We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Tom Gottschalk a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Tom, appreciate you joining us today. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea
Usually when we start the process of designing a new product, it starts with a specific need. Historically the need is almost always brought to our attention from one of us telling the other(Jake and Tom), or a close friend. Then we sit down and discuss possible solutions, and usually Jake is tasked with developing a product that meets the need. We usually go through 4-5 iterations of a product before we feel that it is ready to be made available for sale. Although every once in a while, we get it right on the first try!
Researching different ingredients has had to become a background process for us, Having suppliers where we can start with small amounts of components has been a huge help. Allowing us to have just enough for trial batches to ensure we have something worth making before scaling up our production. For example our Spice Oil contains ingredients like cranberry seed oil and black cumin seed oil. Both of which are useful for conditioning hair and moisturizing skin but often overlooked, especially in the realm of beard grooming products. With the staggering amount of variety beards can grow in we feel its important to try to have something to offer people that don’t see much benefit from the well-known ingredients used in typical beard oils and balms.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Simply put, at Bull Elephant, the goal is to make really good grooming products at a price point that invites people to use these products daily. All of this was inspired by Jake’s involvement in the bearding community and his realization that beard care products were mostly being sold as boutique and bespoke items, when in reality to see the best benefit these products should be used as part of your regular routine. One late night in 2017, before any of this existed, we got to talking about beard oil, and what was missing in this industry. A few hours later, Bull Elephant was born. Six years later, and we both love doing this as much as the day we started. While a good portion of our business is online sales, we still do a ton of trade shows and markets because one of our favorite things is connecting with our customers directly. Every time we have the opportunity to chat with someone and help them get the most out of their beard it is a wonderful reminder of why we started this, and how much we love doing it.
What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?
As a small grooming product company, it was tricky to build a reputation when our biggest competitors are major cosmetics companies. One of our biggest assets when we were starting out was that were just generally friendly people! When we work markets we love to chat with everyone, and being able to meet our customers face to face and build a lasting relationship lead to us having an excellent reputation as a company that people could trust. Other than that, our goal was to create a product that could speak for itself. A big portion of our returning customers are people that were given Bull Elephant products as a gift, and saw such solid results, that they became customers for life.
Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?
Bull Elephant began with the intention of hand-making every aspect of our products as much as possible. If we had access to a glassblowing facility we would make our own bottles if we could! We still maintain that attitude today, we try to acquire raw materials as close to how they grew out of the ground as possible. Initially it wasn’t a huge challenge, just mixing different oils and butters together until we had something that met our expectations. However pushing the bounds of our product line-up has opened us up to new challenges in order to adhere to that ideology. Now that we offer things like our natural soap we’ve had to adapt our methods to ensure the outcomes of each batch are consistent.
Contact Info:
- Website: Bullelephantbeard.com
- Instagram: @bullelephantbrand
- Facebook: Bull Elephant Beard