In this episode of Chill, we chat with the indefatigable Sam Penny @ Cheese Therapy. Now “Cheesemonger” at Cheese Therapy, Sam is an entrepreneur, extreme swimmer, public speaker, and Ambassador for Just Like Jack. Prior to Cheese Therapy, Sam spent many years in the beauty space and then turned his attention to growing Elementa 5. Since 2015, however, Sam has been on a mission to bring the world of delicious, artisanal cheese directly from the makers to Australians’ front doors.
Overdose Brisbane’s Elliot Schoemaker and Sam discuss entrepreneurship, growth challenges & successes, ecommerce & marketing strategy, digital solutions, ecomm trends & approaches through pandemic recovery, and their mutual passion for all things cheese.
Sam Penny
Sam Penny is the type of person who can’t sit still. He’s achieved a lot of things: he’s been in the army, he’s a civil engineer by trade, and he’s into mad swimming adventures (like swimming an ‘ice mile’ in 3.9-degree water; and being the first person in the world to attempt to swim the English Channel in winter). His greatest skill, he says, is pure grit—he is driven to push himself further than most would dare to.
He helps others to strive too: as Ambassador for Just Like Jack—an organisation dedicated to helping kids with disabilities participate in events that most people take for granted.
Not surprisingly, on the business front, Sam is relentless. A passionate entrepreneur, he’s set up entrepreneur networks for Queensland University of Technology; he’s had a successful medical device company; he’s had a chain of not-so-successful hair salons—“My biggest mistake was a chain of hair salons,” he confesses.
He learned, moved on, and found his entrepreneurial utopia; for the past four years, he’s been mongering cheese. “Everything has seemed to have culminated in this great business that my partner Helen and I have created, called Cheese Therapy.”
Cheese Therapy
With his can’t-sit-still nature, it’s no surprise to learn that the Cheese Therapy idea was conceived during a time when he was meant to be relaxing on holiday in the Pacific island of Vanuatu. Instead of letting thoughts and ideas float by like clouds in the tropical sky, Sam’s mind was churning away, formulating his next business idea.
Sam and his partner, Helen, had been shopping at Vanuatu’s main supermarket, French-owned Au Bon Marche, and were blown away by the massive cheese counter bursting with French cheeses, terrines, and foie gras—cheeses and epicurean produce they hadn’t seen back in Australia. Here they were, in a little undeveloped island, with an abundance of foreign delicacies. “It made me realise we’ve lost our deli scene in Australia. We’re now served up some pretty bland, homogenised products in our major supermarkets, where it’s all about margins and there’s not a lot of heart and soul in many of the items that you see on a shelf.”
So, they decided they would go home and start a cheese club. Sam says they wanted to get their hands on some great cheese and figured if they could get enough people in the club, they could fly cheese in from abroad. “That was the limit of our market research, it was based on what we wanted, but I think many great ideas come out of passion, and then it’s just down to the numbers. Can we find 100 people? Can we find 200, a thousand people to be part of this cheese club?”
Cheese Therapy was launched; for the first four years as a small-scale operation with Sam and Helen doing it all—cutting, wrapping, packing, and sending the cheese. Then, an event in January 2020 changed the course of the business: Australia’s devastating bush fires.
