Under The Hood: Robbie from Jupiter

Hey Robbie! So tell me, what’s the backstory for Jupiter? 

Well, I'm originally from Detroit. I went to the University of Michigan though I admittedly didn't go to class that much. I'm the son of a doctor, the brother of doctors, the nephew of a doctor, but I just never wanted to be a doctor. I always just wanted to do my own thing, which makes sense since I'm also the youngest of three children. 

I’ve always been an entrepreneur at heart. Right around the time Facebook was becoming a thing, I launched 2 companies - one of them flopped miserably, while the other was moderately successful (and by that, I mean, it just made me enough money to move out to Los Angeles, which is the farthest from Detroit as I could possibly get). 

Once I got to LA, I somehow managed to work my way into the office of the famous producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, where I worked for a number of years. Later, when the recession hit, I went back to grad school and got my JD-MBA from Northwestern, where I also met my wife who was dead-set on returning home to New York.

Suffice it to say that she dragged me kicking and screaming to the City, where I worked for a small consulting firm as the right hand man to the Chairman. Within 3 years, we'd grown the company from about 40 people to about 130 people and ended up selling the business to a public company. 

After the sale, I was in my office one day having a bit of a panic attack saying “Is this really what I want to do with my life? Where am I going?” and “Do I have a higher calling?”  I then started scratching my head, looked down on my desk and I saw a pile of dandruff flakes and was like “This is so frustrating! How do I stop this from happening?”

So I did like what everybody else does, which is to go to a local drug store and look online for solutions. What I ended up finding was the ubiquitous 2-in-1 offerings for around $9, and a small container of something seemingly more potent for $17. I was curious: Is the smaller one better? Is it higher strength? They both smell equally disgusting to me and had ingredients I didn’t feel comfortable putting on my body.  So I went over to a big beauty retailer to see if they had any other, better smelling and looking solutions, and was equally perplexed. So I asked one of the salespeople  there “what do you have for dry, itchy scalp?” And they just looked at me like a deer in headlights. They had no idea what to offer. 

I went online to see if I was the only person out there who has flakes and discovered that 50-75% of the world gets scalp discomfort like flaky, oily or dry scalp at some point in their lives. And 1 in 5 people in the world get it chronically. 

So I ended up reaching out to my (now) partner Ross, who had been in private equity for a bunch of years and had launched a few other consumer brands about 7 years prior, taking advantage of the trends that were taking place on Amazon. I just told him the idea of launching a D2C brand to tackle scalp discomfort using cleaner ingredients, a better smell and none of the stigma.

The response was not what I expected: he just started laughing at me before responding, “I’ve had dandruff my whole life, and I've been working on this same idea for a few months now.” 

Flash forward 18 months of grueling rounds and rounds of product formulation, and we launched Jupiter. 

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But what was originally launched as a scalp discomfort company very quickly evolved into a scalp care company - with the big discovery being that if you simply want great hair, no matter where your journey begins, it all starts at the scalp.

Fascinating. So when did you officially launch? 

It was the last week in May of 2020: the worst week in a long time to launch a business.

I had just gotten a puppy, my wife was six months pregnant, and I became a first time homeowner. If that wasn’t enough, the panic of COVID was really starting to kick-in. To say that it was an incredibly difficult time to launch a brand would be a tremendous understatement.

What did you and your partners risk to start this business? 

For me, it was mostly leaving a well-paying job where there was a clear path to financial success. See above re: baby on the way. 

Ross had already left his former career in private equity and was focused on building the e-commerce business he had launched a couple years prior to us meeting. But because that was picking up steam, he was being recruited for some very big, very impressive jobs. The decision to dedicate the majority of his time to Jupiter was a financially difficult one no doubt.

But really it was my other partner, Alexa, who perhaps took the biggest leap. As technically the company’s first employee, Alexa left a long career as a senior leader at Warby Parker. She had been there from the early days and was taking a big gamble on me, Ross and the opportunity. To say that we couldn’t be where we are without her is a tremendous understatement.

Did you take on some VC funding? What was that like? 

We originally just used our own money. When we had to make our first inventory purchase, we raised an angel round from friends & family including former bosses, industry veterans and even a law school professor of mine. But as we were getting closer to launch, we realized that we were going to need more capital for advertising/marketing - that’s when we took on the first bit of “institutional” capital.  

So it’s been almost a year and a half. How has the team grown? 

So our team is very small. We only have 3 full-time employees, and our goal is to only bring on people as absolutely needed. This year, we’ll be expanding the team quite a bit since we’re reaching the limits on bandwidth and expertise. 

How are you splitting the responsibilities on the team? 

I oversee the brand and partnerships aspects. Ross oversees the acquisition and product development aspects. And Alexa oversees the customer side which sits right in between acquisition and brand - there’s nice coverage across the business. 

What are some of the most difficult things to crack on the business? 

I'd say eCom supply chain is something that’s been very difficult, but it's impossible to fix unless you vertically integrate: it's just impossible to be able to predict your supply these days. 

We’ve been  incredibly fortunate to have sold out of our shampoo and  conditioner a number of times. We're fortunate on that front, but at the same time, it’s horrible to push pause on a growing business and an even worse feeling when you can’t deliver for your customers. So we're placing larger bets and larger orders these days to ensure that won’t happen in the future. 

The other side is a fairly obvious one: attribution of paid marketing spend. With the iOS changes in the Spring 2021, it's still really hard to figure out our return on ad spend. We haven’t seen a meaningful change in the business performance, but it’s harder to pinpoint what’s working and not.  

What’s working for your guys on acquisition? 

What's working for us is conservative spend and taking a holistic approach to customer acquisition. We are not gonna build a brand that is focused exclusively on crazy high top level growth without the margin to stand up the business profitably. So even though that's not a “hack” or “technique”: patience is really something that’s core to our approach. We have also realized that it is important to review the business (and our customer journey) holistically (paid acquisition, organic social, email, PR, SEO, etc.) as they all work in tandem to educate and ultimately convert our website visitors to customers.

Tell me about the stack: any tools that are really useful to you? 

We run a complicated tech stack for our website (we are built on a headless custom front-end and Shopify back-end) which gives us strong data insights into our customer and allows us to offer customers a more customized browsing experience. 

A few that stand out would be Givz, which helps streamline our charitable give-back efforts; Co-op, a post-purchase plug-in that introduces shoppers to other brands they may like based on their purchasing behavior; and finally Recharge, to help manage our subscription program.   

Outside of that, we’re on Klaviyo for email and Attentive for SMS. 

One last question: What would you attribute most of your success to at Jupiter?

I'm gonna say “professional friendships.” 

And by that I mean people who you can lean on to share resources and can truly empathise with your situation. I’m very open about the mental health aspect of starting a new business, and love that I have a Slack group to lean on for advice and feedback.

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Robbie - thank you! Super thankful to have met you and I’m really appreciative of you sharing your learnings with the community.