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232 | Why You Should Patiently Scale Your Business | with Scott Crumrine

Honest Ecommerce
Honest Ecommerce
Episode • Jul 3, 2023 • 19m

Scott Crumrine is the co-founder and CEO of Guava Family, a high-performance design company creating baby gear that treats parenting like the extreme sport that it is. 

Previously a designer for Motion Water Sports with a specialty in wakeboard design, Scott found parents in his life frustrated with the poor performance of strollers and other family gear. 

Before even becoming a parent himself, Scott teamed up with fellow designers Asa Giffin and Reed Schmidt in 2009 to bring Guava Family to life with the mission to make gear more efficient, simple, and elegant to meet their needs and the needs of people like them, particularly those with active lifestyles. 

Guava Family's products are loved by active parents across the country, and have received prestigious innovations awards such as TIME Best Inventions, Fast Company's Innovation by Design, and a Red Dot. 

Scott holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BS Mechanical Engineering from Santa Clara University. 

He holds several patents in the Action Sports and Juvenile Products industry. 

He lives with his wife and 3 kids in Carlsbad, CA where, when not working, he loves spending time in the ocean, and teaching his little ones to surf and ski.

In This Conversation We Discuss: 

  • [00:00] Intro
  • [01:01] What are Guava Family’s products?
  • [01:30] Where the idea of Guava Family came from
  • [03:07] Getting the first customers and initial sales
  • [04:50] Guava Family’s first platform on 2013
  • [05:27] Experiencing Ecom at its “infancy”
  • [06:28] Guava Family’s marketing platforms and channels
  • [07:38] How Scott balances Amazon and D2C
  • [08:07] Guava Family’s customer service ethos
  • [09:31] Sponsor: Electric Eye electriceye.io/connect
  • [10:28] Sponsor: Sendlane sendlane.com/honest
  • [11:55] Scaling a business without taking capital
  • [13:09] Word-of-mouth marketing in the baby industry
  • [15:49] Determining if a product line is worth doing
  • [16:45] Selling commodity product online might be harder
  • [17:35] Know what your business model is and stick to it
  • [18:21] Where to find Guava Family products

Resources:

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