BEHAVE, MAYSSA CHEHATA: Guilt-Free Gummies

Candy is arguably the most nostalgic impulse buy for most adults. Sticky-sweet, super sour, or indulgent and chocolaty, your favorite confection instantly takes you back (if you ever grew out of your sweet tooth in the first place!) As a proud candy connoisseur with a business background to boot, Mayssa Chehata founded Behave. Launched this August with guilt-free gummy bears, Behave brings the fun back into candy for millennial consumers, keeping them low in sugar, but high on sweetness. 

“We want to bring in the grown-ups who don’t want to eat candy anymore. We’re trying to come into the space and say, ‘Hey, don't feel like you can't eat candy.’ Eat the whole bag and don't feel guilty. We have that cleaner product that you can feel good about.” - Mayssa

Since launching, Mayssa has been featured in Fast Company and as an expert in Adweek’s Brandweek event. She talked to RADICHE about her founder journey and thoughtful, brand-forward approach to spicing up sweets with Behave. 

Childhood and Background  

“If my parents gave me ten dollars I would buy something for a dollar and stash nine. I always saved and held onto it, and I’m still like that. I like to have my little nest egg.” - Mayssa

Mayssa was born and raised in Washington, D.C., and her family is originally from Tunisia, so a career in international development was on her radar from an early age. Like many millennials, her childhood enterprises included a bustling thrifting and reselling business where she relished in the thrill of earning quick cash. For undergrad, she set out to follow her dream of working for the Foreign Service with a degree in International Relations. A few years later and that dream had transformed into a path that led Mayssa to some of the world’s most iconic brands. She first found herself at the NFL through an internship in the league’s new international department.

“Even though the NFL is a huge company, that was my first taste of startup life and trying to build a brand internationally and build a business. That was my first taste of the hustle culture. I ended up taking a job with the NFL after college and that's what set me on this path in the business world,” Mayssa said. 

After the NFL she spent time working in partnerships at Uber, and went on to be an early employee (one of 13!) at Daily Harvest, her first foray into the food world and working on a physical product. Her last position working at a company other than her own was at SoulCycle, where she introduced an entirely new partnership program to the brand. 

“SoulCycle is a massive brand with the resources of a big company, but because everything had grown so fast there was an opportunity to go back and lay the groundwork for new business development and partnerships,” Mayssa said. “It’s not about who can pay the most money, it’s about who aligns with the brand and who the audience can benefit from. Make it integrated and organic.”

Over the course of her time innovating and transforming at these companies, Mayssa was going through her own evolution that served as the inspiration for Behave. 

The Aha Moment

“I was starting to reevaluate what I was eating and trying to eat cleaner, but the one thing I could never kick was candy and sugar. As a kid I felt like I had to hoard candy, and I think that carried over into adulthood. I had a very unhealthy relationship with candy and sweets, so as I was trying to eat cleaner, I started looking for better products across everything, like chickpea pasta or plant-based options. The one thing I couldn't find was candy.” - Mayssa 

In 2017, Mayssa started paying close attention to the candy aisle in the context of her own health and wellness. She found that when it came to candy, there were either traditional sugar-free products that were filled with artificial ingredients or all-natural options that lost the flavor and fun factor but often had even higher sugar content. There was nothing that fulfilled her sweet tooth but satisfied her discerning eye for healthier nutrition facts. While still at SoulCycle, she gave in to her craving to explore this problem as a business opportunity. 

“I started thinking about what it would take to create this product,” Mayssa said. “Step one was come up with the recipe and formula. I reached out to Elizabeth Falkner who is the celebrity chef who makes all of our candies and does the product development. I think the idea resonated with her because even though she's this world-renowned pastry chef, she really does believe in eating better, eating cleaner, in sugar reduction, sustainability, and responsible ingredient sourcing.”

Elizabeth Falkner, Chef above.

Mayssa and Elizabeth went through over 100 different flavor and formula iterations and found the right production partner to make the gummies. Good to know if you’re thinking of entering the candy space: co-packers in this industry have notoriously high MOQs for new products. Mayssa spent a lot of time attending trade shows, researching, and tapping into her network to find her co-manufacturer.

Product and Marketing

Behave’s first product is their signature gummy bears that have 3 grams of sugar, 90 calories, and 6 grams net carbs per pack, with absolutely zero compromise on flavor and fun. The bears come in sweet and sour varieties, and each bag contains lychee, passionfruit, and raspberry flavors.

“We’re not targeted towards kids and we’re not branded towards kids. We’re really branded toward an adult consumer and that thinking really played into the flavor selection as well. We could go more premium and elevated with the flavors and introduce things you don't normally find in the candy aisle. We’ve been getting such a great response already,” Mayssa said.

Launching during the COVID pandemic meant Behave had to retool their go-to-market strategy to lean away from retail and go full direct-to-consumer. Behave used a mix of traditional PR and influencer marketing to bring the brand to life through organic-feeling content from trusted sources. Mayssa is now slowly introducing the brand to select boutique retailers and sees Behave eventually existing on the shelf and in the checkout line where impulse purchases most often happen. 

“93% of US adults eat candy - what other product or what other market do you have where almost everybody eats it?” Mayssa said. “That's a stat I always lean into. There are a lot of people buying candy and we just need to find them and speak to them.”

The Advice

Mayssa has worked on inspiring brands and is now building one of her own. She shared her advice for anyone else blazing a trail in business:

• When you have something to add to the conversation, don’t be afraid to throw it in. What you have to say is valuable and you will be contributing to the conversation. Don’t be afraid to talk too much!
  

• Don't overthink things, just start doing. Figure out what is step one and get to step one, then figure out step two. Put one foot in front of the other.
  

• Break large projects into bite sized pieces while strategizing and planning.
  

• Connect with other founders in your space! Focus on founders six months to a year ahead of you so the challenges you are currently facing are still fresh to them.
  

Want to indulge in some gummy bears and feel zero guilt? Take a bite out of Behave.

Photo courtesy of Behave.

Written by Kendall Embs.

SMALLS, MATT MICHAELSON: The Purrfect Food

Have you ever felt marginalized as a cat person? The DTC pet space is booming, with fresh and nutritious dog food options that look better than some menu items at Sweetgreen. Cats, however, have been notoriously left out of the special place dogs have in the mainstream - and they like it that way. Sick of cats being the underdogs, Matt Michaelson created Smalls to bring healthy, real food to our smarter (and harder to please) furry friends. 

We talked to Matt about his journey as a young entrepreneur, through the DTC growth hacker world, to starting something on his own for the snarky, aloof outsiders in us all.

“It was always part of the family culture to look at the world through numbers and look at the world through money.” 

Matt grew up in Portland, Oregon, with parents who empowered him to see life through a business lens. Family dinners were spent discussing the efficiency of the restaurant, from staffing to traffic flow. At 15 he was looking at Excel models with his dad, seeing how money moved around (what kid wouldn’t want a peek at that?). With the mindset that bending the rules yields the best results which most disruptive founders share, Matt’s earliest scheme involved offering private lessons under the table to patrons of the sailing school where he worked as a teenager.

His first stab at an entrepreneurial venture was in college, where he was in the Northeastern University entrepreneurship program. The highly institutional “Boston Mindset” didn’t exactly spark Matt’s joy, so he started up an eCommerce business.

“There were these people who were building bikes out of bamboo and selling them for heaps of money to hip cyclists in the United States, but they weren’t really building a brand,” Matt said. “So I started buying a bunch of bikes, shipping them over and had a little eCommerce business selling these frames.”

Matt’s meant-to-be-a-founder ambition and wit didn’t always jive with his entrepreneurship co-op at Northeastern, and he was actually pseudo-fired from several placements during the program (*ahem* WeWork). Thanks to his tenacity, Matt met the founder of period-underwear startup Thinx (also previously featured on RADICHE) through a mutual connection at the MassChallenge accelerator, and pitched himself as an “unskilled general smart person with the energy to make stuff happen.” He ended up becoming Thinx’s second employee, an unpaid intern, and left two and a half years later as Head of Growth, having taken the company from zero to $30 million in revenue. 

While at Thinx, Matt redefined their eCommerce strategy and made them one of the first brands to drive traffic to press articles versus a shop page. Smart! When it comes to digital marketing, he defines it as “a fun game. It was like a casino, but also an opportunity to beat the system.” 

Matt became very skilled at predicting how much money would come out of ad spend and was able to find an ROI-positive strategy by breaking the rules and experimenting.

The Aha Moment

“I went into this internet wormhole like any entrepreneur, on page 10 of google search looking at weird blogs that haven’t been redesigned since 1999, and subreddits you’ve never heard of. I discovered this whole world of people who were feeding their pets home-cooked food, and raving about the difference it made.”

After leaving Thinx and freelancing for a few years, Matt was frustrated with the lack of opportunity to expand his skills once he moved from growth hacking to more general consulting. He knew it was finally time to dig in on starting something of his own. In late 2015 Matt barked up the right tree and began to consider the pet space - something ripe for eCommerce purrfection with a high lifetime value customer.

“When you look at the pet industry, there are whole micro-industries and micro-influencers for homemade pet food. Flags start going up - these products are genuinely healthier.”

Matt realized that this was the yard where he was going to play, and he immediately had his family switch to feeding their pets home-cooked food. “I don’t think I'm the right founder to start the millennial brand for ‘X’; I needed something that I could feel good about bringing into the world, outside of it being better designed and cool looking. With food you could see how it really made a difference for people,” Matt said. 

Matt worked with a recipe developer who was selling home-cooking recipes to people with sick pets and began sending his batches to friends with both cats and dogs. He got positive feedback from their first testers, with previously incurable health issues disappearing in several pets. Having grown up with both cats and dogs, Matt’s decision to focus on cats came from a place of appreciation for their misfit attitude, critical thinking, and independence.

“Dogs tend to get all the love in the startup world, and societally we consider them the norm. I always liked being a nonconformist, and an outlier,” Matt said. “It just felt right to go the other direction.” 

The Name

“The first kitchen we were working out of was in the Marcy Projects which is where Jay-Z and Biggie Smalls came up, and we also see cats as our smalls. They’re the little small weirdos that inspire our inner weirdo to come out more. So ‘Smalls’ felt like it hit those two things.” Matt said.

On Finding a Cofounder

From his experience in the startup world, Matt wanted a cofounder that he knew and trusted. He brought on Calvin Bohn, a childhood friend from Portland who would often help bounce ideas around and join in on brainstorming sessions.

“Calvin is someone who whenever we had disagreements we were great at conflict resolution. Our responsibilities started with me being on the demand side and him being supply side. I brought the customer and he brought the product - he even cooked it for a while!”

Over time Matt’s role has transitioned to managing people and being a sounding board, as many founders do.

Challenges

With an eye on customer economics, Matt realized that Smalls was initially missing out on a key opportunity to be more efficient. At first, the company sold just a frozen wet food option, and while 20% of their customers exclusively fed that food, the rest were still buying dry food from another source. Smalls decided to hit “paws” on any big marketing initiatives while they developed the right product mix. 

“We went out and developed all these dry food products and now we have a full range of budget-friendliness, dry food, and wet food,” Matt said.

When talking about future product line expansions, Smalls wants to lean into cats’ behavior and evolution of feeding in the wild, where cats are hunters and will eat 6-12 small meals a day.

“We’re likely to come out with some toys that you can put dry food in and hide around the house so cats can go and hunt for their food throughout the day, stimulating their hunter nature,” Matt said.

For now, Matt is focused on building a brand that celebrates and dignifies the feline way of life.

“I don't think anyone has really elevated cats or explored the idea of what cats stand for. You see all these kitschy things, but there is something really inspiring about cats. If Smalls can inspire you to celebrate your weirdness a little bit more and take the path less traveled, that's a cool impact to have.”

The Advice

From delivering baggies of cat food in a Zipcar to raising over $5 million in venture funding, Matt knows the bumps in the path to growing a business in the pet space. See his advice below:

• Be exploratory and open-minded about what your product should be.
  

• Hire a small team of quality people with experience in your industry or business model.
  

• Starting your own company is supposed to be hard, so don’t get discouraged or be afraid to reset!
  

Want the best food for your best friend? Visit Smalls and use the code “Radiche” for 50% off.

Photo courtesy of Smalls. 

Written by Kendall Embs.

ARTET, XANDER SHEPHERD: The High Rise

Put away your papers and pipes, people! If you’re ready to kick back with some THC, but aren’t feeling like you want to smoke that tumbleweed, perhaps a drink would be more your style? Looking to disrupt the THC category with new consumable formats, Artet is bringing the aperitif experience to a higher plane. Founded by Xander Shepherd with his cousins Max and Zach Spohler, this drink is on the high rise! 

In 2018, beverages made up only 6% of the total edible cannabis market in the US. The drinkables that are out there resemble everything from FourLoko-adjacent convenience store cans to beautifully branded sparkling water, and often just contain CBD. So what is the difference between CBD and THC you must be wondering? Both CBD and THC are cannabinoids that are derived from the marijuana plant. They even have the same chemical formula (21 carbon atoms, 30 hydrogen atoms, and two oxygen atoms). However, the main differences lie in the way the atoms are arranged, causing THC to be psychoactive unlike CBD and leading you to as Snoop Doop would be delighted to say, “get high”. 

Unlike other beverage companies, the founders of Artet,  Xander Shepherd, Max Spohler, and Zach Spohler are taking a new approach by incorporating THC into an aperitif. “[Cannabis] beverages exist but they way we’re doing it and talking about it doesn’t - the way we think about some of the drivers for someone who is cannabis curious, someone who wants to get into cannabis but wants a product that looks and behaves and feels like something they’ve consumed in their past that wasn’t cannabis-related,” Xander said. 

“It’s about bridging the gap between cannabis and the cocktail culture, with a better buzz of THC. To an extent we’re creating a sector,” Xander said. 

Since Artet’s launch in 2018, the brand has seen distribution throughout California (since they are only legally able to sell it there), and Xander, Max and Zach have been featured in Forbes. This new format for experiencing THC has opened doors for interactions with the mixologist community and all kinds of creative thinkers and drinkers.

“The real vision we have is owning this space between cannabis and cocktail culture, and we see the future of cannabis mixology being very bright. We want to focus on our flagship SKU and make sure everyone can enjoy the original product. After that we want to look at ways that different products, different cannabinoids, and different flavor profiles can create complements,” Zach said.

The gentlemen over at Artet feel that it is best to allow customers the optionality and creativity to create their own drink. Therefore, the packaging comes with a cap that can be used as a shot glass to measure and pour your own Artet. “We saw somebody the other day making a drink using gin, Aperol, Artet and some bitters. That’s not a recipe that we put into the world, that’s a recipe that someone made at home, with the things they had in their bar. That’s what’s exciting for us to see.” Max said.

The Challenges

Other than raising capital, state-by-state distribution has been a major challenge for the Artet gentlemen as they are operating under murky laws and gray zones. However, as major beverage players started to enter the cannabis sector, investors eventually came around to join the high times (both financially and literally). Max tells us that it was very important for the team to keep its focus during the early days of adoption as “half the people we pitched to thought we were out of our minds since the idea of drinking weed hadn’t gone mainstream yet!”. 

The Aha Moment

Xander, Max and Zach started tinkering with the idea of Artet back in 2015. “The aha moment came to us when we were hanging out one day and thought about what our future would look like 10 years from now. We always knew we would gather with our friends around a social drink, but it wasn’t alcohol, it was something else,” Zach said. 

What started out as R&D was the boys’ first attempt to invade their home kitchen. With an ingredient-forward approach, a few questionable experiments later and with the help of the almighty flavor experts and beverage scientists from the internet, Artet was born in 2018. So how does one feel after their first drink? It takes about 10 to 15 minutes to take effect after finishing your first glass. The founders describe the experience as an uplifting, social buzz that leaves you chatty and mildly high with no hangover! 

The Childhood 

Xander, Max, and Zach grew up in New York City, with a family whose work in the hospitality space created a sense of importance around meaningful moments and experiences rather than material possessions. With their grandmother’s travel agency and parents’ family businesses as inspiration, the entrepreneurial spirit manifested itself in early endeavors centered around creating joy for others. 

“I’ve always enjoyed creating things for other people,” Xander said. “In college, I produced a music festival that was partially funded by the school I went to, but a lot of it relied on us as a student group to fund it, build it out, and do everything from insurance to booking to travel logistics to ticket sales. [I was] running a team of 70 people as a 20-year-old, while also taking classes. Finding more excitement in the uncertainties of getting an artist to agree to the terms and show up and perform for everybody else, I found more value and excitement in that than my classes or my tests.”

Zach and Max also found their own ways to exercise their entrepreneurial tendencies before becoming founders. Zach created a platform that connected entrepreneurial communities on college campuses, and Max worked for a high-growth coconut water company that set him up with beverage innovation experience.

The Name

“Artet” is the mirror image of “Tetra,” the T in THC (or Tetrahydrocannabinol, try pronouncing that when you’re high). This backward way of looking at things seems appropriate for our out-of-the-box-thinking founders.

“We’re empowering everyone to hopefully one day become evangelists for our product.”

With the flagship product launched widely in California through several dispensaries and delivery services, including Kind Courier in San Francisco, and the Pottery and Tokr in LA, Xander works to grow the world of Artet.

“I’m very focused on how we show up in the world, how we tell our story, and how we present ourselves in order for there to be a reason for supply chain and sales,” Xander said “We see all of these things going hand in hand. That’s where a lot of my time is spent - making sure we are telling a very cohesive narrative, digitally, physically, in-store, with our partners.”

“I think Artet, in its final form, is an experience we really feel like the world deserves, and people can enjoy cannabis in the experience that we’re cultivating,” Max said.

The Advice

When it comes to launching a beverage company, we’ve heard a thing or two. Check out the gentlemen's key takeaways below:

• Go slow and take your time formulating.
  
  

• Trust your gut and know that some things might not work out and that’s okay.
  
  

• The beverage industry is all about branding! Create something unique that speaks to a small segment before going mass.
  
  

Interested in sipping the future? Discover Artet here or email us to be put in touch with its founders. 

Photo courtesy of Artet.

Written by Kendall Embs.