that work with us as well.
10:14
AS: So I'm interested in - I was reading an article, and you talked about core values and I'm interested in how you developed your core values and how they kind of carried you through.
SM: So the concept of core values is definitely something I brought some of my education days; core values is a really big concept in the nonprofit arena and particularly in education in schools where you're educating kids and helping them develop and creating a community and culture. For me core values is really about culture, you’re saying what you believe in, how you want to treat each other and how you want to treat your customers. So, that was important for me to have that as part of Asutra. We have our core values outlined in our employee handbook. So any time we hire someone new, that's part of what they read and actually sign off on, and the other important thing that I've seen is hiring. So when you hire people, I found it's so important to make sure that those potential employees are aligned with your core values and can actually describe times that they've exemplified those core values, because when the times are tough, those core values and going back to those are what really gets you through.
So for example, our top core value as the journey is one team, one goal. Like I said, we're a small but mighty team, and we've been really lucky to have a lot of business. I mean we have a lot of customers on our site. We've had an influx of orders from retail partners over the last few months. And sometimes it's a lot, right, but what's so great about our team is they always go back to that idea of one team one goal, and everybody pitches in to get the job done and make sure that our customers are happy.
12:06
AS: Do you see any challenges in scaling that, as you said you're 10 now but I am I can see you just keep growing. so how do you think about scaling that?
SM: Yeah, that's a great question too so I'll share a couple thoughts. One like I said we have 10 employees but we also have this constellation of agencies so all told we probably have something like 40 people who work with us. And, when we hire agencies, that's actually been a way that has helped us scale. I'm just thinking about the folks listening to this, right, who might be small business owners and also growing. And frankly, being able to have agencies allows us to, you know, grow, or work with them as we're growing, or if we need to cut costs, we, you know we can do that more flexibly. But what's been great about the agencies and how we approach it is we think about it like hiring staff. We also look for agency partners that want to operate as if they're a part of our team, that they share our core values too and that they really feel ownership over Asutra. So that's just one specific tip I would give folks, is if you're hiring an agency partner, treat it like a staff interview. Right. The other thing is you know I've been very fortunate to work in organizations of all sizes, and you know 1,300 people, 200 people, 10 people, five people, and even in that 1,300 person organization where I had to hire hundreds of folks; it really came down to two things, you know, do you embrace our mission, whatever that mission might be. And do you exemplify our core values? And then, of course, the more technical questions related to do you bring the right skills and expertise for the particular role. But if people embrace the mission and if people cued to the core values, they really succeeded in these organizations so that's why I keep harping on that because as we scale we'll continue to look for people who meet both of those things.
13:52
AS: So what do you think is going to happen with the holiday shopping this year, the holiday season. I've heard different things and then also the mail - we were talking last time we got together about some issues with mail - and I already saw something about them thinking they were saying that, you know, the mail might not be able to keep up so maybe we should get our orders in before the election day and things like that.
SM: Well what I really hope people do before election day is vote - get their ballots in. That's what I would like the post office to prioritize personally; but after that, you know, everything that I've been reading and what we're planning for Asutra is earlier shopping; people are still nervous about going to stores. Many retail chains are not going to be open on Thanksgiving or Black Friday to give their employees time off, and also because, you know, a mad crush of people in the stores is not safe, frankly, or helping with COVID cases rising again as the weather gets cold and people are indoors. So, what I think a lot of ecommerce companies like us are planning for is earlier shopping earlier sales to make people's lives easier.
For us at Asutra, we always have a big Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale, so we'll be doing something similar and if you if you want to hear more about it, you know, sign up for our email list or follow us on social and we'll let you know as soon as that’s available. And we're also, you know, thinking of ways to support our VIP customers with gifting. A lot of people will buy Asutra for teachers or trainers, or health care workers or other people that support them in their lives and so we're going to have a program in November to help our VIPs with gifting just to make it stress free and easy for them. As far as shipping, yes I think shipping is a mess right now, across the globe, you know with flights reduced as a for instance, there's just fewer spots for cargo to cross the sea or go to different countries. And then here in the US, shipping companies are inundated and so it is much harder to get things on time. So I would definitely say for customers out there but also for business owners who sell products. Assume shipping is going to take a lot longer and plan for that and help your customers plan for that too and set the right expectations right they may not be able to get something in two days. It may take a week. And so how do you sort of nudge your customers in the right direction so they're not upset when something doesn't arrive on time.
16:22
AS: Did you all run into a lot of issues during the pandemic of just because you moved back to mail order, so were people getting upset or...
SM: The core of our business has always been online. And so we're used to processing shipments and getting that done every day which was fortunate for us, I would say. We definitely saw a little bit of a slowdown and some hiccups with the mail, you know, slightly more customers than usual not getting their packages, things actually getting lost in the mail. I would say the bigger issue we experienced as a company that has to manage getting raw materials and packaging and products from different places is supply chain issues. So, you know, with a lot of factories across the globe shut down, production capacity stopped. So getting things like bottles or jars that we need to put our products in was much harder because they just literally didn't have the materials made and getting people back into the factory and getting the lines back up and running, took them longer as cities and states opened up. So, getting the materials is actually the bigger issue, and then like I mentioned before, there just weren't as many planes, trains and buses running. So, getting the goods from one place to another place once they were made was also the challenge.
AS: I definitely noticed that at retail I remember you could not get any cleaning products for a good several months. It was crazy. So did you, how did any of your retail partners have any troubles with out of stocks or were they pretty understanding about that?
SM: The good thing is a lot of our retail partners asked us, you know, are you facing supply chain issues? Do you anticipate shortages of certain items that we order from you or longer timelines? And they were more forgiving during that time so instead of penalizing us for being out of stock on something, they would let it slide, or they would work with us and order the things that we had available and not order the things that we were stocked out on because we were waiting for parts.
18:32
LP: We all want to know how did you connect to Venus Williams, and how is she serving you and your company values, being a brand ambassador?
SM: Well, it's a crazy story about Venus, she cold called us, which is the craziest cold call to get. I still remember, checking my email, and our customer service person forwarded a note that had gone to our support@Asutra.com generic customer service email. It was somebody on her team at the largest talent agency in the globe, so I thought okay I should probably take this call, set up a call. He didn't say why he was calling but he asked all these questions and I shared with them our mission of active self care that were women owned and women led and our commitment to natural and clean formulations to help you take care of yourself while being accessibly priced. And he said oh my gosh this is so inspiring I love this story and I said, Well, how the heck did you hear about us. And he responds, you're not going to believe this but Venus Williams uses your pain relief products, and she asked us to find out more about you. And my jaw just dropped. Exactly. I said, I'm sorry what, you know, it was just an incredible introduction and the conversations ensued. We found out more about what she was interested in and it turns out she loves skincare and natural products, she actually makes some stuff at home for her friends and family. We loved the fact that not only is she an icon, a legend. She lives our mission of active self care every day, and she's an entrepreneur she owns two of her own businesses an interior design firm and an athletic apparel company. So we had a lot we could learn from her too. So we settled on her playing a real role on the team that's what she wanted to do. She wanted to be involved, and we made her our chief brand officer, so her job is to tell the world about Asutra and also educate folks on the importance of taking care of yourself on purpose. So she does press interviews she posts on social and she just collaborates with us in a variety of ways to share about Asutra and talk about the importance of active self care.
LP: That's awesome.
SM: She's awesome. She’s as goal oriented and hard working off the court, and in business as she is on the court.
LP: I would say people find each other for a reason. So talking to you now I see why that happened.
SM: Oh well thank you I feel very honored that you would say that.
LP: Very cool.
21:13
AS: What is your number one self-care tip for CEOs, dealing with this year?
SM: Yeah, I say this, in particular to women, all the time. Don't feel guilty about putting yourself first. I think we as women leaders and entrepreneurs in particular are trained frankly to take care of everyone before we take care of ourselves. And it can be exhausting. And if we do set aside time for ourselves instead of our partners or our kids or our businesses or whatever, we can feel guilty about that. And so I would say, don't - you know whether it's five minutes in the morning for a great skincare routine, or a midday breathing or yoga session, or you know gardening, or cooking or doing whatever it is that gives you joy. Make that time. And it's, you know, self care is not just about taking a bath. Self-care is about being intentional about caring for your whole self your mind, your body your soul, so that you can be your best, and especially now with the pandemic this year, you know, mental wellness is, it's a, it's a tough thing, it's a challenge everybody's stuck at home - they’re in very different environments. And so paying attention to that and doing the things you need to reset and rejuvenate so that you can be a better leader is key.
The final thing I'll say is sleep, sleeping really helps with that. There was a Harvard Business Review article that talked about how sleeping well makes you a better leader, and I fundamentally agree with that so don't short yourself on sleep either.
AS: Really great advice. This has been so inspiring thank you for joining us, Stephanie.
SM: Thank you so much for having me. I hope this is helpful to everyone out there and if you want to learn more about Asutra, you can go to our site. It's asutra.com so that's a s u t r a.com, or follow us on social media at asutra.life or, please connect with me personally on LinkedIn. I love hearing from other business owners and leaders, and would love to continue the dialogue.
LP: Stephanie Morimoto, CEO of Asutra, thank you so much for taking time to share your insights.
[Music]
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Hosted by: Andrea Spirov, Laurie Pillow
Writing and research: Andrea Spirov, Laurie Pillow
Edited by: Laurie Pillow
Produced by: Laurie Pillow, Andrea Spirov
