Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Christie Yau. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Christie, appreciate you joining us today. Looking back, do you think you started your business at the right time? Do you wish you had started sooner or later

The timing was truly serendipitous. I had just left my previous role as an early employee at a successful venture-backed wine start-up and I was ready to take on something new, but felt insecure about moving from wine (fun and easy to talk about) to toilet paper (arguably less cool and a lot less natural to talk about). I shipped my 1st honeycomb order in Sept 2019. By December, I was already seeing crazy demand so I took a leap and placed my first large custom order. It was a 5-figure investment in a 20 foot container of toilet paper to be delivered to my home garage. Everyone thought I was crazy – including myself. Then 2020 hit, TP was flying off the shelves and… the rest is history.

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

Absolutely. I’m a serial entrepreneur, founder and life coach. I started honeycomb luxury in 2019, which is a DTC sustainable luxury toilet paper brand made from bamboo. Every 24 hours, 27,000 trees are cut down to produce toilet paper. That felt like too many, so we created luxury 3-ply TP that feels just like the high-end stuff, but doesn’t harm trees. Given how important trees are to our environment and how long they take to grow back, switching to a fast-growing grass like bamboo is a no brainer.

Conversations about M&A are often focused on multibillion dollar transactions – but M&A can be an important part of a small or medium business owner’s journey. We’d love to hear about your experience with selling businesses.

I started my first business, a bubble soccer brand, right after I left the corporate world. For those who don’t know what bubble soccer is – honestly, just google a video. It’s incredible. You and your opponents wear individual giant inflatable bubble suits and try to play soccer. Mostly, you just bounce off of everything in sight and can’t run because you’re laughing so hard. It’s a true delight – for kids, but even more for adults.

So, I saw video of this – and I HAD to play. There were no opportunities around me, so I bought 12 suits for an outrageous amount of money. While waiting out the 3 months it took for them to arrive (I know, tell me about it), I decided to put together a competitive bubble soccer league. I collected the fees ahead of time and made my full investment back before the suits arrived. And then it just took off from there, snowballing into corporate events, festivals, and birthday parties. Two years later, I sold the whole thing to a competitor looking to expand.

As far as lessons: it sounds counterintuitive, but be friendly with your “competitors”. I say it in quotes because perhaps you’re competing for business, but at the end of the day, you’re all on the same side. You all want to grow your industry. You can get the biggest piece of the pie for yourself, or you can support each other and make the entire pie bigger. Either way, you end up with the same amount – but the latter is a heck of a lot more fun and makes for a better journey.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

Business and life coaching was a game changer for me – so much so, that I invested in formal training and became a coach myself. Entrepreneurs are some of the smartest people on this planet. But all of us are shaped by our past and the things that got you to where you are now, won’t necessarily get you to where you want to go.

When I started working with a coach, honeycomb was pulling high 6 figure revenue – but it was hard. I thought about it all the time. I stressed about it all the time. It impacted my time with my family and friends, and I hadn’t truly relaxed in years.

Once I started working with a coach, everything just felt so much… easier. For the first time, I finally felt like the entrepreneur I wanted to be, not only on paper, but in who I was being both in and out of my work. And as a result, I could finally start working on the good stuff and my revenue soared, too.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.christieyaucoaching.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christielow/
• Other: https://honeycombluxury.com/