Serial entrepreneur Miki Agrawal recently joined host John Lee Dumas on the Entrepreneurs on Fire podcast to discuss company origin stories, marketing hacks, and the stories of entrepreneurship that inspire others. The duo discussed Miki Agrawal’s TUSHY brand and the company’s recent disruptive marketing tactics.
As the host of the podcast, John Lee Dumas asked probing questions and shared his own experiences with experiential marketing, disruptive thinking, and what it means to challenge the status quo. A disruptor at heart, Miki Agrawal is the founder of several companies in traditionally antiquated arenas, including Wild (gluten-free pizzeria), Thinx (period panties), and Tushy (bidet attachments).
Read on below for highlights from the podcast:
John Lee Dumas: So, Fire Nation, what serious problems are you facing every single day that you can solve? I mean, it was right there not quite but basically staring Miki in the face every single day, where she is having to go through this incredibly annoying process. She was like; this is a problem that I not only can solve but I really want to solve. I have passion about solving this problem and adding even more value back into this world. So, Miki Agrawal, let’s say Fire Nation is going through the process and they actually come up with a disruptive idea (like your idea was super disruptive), but it’s one thing to come up with a disruptive idea. It’s another thing to actually put it into action. So, once we have that disruptive idea, what are the next steps to create a disruptive product? I mean, what did you do?
Miki Agrawal On The Benefits of Mood Boards
Miki Agrawal: You first start by putting a mood board together, not in the same field as you, but like you go to art museums or you kind of go outside and look at just the world that you live in, whether it’s nature. You just start taking the ideas of shapes and you look at architecture, you look at interior design. Then, you just start putting a mood board together of; what is it, what is that the feeling of this product going to be? What are the shapes or the curves or the colors, the contours? You start getting an idea of sort of the vibe that you want to create. You start it down on a piece of paper. Even if you have no idea how to draw. You kind of like lay it down on a piece of paper just with literally a pen and a paper.
Then, what you do is you just take it to a product designer. You can find lots of product designers on places like Upwork or through different product design groups, Graduate courses, and find all the students there and then you find the right one that makes that vibe with you. Then, you show them the mood board and the concept that you want to create, and then they put together a 3D rendering of it using CAD and AutoCAD. You go to a prototyper and then you create the prototype and that’s sort of like the step 123 of actually creating the product.
John Lee Dumas: So, Fire Nation, you have this disruptive idea. You want to start the process of creating a disruptive product. What do you do? Get on a mood board, you walk around, you look around what is inspiring you, then sit down, sketch it out, and then you got to take it to a product designer. You can go to places like Upwork, and like Miki said, there’s other places. Just for five bucks, start with something very basic just to kind of keep the process going. So, maybe by the time you go to something like Upwork or another level up, you even have a better idea or design you can show to them to take it to the next level.
So, this is all critical steps in that process of A, to start of idea B, disruptive product. But Miki, what you’ve done frankly better than most is you’ve taken the idea. You’ve turned it into a product and then you’ve branded it disruptively. Now, talk to us about some things that you’ve done to really be disruptive in the branding of your physical products and some recommendations that you have for people that are listening as well.
Miki Agrawal On Disruptive Branding
Miki Agrawal: My creative team always knows that for me, when it comes to branding anything, it needs to feel like art. It really cannot feel like advertising or marketing or a website that just full of information. It really needs to feel like you’re looking at art and especially when you’re talking about something disruptive. Art is resting. Art makes you stop and look. Art makes you ask questions. Like looking at something that has real breathing room around the piece of art if it’s too cluttered with words. It’s just not going to get the concept across. If it’s a single image with a lot of space around it, and that image is really interesting and makes you be like what’s that, and what is that single image. Then there’s the website and the and the logo and that’s all that there is.
I feel like that creates that sort of intrigue and I feel like often times people want to say, the technical and the and the medical and the clinic and the academic benefits of all the things that your products going to do. That just kind of scares people off, frankly. In the beginning, for all of my brands, I always want to say too much and it just was over people’s heads. So, I realized that to really distill it down to one really intriguing image, and let that be sort of the thing that drives draws you in showed me that that’s actually the way to do it. So, when I think about all of my brand all of my products, they’re very simple. It’s very dumbed down.
I think about music a lot. Oftentimes, a new sort of music has so many layers of a billion different sounds and it just becomes so drowned out and it becomes so hard to listen. It’s so intensive to actually like just let it listen to it versus just a song with a basic chord and a simple melody. That just like sticks to people and that like that simplicity makes you remember it and there’s that level of just like, it’s refreshing and it’s a breath of fresh air. My current designer’s name is Cindy. I’m always like, not enough breathing room, not enough breathing room. It’s too cluttered, not enough breathing room. Open up the space, create more space. That’s critical, I think, in branding.
John Lee Dumas: Let’s get specific for a second. What is the proudest branding achievement and this is just in your opinion that you’ve had so far? I mean kind of take us through that process and story of getting to that point.
Miki Agrawal On Her Proudest Branding Achievements
Miki Agrawal: With my previous company, we were trying to bring our advertising and our campaigns outside of digital and into the world. We had our first out-of-home campaign, which is like a subway campaign. We were able to dream up like, what would this subway campaign be? What we settled on was just a simple grapefruit that was halved. That was basically put on a very simple half sort of this muted pink and half maroon backdrop. That was it. Then, with the name of our brand at the very bottom. It was arresting enough and intriguing enough and sexy enough that it was like the talk of the town.
I mean, this campaign really took us from a very small startup to a well-known brand. I think that the simplicity of finding that right sort of icon, that right image, the right backdrop, the simplicity of it, enough breathing room around it, that created that artful experience that people just talked about that that this campaign went viral internationally.
John Lee Dumas: So, Fire Nation, we’ve talked about idea curation. We’ve talked about product creation. We talked a little bit about branding and how to just do it simply. I mean, just the thought of that grapefruit. I mean if that’s just going to stand out, because people are going to be like, oh there’s not a million words in that paper, there are not a million images that, it’s just kind of making my head spin. There’s just one thing and it’s just that grapefruit cut in half. I mean, just think about the beauty of that simplicity. This kind of actually started to morph into the marketing side and that is just being simple with your design, simple with your branding, and of course simple, with your marketing.
Let’s dive deeper into this point, Miki, right now. How do you market a disruptive product? I mean, of course, that grapefruit cut in half. That was disruptive. That was killer marketing. How do you do that? How do you replicate things like that?
Miki Agrawal On Marketing Disruptive Products
Miki Agrawal: With Tushy, for example, our marketing is really specific on digital marketing right now and the same thing happened with things as well. It was really all about finding sort of the right audiences to target with the right messaging that felt really authentic. I think marketing and the word authenticity keep popping up, authentic, authentic, authentic. I think so many people and so many brands are trying to think about what the customer wants to hear versus what you really feel deep within you that you want to say. I think it’s just such a difference.
You can feel the difference whether someone’s like saying the right words versus feeling through what you want to say authentically. I think that really shows up in all of my brands, where it’s dripping with authenticity. I also think that we have an inbound marketing strategy versus an outbound marketing strategy. An inbound marketing strategy is when you create spectacles, enough interesting weird things that people will write about you.
So, for example, with Tushy, we just recently created a poop-up shop. Instead of doing a pop-up shop, it was a poop-up shop and we did a partnership with Poo-Pourri, the Poop Spray brand. We put together a really weird kind of like an art gallery, an exhibit, and a ball pit. The ball pit’s in the shape of a big toilet bowl, with a large Tushy on it.
We had a porta-potty photo booth, so we took a porta-potty and we turned it into a really fun photo booth that people could take pictures in. We just had a bunch of weird we had a butt wall where we had a bunch of butts with like a towel sticking out of the butt crack. On the towel were a bunch of facts about how bad toilet paper is. So, it was just like a really weird funny exhibit and it got featured and we had thousands of people come through the exhibit and really touch our brand and giggle and have experiences with it and memories.
I think that’s the kind of stuff that we want to continue to do to create that buzz, to create that story, to create people to put Hello Tushy all over their Instagram. All of a sudden, thousands of people are sharing Hello Tushy in their Insta stories authentically. It becomes like, ‘Oh wait, what’s Hello Tushy like what is this, oh let me look it up, let me check it out.’ We start to see true exponential growth that way.
Next, we’re about to send this gigantic package to a couple of big media house’s offices. Where it’s going to be a gigantic package, where you have to open up and it’s this big toilet. You have an instruction manual that tells you how to put the Tushy on and how to set up the pump and then pump the Tushy.
It’s just going to be this whole thing that’s going to be a spectacle that like these, the press is going to just giggle. They’ll just find it, it’ll tickle them. We want to find things that tickle people. In the past, when we had big events, I had my team put the events together, basically go to Home Depot and buy quick-dry cement and then pour the cement over the invitations. When these invitations got delivered to the press, the press had to smash the concrete open and then the invitation was in the middle of the concrete. So, they had to kind of move all the concrete and blow it so they can actually read the invitation, and it just made it really fun.
I had another experience where I had my team blow the egg yolk out of raw eggs. So, you just kind of stuck a little needle on the top and the bottom, and you like blow out the egg yolk. Then, we stuck a little scroll in it, which had a question. In order for you to get the question, you had to crack the egg open. It was just like these really fun experiences that got people participating in the experience. So, I think participation is key is integral in marketing. I think they say that experiential marketing is the stickiest form of marketing. So, if we can create experiences and along every step of the way, that’s the most important thing.
To read more stories from Miki Agrawal, check out her Medium page.
