We were lucky to catch up with Amy Cohn recently and have shared our conversation below.

Amy, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. The more we talk about good leadership the more we think good leadership practices will spread and so we’d love for you to tell us a story about the best boss you’ve had and what they were like or what they did that was so great?

One of the best bosses I’ve ever had was Vickie Collier DeNicola, my boss at Disney. She was one that didn’t expect you to fit into a specific box, and found your strengths recognizing that everyone was different. She also created psychological safety, so you weren’t afraid of failing – which made you try more risks. This made her team the most successful out of many, and allowed us to win a lot of awards around innovation. She was a personal champion, always talking you up to her bosses and putting you forward for special awards or learning. What she did was allow everyone to be their best self, learn more and really feel you were apart of something bigger.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I worked for years at the intersection of tech and media, where I was able to build some amazing online businesses. I led teams at Disney, Oprah and Sony along with dabbling in healthcare and blockchain. My focus was around building onlilne communities, looking for new tech innovation and creating products that people would keep coming back to.

After going through colon cancer at the start of the pandemic (yes, that was crazy and unexpected), it made me look at access to health systems in a different way. There is a massive divide on who has tools, access, healthy food, etc. one of the first habit changes is simply what you can buy on shelf. So looking at this from that lens, I wanted to focus on the idea around blood sugar balance. I need to eat in that way, as it prevents recurrence of cancer, and its obviously associated with diabetes. Eating in a way that is about balancing blood sugar, is simply focusing on the right balance of good fiber, low sugar and protein. It’s not a fad diet, it’s just a way we should all be eating.

When we began we polled people with diabetes, and asked what they missed most, and the first answer was cookies. brought in a chef who had worked at Noma and Alinea—it was important to me not to settle on taste. Then I found R&D food scientists and dietitians, and we all worked together to create cookies with the right nutritional balance at the right price..

This took about a year of R&D, as doing something like that in baking is not trivial, particularly when you take out things like sugar and other ingredients that make a cookie what it is.

We also set out to create a brand that was joyful, and wouldn’t make anyone feel ‘otherized’. We also wanted flexibility in the name, so the name Joydays ended up being the right fit.

At first, our go to market strategy was focusing on the diabetes consumer, but as we were in market we realized it’s much broader, particularly with moms as kids like this product , and it happens to be low sugar and great fiber.

We are incredibly proud of a new product that has just launched called Chocolate Date Bark, which is a chocolate bark layered with date sweetened dark chocolate, creamy nut butter, crunchy nuts, chewy dates and flaky sea salt.. So this helps us build out a brand that is focused on re-creating indulgent snacks to be blood sugar friendly.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

In our first year launching, we took a big risk and launched into over 2000 Walmart doors, which no one in their right mind would do in their first year in business for many reasons. We figured this was a risk, but it wasn’t a break the bank risk – namely because it was going into the Diabetes OTC aisle and not the food aisle. This meant velocity was lower, which would mean less inventory to produce, and we could have a higher price point in that aisle. Had it been the food aisle, there would be no way an early brand could compete with the Walmart prices in the cookie aisle.
This was also a very targeted market for us, since our strategy was to first go after the diabetes consumer and then grow from there.

We learned a lot, one was even if you are going into a low velocity aisle, the level of effort on logstics is the same and so is the cost of marketing to that many doors. We also discovered most people with diabetes didn’t know there was such an aisle, or if they did they assumed it was for old. people, and not for them. We also were driving consumers who didn’t have diabetes to purchase, and they wondered why we were there – this bright pink box in a medicinal and dated aisle with only one sku.

We were correct, as the risk didn’t kill us and we learned a ton. It’s a bet I don’t regret, but it did require our full focus, and now we are going the. more traditional cpg growth route going into natural retailers first (in the food aisles!)

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

We use a co-man to manufacturer our cookies, and i will say that has been one of the most challenging endeavors, as I think most brands would say. Finding the right one is difficult, and you often don’t know if they are the right fit until after you’ve done a production run or two. Cookies are also incredibly challenging, as every step of the process from mixing, to baking to cooling have to be exactly right as they are not forgiving since baking is a science.

We found our first co=man from calling around to the big manufacturers and asking them for referrals. Everyone knows each other. Another route we did was to call the manufactuers of the equipment we knew we required, and asking them who was using that equipment. That’s also a great way to find niche manufactuers.

Our date bark literally came from a referral from someone we knew who was outside of the industry. There are great tools we’ve used like Keychain, an AI matching platform. But it seems the best way is literally calling around and asking a ton of people.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.getjoydays.com
• Instagram: @getjoydays
• Facebook: @getjoydays
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyraymondcohn/
• Twitter: @getjoydays
• Other: TikTok – @getjoydays

Image Credits

Meraki creative