Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Lindzi Shanks & Kat Connor. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Lindzi Shanks, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Do you manage your own social media?
XO Marshmallow manages our own social media platforms — with the majority of them run by Lindzi from day 1. Last year, we hired our first ever social media assistant to help capture and create content for all of our social platforms. While she did an amazing job executing the vision, we noticed our social started to under perform based on our normal standards when we had someone take it over. We asked friends and close customers why they thought that was the case and the ultimate consensus was “the vibes are off”. We had spent to much time and energy cultivating a social media platform that was deeply connected to our customers and definitely had Lindzi’s voice (both literally and figuratively) that we realized even with someone who was excellent at her job — it was very difficult to replicate that vibe and feeling that came with Lindzi’s content. We decided to shift the majority of the content creation back to Lindzi with our assistant maintaining our Pinterest and getting video content clips when needed — allowing the majority of the brand voice to fall back to Lindzi (who, luckily, LOVES social media). Our biggest advice is to find someone who is incredibly passionate about social media/your brand and let them have the reigns of social. If you’re lucky, it’s one of the founders, but that’s not always the case. For example, Kat hates most things social and therefore has taken a back seat when it comes to content creation. That’s okay — it doesn’t need to be everyone’s passion. If you hire someone to run your social for you, have strict brand guidelines and systems in place for what should be said/posted — BUT allow that person creativity to experiment. Social is free, after all, so there is room to play and see what your customers want you to share. My biggest piece of advice no matter who is creating your content is to ENGAGE. That doesn’t mean just responding to comments or posting polls to IG stories that you never read — it means actively listening to what your customers are saying and give them what they want. One of our biggest questions is “How do I use that?” so we create lots of content showing people how to use our marshmallows or marshmallow fluff. That content performs well and answers a question customers have time and time again.
Lindzi Shanks, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Both Lindzi and Kat had a long and interesting road that led them to marshmallows. Kat, in her last year of law school at Marquette University, began making marshmallows as a holiday gift for her family. During her graduation party she experimented with flavors (some of which we still make today!) and all of her friends and family loved them and encouraged her to do more with them. She realized she did not want to pursue a career in law and began playing around with her recipes. On the other side of Chicago, Lindzi was going through something very similar. She just graduated with a Master’s in Psychology from the University of Chicago and realized she was no longer interested in pursing a PhD. She started an online boutique while she was in undergrad (maintaining it through grad school) and decided to pursue it full time. She gave herself one year. During that year, she opening a popup shop in downtown Chicago for the holiday season. Kat found Lindzi through Instagram — noticing she was hiring and applied for a position at the popup. In her interview, Kat mentioned her marshmallows and Lindzi was hooked — deciding to sell them in the shop alongside her coffee mugs. At the end of the popup, the marshmallow and mug combo was the best selling product and they became business partners. The rest is a sweet history as they’ve continued to grow what has to be one of the most joy-filled companies ever!
XO Marshmallow is a gourmet marshmallow company, with a brand focused on whimsy, nostalgia, and having capital F-fun. Since 2015, the goal of XO Marshmallow has been to introduce customers to a new marshmallow culture. This goal has been achieved through an established online presence, consistent brand messaging on all social platforms, and with the highly-experiential XO Marshmallow Café and Coffee Shop.
Launched formally in 2016, XO Marshmallow was an almost instant success – being featured on The Today Show, Good Morning America, Refinery 29, Business Insider, Buzzfeed, and many more. After launching an ecommerce platform, a café location was opened just a year later. XO has collaborated with Scooby Do, Care Bears, Strawberry Shortcake, and The Honest Company to name a few.
What started as each of us putting $100 into a bank account has grown into the nation’s favorite marshmallow company. With Kat’s food service experience and Lindzi’s marketing background, we’ve maintained sustainable growth — even during a global pandemic. XO Marshmallow is now a multi-seven figure candy wonderland – creating innovative marshmallow flavors from pistachio to strawberry cheesecake – even reimagining nostalgic favorites like Cosmic Brownies into marshmallows.
No other company on the market has fully taken advantage of the various roles marshmallows play in the lives of the influential American consumer. From hot chocolate, to s’mores, from treats to fun flavored marshmallows, XO Marshmallow takes the memory of roasting marshmallows into account when considering marketability, sales, and retail. Our café concept, and strong social media presence, has re-invented many of these experiences for our customers.
One of the biggest things that sets us apart is our commitment to our customers both in terms of quality and service. After listening to our customer’s requests, we made a tenant of our brand to focus on being both completely gluten and peanut free. We are an allergy conscious company that also offers dairy free, soy free, nut free, vegetarian and vegan options. Most recently, we’ve started offering more and more food coloring free options per the requests of our customers. We believe in putting in the hours, in building a brand that people not only love, but trust.
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 2019, we came up with an idea for a Marshmallow Advent Calendar for the holiday season. It would include 25 individual marshmallows that counted down from December 1st to Christmas Day. The majority of the marshmallows would be exclusive to the advent calendar — a fun way to try some off the wall experimental flavors that may not do well when sold in a box of a dozen. We had been toying with the idea of an advent calendar for quite some time, but were nervous about whether or not it would sell. It was by far our most expensive project to date — requiring a lot of up front costs and lift on our end. It would also be our most expensive marshmallow offering — coming in at just shy of $55 per calendar. We knew it was a risk, but felt strongly our customers would love it. We decided to start small — 1,000 calendars — and we would preorder them early to help generate buzz for them and help pay for the cost of building them early. We teased out sneak peeks of the concept on social before launch. And finally when launch day came, we held our breaths and prayed it would work. We had emptied our bank account to pay for the packaging so we NEEDED it to work. Preorders went live and we sold out in 2 weeks. TWO WEEKS! At that point, we couldn’t add any more to production for that year because of the timelines and our team was already strapped making them (Kat and Lindzi both were at the kitchen until 3am a lot of nights and weekends trying to get them made) — but we put together a waitlist for next year. As customers started opening them in December, we realized they were recording unboxing videos for all 25 days! All of the sudden we had honest UGC content from hundreds of customers for the entire month of December. The calendar was a success, but it also boosted other orders for the holiday season and with FOMO of it being sold out — the waitlist grew. The following year we tripled the calendars and gave the waitlist first access. We sold out again in 2 weeks. This year we are on our 6th advent and even added a Halloween advent (year 2) and every year we make more and more and the buzz just keeps going. What started our as a scary marketing risk has turned into our biggest money maker (and driver of UGC content) of the year.
How do you keep your team’s morale high?
Great employees make for great companies. When we first started the business, we had no experience with managing or hiring a team. We were growing fast and looking for bodies (any bodies) that we could get into the space. We wish we knew the importance of a team from day 1 — knowing it’s better to find the right person to fit the culture than just hiring for experience. It would have saved us a lot of headaches (and tears).
Today our highest priority (yes, HIGHEST) priority is our team. Our team comes before our customers and before our profits because at the end of the day, they are the ones making this happen. Our biggest advice is to hire for culture first and experience second. You can teach people to do a lot of things, but you can’t teach attitude, work ethic, or teamwork. We hire those who have those qualities first and foremost and train them to do everything else. Also know that the people who got you where you are may not be the people who will get you where you need to go. This has been a lesson hard earned at XO. You hire someone who helps you to get to the next level and then you both realize after you’ve reached that level that they do not have the knowledge to get you to the next level after that. You are too attached and grateful for their work to let them go and find the next person, but you’re doing you BOTH a disservice. Let them go and help them find another position where they will thrive in a new environment rather than setting them up to fail and create frustration in the role.
Pay your team well, offer them benefits as soon as you can, and treat them like people first. It feels like it should be so obvious, but we are always shocked at the number of employees we have that talk about how they feel like people first and employees second at our company — and what a novel concept that is. It shouldn’t be. Your team should know you see them as a person, not as a number. You should also set boundaries for yourself and for your team. While we consider our employees friends and care about them as people — they also know we have set boundaries for communication and what personal matters we can assist with. They know we care about them, but know we can’t be the people to fix their personal lives. The idea that a company is a “family” is nonsense — employees don’t want a second family — they want to be treated well and like a human being, but with firm boundaries between work and outside life. We are constantly asking for feedback from our team as well (similar to what we do with our customers) and work within the company to make any accommodations or changes it seems the majority of the team wants/needs.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.xomarshmallow.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/xo.marshmallow/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/xomarshmallow/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/xo-marshmallow/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@xo.marshmallow/shorts
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@xo.marshmallow
Image Credits
Photo of Kat and Lindzi (Harper Point Photography) All other photos credit XO Marshmallow