What if the fastest way to grow was walking away from $15 million in sales?

In this episode of The Story of a Brand Show, host Rose Hamilton sits down with Jason Burke, Founder and CEO of New Primal. Jason shares his incredible evolution from Googling "how to make beef jerky" without any food manufacturing background to building a CPG powerhouse.

Together, they deliver a masterclass on commercial discipline, detailing how New Primal cut 36 products down to a focused core, shifted from an impulse snack to a high-velocity lunchbox staple, and learned that revenue without healthy margins is just noise.

In this episode, we cover:

* The $15 Million Cut: How eliminating profitable yet complex SKUs and categories actually unlocked faster overall growth.

* The Hidden Tax of Complexity: Why adding "one more SKU" taxes management bandwidth, operations, and capital far more than founders realize.

* Top-Line Vanity vs. Enterprise Value: Shifting away from chasing rapid top-line revenue to building a sustainable, margin-accretive business model.

* Listening to Consumer Behavior: How feedback from parents led to pivoting into mini meat sticks and capturing the expanding kids' lunchbox market.

* The Retailer Reality Check: What a brand truly owes the shelf after getting authorized, and why distribution without demand is a dangerous trap.

* Founder Discipline: Why the hardest part of scaling is learning to stop inventing new products and start mastering the core.

Join us in listening to this episode!

For more on New Primal visit: https://newprimal.com/

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What happens when a founder decides to pull a product off 400 store shelves not because it failed, but because scaling the wrong economics is a fast track to killing a company.

In this masterclass on CPG entrepreneurship, Omar Atia, Co-Founder & CEO of ZeroCarb LYFE, joins host Rose Hamilton, CEO of Compass Rose Ventures, to break down the mechanics of building a resilient, high-value enterprise.

Omar traces his evolution from corporate R&D to startup leadership, delivering a candid blueprint for navigating the hidden traps of rapid expansion, commercializing novel manufacturing processes, and making disciplined financial trade-offs.

Key Takeaways & Business Frameworks:

* Unit Economics Over Top-Line Growth: Why exiting 400 Sprouts locations was the smartest move for long-term enterprise value, proving that revenue without margin is just noise.

* Bridging R&D and Commercial Scale: The operational reality of transforming a four-ingredient, kitchen-table innovation into a scalable, patented manufacturing system.

* Positioning for Market Realities: How tracking customer behavior led ZeroCarb LYFE to pivot its core value proposition from "low-carb" to "highest protein-to-calorie ratio," proving why messaging must evolve alongside the market.

* Omnichannel Strategy Demystified: A tactical breakdown of how to use direct-to-consumer for immediate feedback loops, food service for margin stability, and selective retail for broader reach.

* Capitalizing on Structural Consumer Shifts: How to build product strategies around macro health shifts, including the rise of GLP-1 medications, by prioritizing high-protein, calorie-efficient nutrition.

Whether you are scaling a CPG brand, refining your go-to-market strategy, or evaluating channel profitability, this interview serves as a practical guide to operational discipline and sustainable growth.

For more on ZeroCarb LYFE visit: https://zerocarblyfe.com/

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Growth conceals a weak business, but choice proves whether your brand has earned real trust.

In a $20 billion supplement industry flooded with endless trends and questionable promises, earning true consumer belief requires much more than slick marketing—it takes radical discipline.

In this episode, Rose Hamilton, CEO of Compass Rose Ventures, sits down with Alice Li, Founder & CEO of First Day, to explore how she transformed a deeply personal family history into an operating philosophy for building a trusted, science-backed wellness brand.

Alice unpacks the strategic decisions behind turning First Day into a powerhouse—scaling to nine figures with less than $1 million in outside capital—while prioritizing capital efficiency, unit economics, and long-term brand legacy over fast, short-term trends.

Here is what we cover in this episode:

* Generational History as an Operating Philosophy: How her family's experience during the Great Chinese Famine shaped Alice's deep sense of responsibility and mission in nutrition.

* Saying No to $20B Market Fads: Why First Day deliberately walked away from massive, hype-driven product trends like apple cider vinegar gummies to protect brand trust and clinical integrity.

* Building for Trust Over Speed: The key differences between optimizing a business for immediate exit potential versus constructing a brand with 20- to 30-year staying power.

* Obsession with Customer Intimacy: How taking customer support calls personally—and hearing the real stories of overwhelmed parents and grandparents—grounded First Day's value proposition.

* Unit Economics over Fundraising: How Alice scaled the business to over $100 million in revenue with under $1 million in funding by staying ruthlessly disciplined about contribution margins from day one.

* The Retail Delay Strategy: Why Alice turned down major mass-retail partnerships for nearly three years until the team, supply chain, and unit economics were truly ready to execute flawlessly.

Join us in listening to this episode!

For more on First Day visit: https://firstday.com/

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She Co-Founded Hims and Hers. Now She's Coming for Your Morning Routine.

Ramon Vela sits down with Hilary Coles, Co-Founder & CEO of POCA and Co-Founder of Hims & Hers, for a warm and revealing conversation about the lessons learned scaling a billion-dollar brand, the gap in the low-sugar coffee and matcha category, and the deeply personal conviction behind her newest venture.

* The suit story that changed everything. At 22, living at her mom's house on $30,000 a year, Hilary's boss quietly sent her to a private shopper and bought her two suits. It wasn't about the clothes. It was about being told, without words, that she belonged in the room. That moment shaped how she leads and how she shows up for others to this day.

* What Hims and Hers taught her that no business school could. Building a category-defining brand from zero gave Hilary a front-row seat to what it really takes to scale with speed while staying true to the consumer. She brought every lesson into POCA.

* The gap nobody was filling. Hilary wanted a low-sugar, great-tasting coffee and matcha option that didn't taste like a compromise. When she couldn't find one, she built it. POCA uses allulose and monk fruit for sweetness, adds a boost of fiber, and comes in flavors like vanilla, caramel, and pistachio.

* Ritual is the product. POCA is not just a beverage. It is designed to become the warm cup of something special that anchors your morning and your day. Hilary talks about building a brand that people reach for not because they have to, but because they genuinely want to.

* Watch closely toward summer and fall. New flavors and innovations are on the way as POCA continues to clean up the coffee and matcha aisle. Right now they are available at pickpoca.com and TikTok Shop.

Join us in listening to this episode for a genuinely inspiring conversation about building with intention, leading with belief in others, and finding the white space hiding in a category everyone else overlooked.

Whether you are a founder, a wellness-minded consumer, or someone who just wants something sweet without the sugar crash, this one has something for you.

Visit: https://pickpoca.com/

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Getting on shelf is not the win. Staying there is the business.

Rose Hamilton, CEO of Compass Rose Ventures and co-host of The Story of a Brand Show, sits down with Michael Marquis, CEO of Raw Sugar, for a masterclass in what retail really reveals about a brand.

With more than 20,000 doors across Target, Walmart, CVS, Walgreens, Meijer, Sally Beauty, Amazon, and DTC, Raw Sugar is one of the most compelling case studies in mass retail execution in the clean personal care space today.

* Clean personal care at mass retail prices is not a tagline. It is an operating model. Raw Sugar launched as a Target exclusive with a deceptively simple belief: clean personal care should not cost more than conventional personal care. That mission drove every formula, fragrance, packaging, and supply chain decision the brand has ever made.

* Operational execution comes before brand strategy. The first thing any retailer watches is whether you can supply product on time, in full, at consistent quality. Michael is direct: the worst thing a brand can do is win the shelf and then fail to fill it.

* Retail compresses the truth. In DTC you can retarget, rewrite the landing page, and buy yourself more time. In retail the shelf does not care how hard you worked. The consumer either gets it in seconds or they don't. And the weekly scorecards come fast.

* A restage is a consumer trust event, not a design project. When Raw Sugar evolved its packaging, the team knew that loyal consumers needed to recognize the brand, understand the change, and feel reassured rather than disrupted. Getting that choreography right is one of the most underestimated challenges in brand building.

* Do not go too big too fast. Michael's sharpest advice for any founder heading into retail: hold back on the temptation to chase doors and scale before the brand is fully baked. Place is part of brand positioning. Make sure the channel is a logical extension of what the brand actually stands for.

Join us in listening to this episode for one of the most practically useful retail conversations the show has ever produced. Rose and Michael cover shelf clarity, velocity, brand restaging, omnichannel discipline, and what it really takes to compete against the giants without acting like a smaller version of one.

Whether you are already in retail or working hard to get there, this conversation will change how you think about the channel.

For more on Raw Sugar visit: https://rawsugarliving.com/

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Most supplement brands start with a formula. Jason Dyer started with a philosophy.

Ramon Vela sits down with Jason Dyer, Co-Founder of Farmana, for a deeply thoughtful conversation about twenty-two years of experience in the health and wellness industry, a personal transformation that changed everything, and a brand built on the radical idea that real nutrition should begin where it always has: the farm.

* Health is a verb, not an adjective. Jason's core belief, forged through over two decades in the supplement industry, is that health is something you continuously do, not something you have. That insight is baked into every Farmana product and every decision the brand makes.

* Farm to function. Farmana bridges the gap between whole food nutrition and functional supplementation, taking real, nutrient-dense ingredients from carefully vetted organic farmers and preserving their goodness through a proprietary freeze-drying process that keeps the food as close to its original state as possible.

* The personal transformation behind the brand. Five years ago Jason weighed 260 pounds. Not through radical change but through a large quantity of small conscious choices, he found himself in the best health of his life at 46. That lived experience is the real origin story of Farmana.

* The sea of compromise in the supplement aisle. With 25,000 products and 400 brands on typical health food store shelves, consumers face more confusion than clarity. Farmana was built to cut through that noise with formulations that don't compromise, combining whole food nutrition with proven functional ingredients in a single product.

* Patience over guilt. Jason's most powerful message for anyone on a health journey: stop carrying the guilt of what you haven't done and start taking one conscious step at a time. You didn't get here overnight. You won't get out of it overnight either.

Join us in listening to this episode for a conversation that is as much about mindset as it is about nutrition. Jason brings twenty-two years of industry experience, a personal story of transformation, and a genuine belief that better health is available to everyone willing to take that one next step.

Visit: https://farmana.co/

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A flood destroyed the factory, the FDA shut them down, and the company had almost no cash and then something remarkable happened.

Ramon Vela sits down with Alex Whitmore, Founder & CEO of Taza Chocolate, for a deeply human conversation about twenty-plus years of stone-ground, mission-driven chocolate making in Somerville, Massachusetts.

From a transformative trip to Oaxaca to pioneering direct trade relationships with cocoa farmers in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Alex's story is one of the most compelling in the specialty food world.

* The flood that almost ended everything. Just a few years into building Taza, a freak thunderstorm flooded the factory, destroyed inventory, and triggered an FDA shutdown. What happened next surprised even Alex: suppliers, customers, landlord, and community all showed up. That moment taught him that business is deeply human at its core.

* A trip to Oaxaca that changed everything. The name Taza comes from "taza de chocolate," a traditional Mexican drinking chocolate. After visiting stone mills in southern Mexico in his twenties, Alex came home and built the only company in America making chocolate on traditional Mexicano stone mills — and that founding commitment still defines every bar made today.

* Direct trade before it was a trend. Taza built relationships directly with cocoa farmers, paying above fair trade prices and publishing an annual transparency report. When the global cocoa crisis hit and prices spiked, those long-standing farmer relationships became a genuine competitive and operational lifeline.

* Twenty years of staying independent. Taza raised only $120,000 at the start and never chased outside capital. Alex walks through what two decades of bootstrapping in an intensely competitive specialty food category actually teaches you about patience, resilience, and staying true to your craft.

* Start with the Wicked Dark. Taza's number one seller is a 95% dark chocolate bar made with cocoa beans from the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Alex also points new fans to the Mexican Style Chocolate Discs, the product that best captures who Taza has always been.

Join us in listening to this episode for a rich and genuinely moving conversation about craft, community, and what it means to build a brand with deep roots and unshakeable values over two decades.

Whether you are a chocolate lover, a founder, or someone who just needs a reminder of why the mission matters, this one will stay with you.

Visit: https://www.tazachocolate.com/

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Pet food looks like a food category, but it behaves like a trust category and nobody understands that better than Michael Meyer.

Rose Hamilton, CEO of Compass Rose Ventures and co-host of The Story of a Brand Show, sits down with Michael for an operator masterclass that goes far beyond pet food into the deeper mechanics of how premium consumer brands get built, scaled, and sustained.

With experience across Wellness Pet Food, Plum Organics, Restoration Hardware, I and Love and You, and Just Food for Dogs, Michael brings a rare pattern recognition that every founder, operator, and investor needs to hear.

* Pet food is a trust category, not a food category. The dog or cat either eats it or doesn't. The pet parent either feels reassured or doesn't. Repeat purchase is the only real trust metric that matters, and building toward it requires discipline most brands skip.

* Cats are the most underbuilt opportunity in premium pets. All the innovation went to dogs. Cat parents were always emotionally invested; the category just never gave them enough ways to express it. That is changing now, and it has to be intentional to work.

* The Bobby Flay lesson every founder needs. Celebrity partnerships only work when they make the product promise more believable. Made by Nacho added depth to an existing thesis. It was not motion for motion's sake.

* Distribution is not demand. Awareness is not trust. Getting on shelf is not the win. Turning and staying on shelf is the business. Scaling before your system is ready does not create growth, it creates expensive complexity.

* Don't rush it. Michael's sharpest advice for founders under pressure to scale: take a breath, think it through, then come back. Speed without clarity is one of the most costly mistakes a growing brand can make.

Join us in listening to this episode for one of the most practically useful operator conversations the show has ever produced. Rose and Michael cover category signals, acquisition lessons, channel strategy, celebrity partnerships, and the discipline required to scale without breaking what you built.

Whether you are a founder, an operator, or an investor, this one will sharpen how you think about building consumer brands that last.

For more on I and Love and You visit: https://iandloveandyou.com/

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She left Goldman Sachs, moved to Mozambique for a year, and came back to build one of the most distinct wellness brands in America.

Rose Hamilton, CEO of Compass Rose Ventures and co-host of The Story of a Brand Show, sits down with Shizu Okusa, Founder & CEO of Apothékary, for a masterclass in what it really means to build a brand system not just a product line. From a New York City billboard to a Series A close, Apothékary is proof that deep roots and radical clarity can outpace any amount of paid media spend.

* Three iterations before liftoff. Apothékary started as a pop-up store rooted in Ayurveda, evolved into powders, and eventually landed on liquid supplements, a format Shizu now considers a near-monopoly position. The lesson: your first product is almost never your final one.

* Heritage as an operating system, not a mood board. Shizu's Japanese roots show up in how the company hires, iterates, and moves; guided by the principle of Kaizen, continuous improvement. It's not packaging. It's how the business runs.

* TikTok crossed a million dollars a month and here's why. Apothékary's TikTok success isn't about chasing the algorithm. It's built on 20,000+ affiliates creating education-first content around a visually distinctive blue liquid dropper that stops the scroll and earns the click.

* Retail forced brutal clarity. Entering Whole Foods, Sprouts, and The Vitamin Shoppe forced Apothékary to put ingredient benefits bigger than the brand name on packaging. The consumer doesn't have time for your founder story in the aisle and that discipline makes the brand stronger everywhere.

* Distribution is the moat. In a category where products get copied, Shizu's sharpest insight is that the real defensibility is distribution, the ability to play in grocery, health care, and beauty simultaneously, backed by proprietary formulas and Shiseido as a strategic investor.

Join us in listening to this episode for one of the most intellectually rigorous and practically useful brand conversations we've had on the show. Rose and Shizu cover signal, thesis, behavior, and proof, the four pillars of a brand that becomes easier to understand and harder to copy over time.

Whether you're a founder, an operator, or an investor, this one will sharpen how you think.

For more on Apothékary visit: https://www.apothekary.com/

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Most people get their hormone levels tested once a year — if they think about it at all. Marina Pavlovic Rivas, Co-Founder & CEO of Eli Health, is on a mission to change that.

Ramon Vela sits down with Marina for a fascinating conversation about the technology she spent nearly seven years building: a saliva-based, at-home hormone monitoring platform that delivers cortisol, testosterone, and progesterone results to your phone in minutes, giving people real-time visibility into one of the most overlooked dimensions of their health.

* The gap nobody was solving. After searching online for a way to track her own hormonal data, Marina realized the product didn't exist. So she built it, spending more than six years on R&D, regulatory approval, and venture capital before bringing it to market.

* Hormones affect everything, not just fertility. From energy and mood to sleep, libido, bone health, cardiac health, and cognitive performance, Marina breaks down why hormonal data is one of the most important and most underused signals in personal wellness.

* The wearable parallel that puts it all in context. Checking your hormones once a year is like measuring your heartbeat once a year: technically useful, but dangerously incomplete. Eli Health gives users the same continuous feedback loop that smartwatches brought to sleep and heart rate.

* A six-second saliva test. Results in 20 minutes. Users collect saliva, wait 20 minutes, then photograph the test to receive results directly in the app. Repeat over time and you build a hormonal picture that no annual blood draw could ever provide.

* Cortisol first, for good reason. Eli launched with cortisol because it sits at the top of the hormonal cascade. When cortisol is off, everything else follows. Testosterone and progesterone, including their interactions, are coming next.

Join us in listening to this episode for a genuinely eye-opening conversation about hormonal health, the future of at-home diagnostics, and what it means to build a category that didn't exist before you created it.

Whether you're a health-conscious consumer, a founder, or someone who just wants to understand what their body is actually telling them, this one is for you.

Visit: https://eli.health/

Try their Instant Cortisol Test: https://eli.health/products/cortisol?view=sl-44128C61

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Today's Sponsors:

Saral - The Influencer OS: https://www.getsaral.com/demo

SARAL is the all-in-one influencer platform that finds brand-aligned creators, automates outreach, and manages everything in one place. Request a live demo today. Let the SARAL team know you're a The Story of a Brand Show podcast listener to get an extended free trial! Visit the link above.