We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Leeanna Gantt a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Leeanna , appreciate you joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

I came up with the idea for tooktake during my own treatment for breast cancer. I was stuck in bed for 6 months during chemo and I had at least a dozen medications, both over-the-counter and prescription to manage the side effects of treatment. They were all in different forms and all on different schedules. Trying to keep track of them all became very stressful for my family and me. Even if I had wanted to use a pillbox, it wouldn’t have worked, so many of the medications weren’t pills, and the ones that were had a different schedule every day. So after a little while I started to make sticky notes into little labels that we could use to track everything. It also helped because if I was sleeping, they could see what I had taken and when and not have to wake me up.
Throughout my treatment, we kept adjusting the way the labels worked and came up with different ones for different dosing schedules. They really became an essential part of our routine.
When I was all done with treatment I thought that the labels were pretty helpful, but I wasn’t 100% sure that I wanted to make it a business. But then I found out that I still had to take one pill every single day to help keep my cancer from returning. At first, I wasn’t using my labels and within the first few days I was already off track with the medication because I wasn’t sure if I took it or still needed to take it, so I choose the skip it because I was afraid to take too much.
That’s when I took my labels out and started to use them again EVERY.SINGLE.DAY.
I knew that if I was having this problem, lots of other people must be too. I couldn’t be the only one who didn’t like pillboxes and frequently found myself wondering “Did I take that? ”
That’s when tooktake officially became a business. From that point on we never looked back. Tooktake labels have become very popular for people of all ages, but especially for moms of young children because almost all kids’ medications are liquids or lotions. Until now there hasn’t been and easy way to track anything that wasn’t a pill.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’d love to be able to say that I was always passionate about medication adherence and making sure that people had the tools they need to take care of themselves. But, that’s not really how it happened. As I mentioned, I invented tooktake during my treatment for breast cancer. But, that being said, I LOVE being an entrepreneur! One of my favorite parts has been meeting other female founders and learning from them. There are so many people out there who had an idea and decided to make it a business and just figured it out as they went. Like me they didn’t have MBAs or other training, they are just hustling and making it work. The best part of that is that I have found that the entrepreneurs who start that way, really love helping out other people who are doing it that way too. I certainly don’t have it all figured out by any means, but I know a lot more than I did a few years ago and I love being able to share what I have learned with other entrepreneurs who are just starting out so they can see that it is possible. It’s not easy, but it’s possible to create a business without a fancy degree and a lot of connections.

How’d you think through whether to sell directly on your own site or through a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc.

We sell on our own site and on Amazon (as well as in retail ). I like to talk about our decision to sell on Amazon because I know so many other small business owners who say that they will never sell there.

The first place we expanded to after our own website was Amazon. It was during covid and we needed another way for people to find out about tooktake and shipping from the post office was taking forever, so we needed to be able to have a more reliable way to ship, FBA gave us that.

Since tooktake is a small product and not super expensive, Amazon has been a great choice for us. The fees aren’t too bad and it has helped us get tooktake in front of more and more people.

When other small businesses ask me if they should do it, I usually tell them that they need to look at the numbers for their product and see if it works. But if it does work and they can make anything at all, I think it’s worth it just to give people one more place to discover your product and get it easily. In the beginning, I really thought of Amazon as more of an advertising cost than a revenue source, which may not be the best way to look at it, but it worked for us at the time.

I have also found that many many people prefer to order on Amazon than from our website. The few people that I have been able to ask why that is have shared that it’s easy for them to order on Amazon because all their info is already in there and that they feel like they can get customer service easier from Amazon than from a site and a company that is new to them.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

When I first started tooktake I thought that we had to get a huge following really quickly if we wanted to be successful. But I have learned that is only one way to do it. Our social media following has grown slowly over the years, but we have a pretty engaged and loyal group of followers. Many of them DM me on a regular basis with ideas, to ask questions or just to share how they are using the product. I think that before you spend a bunch of time and money worrying about social media it’s a good idea to really think about how you want to use it. For some companies, it is a critical part of their marketing plan, for example, if they do limited edition drops of products and social is how their customers find out about it and order. But our social is more for tips about how to use the product and reminding people to take care of themselves so it’s more important for us to have an audience of people who are really fans of the product than to just have millions of followers who don’t really know what it is.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://tooktake.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tooktake/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hellotooktake
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leeanna-g-84221035/