March
1, 2019

5 min read

For Fluer Marche´ co-founder, Meredith Schroeder, her cannabis awakening happened on a trip to Aspen, Colorado in 2016. The former Goop executive was visiting for a wedding when she suffered severe menstrual cramps. At her husband’s recommendation, she went into a dispensary and purchased a product. 

“It was the most effective pain medication I ever had,” Schroeder says, admitting that prior to that experience she’d not been cannabis enthusiast. “I pretty much converted right then and there.”

Back in California, Schroeder shared her story with her Goop “work wife”, Ashley Lewis, who at that time had been heavily researching the possibility of opening up a standup CBD shop for Goop.com — Gwyneth Paltrow’s hugely successful wellness company. 

Although Lewis had learned a ton about different CBD brands, and she also had a ton of positive experiences with the compound, she faced obstacles getting the initiative off the ground. “There are a lot of regulatory challenges for a company that is as big and successful and involved in so many different categories as Goop is,” she explains

That’s when the two decided to team up to start their own venture — Fleur Marche´, an online, curated CBD boutique focused on rebranding and repositioning cannabis as a wellness tool for the Goop customer and beyond. Here, we talk to them about their business, their challenges, and what they hope to achieve. 

Image Credit: Rodolfo Carlos

What problem are you solving with Fleur Marche´?

Schroeder: Coming from a background where I’ve bought for women and built out retail experiences my whole life, I didn’t feel like that there was anywhere for me to shop either physically or online for CBD. There wasn’t a destination where the experience was sophisticated, educational, elevated, and where the product selection was aggregated in a single place. It just felt like there was a huge white space in that area. And with Ashley’s background and her data research specifically for Goop and my experience in buying and curating and building retail experiences for women, we really thought we could be the dynamic duo.

How do you decide what products to feature on the site?

Lewis: I had spent a good year looking into various brands and there were some that rose to the top. But once we do decide that we’re interested in working with a brand, we have a really strict set of standards through which we vet them. Every brand on the site is required to submit product testing for both their CBD extract and the finished product. We look at everything from chemicals, residual solvents, to heavy metals, micro to make sure that we feel confident that this is a quality product.

How did your experience working at Goop impact how you’re running your company?

Lewis: Figuring out how to talk to an audience of women in a specific way that’s meaningful to them. Because of Goop, we have a really unique understanding of how to target that woman, how to speak to her in the right way, how to help her feel comfortable, and then answer the questions that are important to her. 

Schroeder: We’re really transparent about the effects of CBD in the various categories. On our site, we have a decent assortment of skincare versus tinctures versus transdermal. We really are clear about the benefits or effects of CBD in those specific formats. 

What’s been the biggest challenge working in the space that you’ve had to overcome?

Lewis: We heard from all these brands, colleagues, and peers in the cannabis space that we should be prepared for our site to be shut down at any minute, and that we weren’t going to get banks to process our payments. So we spent months diving deep into why that was happening and how we could avoid it. We got smart early on in those areas and started to understand that sites aren’t arbitrarily being shut down. Often times, people don’t understand the payment processing structure. We had to find a high-risk payment processor who deals specifically in cannabis with an underwriting bank that knows it is dealing in cannabis and is okay with that. While I think it’s important to move fast and know how to break things, there are a lot of areas that we just couldn’t afford to cut corners and had to be very methodical and tactical. We still have to pay no higher transaction fees than someone selling shoes. 

Schroeder: I think for anyone getting into the cannabis space, your first resources has to be a cannabis regulatory lawyer. The laws change every day, and it’s just so easy to not know if you’re doing something wrong.

February
28, 2019

3 min read

Jenna Meister left her senior Airbnb job in 2015 and cofounded a cannabis company. Its goal: Build a premium brand that felt antique, harking back to the 1960s, when Northern Californians grew cannabis next to their vegetable gardens. “These people thought, I believe in this, and am going to do it regardless of what the government says I should or shouldn’t do,” Meister says. To convey that sensibility, she hired the design firm Pavement — and then obsessed over the details for nine months before her product made it to shelves. Here were some of the big decisions.

Related: The Next Big Thing in ‘Green’ Packaging Is Hemp Bioplastic

Name

Image credit:

Courtesy of Henry’s Original

From the beginning, cofounder Jamie Warm wanted to call the company Henry’s Original. It was inspired by a farmer he met in Mendocino County, where the startup’s cannabis is sourced. Meister wasn’t sold at first; she worried the name Henry sounded too old and masculine. But after surveying potential customers, she discovered an unexpected plus: It made the brand feel instantly familiar. “Almost everyone has someone named Henry in their life and has an affinity toward them,” she says. “It brings the heritage aspect and antique feel.”

Related: A Comprehensive Guide to Packaging Concentrates

Sticker

Image credit:

Courtesy of Henry’s Original

Meister began studying antique apothecary and whiskey bottles, looking for details to import onto Henry’s packaging. One jumped out strongest — a hand-done element, be it a stamp or a number, that’s added at the end. To replicate that, Henry’s places a sticker on the bottom of each box to identify the strain of cannabis inside. “We wanted it to feel like it was applied just for this batch — and that it didn’t just roll off an assembly line,” she says.

Box

Image credit:

Courtesy of Henry’s Original

As Airbnb’s head of community development, Meister learned how customers are won over by great experiences. She wanted the same for Henry’s packaging, for it “to feel like you open and reveal something.” So rather than build a box that simply opened, she made it a tray and a sleeve, like a matchbox. Users would push out the tray to unveil the smokes. It cost way more than a regular box — but how much? “A lot,” is all she’ll reveal.

Related: These Social Justice Weed Warriors Are Making a Difference

Cork

Image credit:

Courtesy of Henry’s Original

Henry’s team wanted to keep its smokes fresh without using cheap-feeling bags, and a tube with a cork felt like an appropriately vintage solution. But its half-gram smokes were so small that standardized cork sizes wouldn’t cap the tube. “I contacted, like, every cork supplier in the world,” Meister says, and she eventually found one to make custom sizes, each order taking months to fulfill. An early batch was a millimeter off, forcing the team to screw them in by hand. “My hands were blistered and raw,” she says. But the result looked authentic.

February
26, 2019

11 min read

This story appears in the
March 2019
issue of
Entrepreneur. Subscribe »

Drew and Jonathan Scott were about to enter their first-ever escape room. This was a decade ago, before the rooms — containing a series of puzzles that must be solved before time runs out — had become an international trend. The identical twins and hosts of HGTV’s blockbuster series Property Brothers were traveling through Budapest, and their mother suggested they try the activity. So the brothers made their way into the basement of a building and apprehensively asked how it works. 

“We lock you in; you try to get out,” the owner replied, in what Jonathan describes as a menacing Eastern bloc accent. 

“We thought for sure we were being kidnapped,” he adds. 

Instead, the brothers became each other’s worst enemy. Drew barked orders at Jonathan, while Jonathan obsessed over small, inconsequential problems. They made it out — but barely. 

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The ironies here come in sizes small and big. Small: The Scotts’ brand is all about creating rooms you’d never want to escape. On their flagship show, Property Brothers, they help buyers purchase a fixer-upper and then spend a couple of months on renovation and design. The two are dynamic partners and charmingly goofy, which keeps viewers going until the end of each episode, when there’s a big reveal, TV-worthy gasps, and joyful tears. It’s a formula that has worked for 13 seasons and counting, and has inspired six equally hot HGTV spin-offs (the latest of which, Forever Home, debuts later this year).

And here’s the big irony: The brothers may have stumbled over each other in the escape room, but their entire professional success relies upon their strong sense of partnership. By moving together as one, they’ve been able to build upon opportunities like a bricklayer stacking bricks — turning a real estate business into a TV show, then that one show into six, then using those shows as a platform to launch a production company called Scott Brothers Entertainment, then using that platform to build Scott Living, a furniture, decor, and housewares brand that helped their company clear a half-billion dollars in sales in 2018, and now, launching a consumer-­facing design platform called Casaza.

The Scotts say they’ve done all this by treating their partnership as a gut check. “Sometimes you’re running toward your target so hard that you don’t stop to reassess,” Jonathan says. Together, they’re able to slow each other down, take a long, hard look at opportunities, and then make the right choice. Their partnership isn’t just about building; it’s about stopping to listen.

All of which is why they still go to escape rooms. In fact, they’re fixated on them — and they’ve found their groove. “Now we’re the Dream Team,” Jonathan says. “We’ve learned to look at problems in [fresh] ways, and we naturally divide and conquer. It’s funny, because it really does tie into what we do with our business.” 

Image Credit: Jake Chessum

On a frigid Monday in December, the brothers arrive in New York fresh off a five-day Caribbean cruise — dubbed Sailing with the Scotts — in which fans paid to float around the ocean, attend design workshops, and perform karaoke with the brothers. Mere hours after they disembark, they cohost the Today show with Hoda Kotb and Kathie Lee Gifford, then head off to a meeting with Sunham Home, a textile company that’s helping them with some Scott Living products. 

There, they talk through patterns for pillow coverlets and towel thread counts — details they could easily outsource but insist on reviewing. They compromise and make changes in seconds. Drew questions the beading pattern on a pillow, and just as he’s about to scrap the design, Jonathan suggests an alternative idea. Drew approves, and they’re on to the next.

This is the Scotts’ life now: a fast, efficient, high-profile series of opportunities that keeps them constantly together. It’s a strange version of their childhood dreams. Though back then, their visions didn’t necessarily involve real estate — or, frankly, each other.

Both brothers dreamed of fame. Drew wanted to be an actor; Jonathan, a magician. But in 1996 they weren’t really either — just broke high school grads in search of a side hustle. As a way to make cash, they started flipping houses. It seemed like a good plan; the two were handy (they’d learned from their father, who built the family home in High River, south of Calgary), and a provision in Canadian real estate law allowed them to take over someone else’s mortgage without personally qualifying. They made $50,000 on their first flip. It was addictive. 

Over time, they honed a divide-and-conquer approach. Drew did most of the buying and selling, which suited his gregarious nature. Jonathan, who preferred to work behind the scenes, went back to school for construction and design. They picked up various acting gigs here and there, but the business was becoming too much of a cash cow to deny. In 2004, they made it official by creating Scott Real Estate, a one-stop shop for buying, selling, and renovating. 

Just more than a year later, though, Drew felt unsettled. “I remember thinking, Real estate isn’t my only passion,” he says. He had to give acting another shot, and announced he was moving to what’s known as Hollywood North: Vancouver.  

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Jonathan was blindsided. “When your business partner tells you he’s leaving the province, you freak out,” he says. “We’d never had this kind of money or success, and you want to move away and do acting?” Jonathan considered his options. He could guilt Drew into staying, or he could support his decision. He settled on the latter. Yes, Drew’s leaving might kill the business — or just kill Jonathan, who now had to work 18-hour days — but if Drew stayed and came to resent Jonathan, both the business and the relationship would be in peril. He couldn’t risk it. 

Drew went to auditions and networked his butt off for nearly a year but had secured just a few small bookings when he realized he’d racked up $140,000 in debt. “It was the first sleepless night I’d ever had,” Drew says. As he lay awake, a song by Jim Cuddy came on the radio: “Pull Me Through.” Drew realized he already knew how to pull himself out of this situation, and thought of his brother and their real estate business. “I went back to my roots, ” he says.

That very night, Jonathan received an email from his brother asking for Scott Real Estate’s marketing template. “That’s when I knew,” Jonathan says. “He’s back.” Acting, it seemed, was an ambition of the past. Whatever came next they would do as a team.

Image Credit: Jake Chessum

To their surprise, Drew’s failed Vancouver expedition ended up being a huge win for the Scotts’ growing business. Those costly dinners and networking events left him with a fresh Rolodex of valuable contacts that allowed Scott Real Estate to expand to a new province — and their new clients’ proximity to the entertainment industry got the brothers wondering if they could merge their old dreams with their new success. 

They started pitching a cohosted renovation show. Despite promising meetings, production companies passed. Finally, they found a taker: Cineflix, a midsize Canadian production house that developed the idea for Property Brothers and sold it to Canada’s W Network after a female exec’s feedback: “Two young hot guys in tight jeans, renovating? Sold.” The show debuted in 2010 with strong ratings, HGTV picked it up in the U.S., and viewership skyrocketed. (Today, the majority of their audience is female.) 

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Some of what came next was the natural extension of having a hit TV show — the production company, the retail opportunities, and, frankly, the money. “There are probably less than 100 actors who make more than we do across our empire,” Jonathan says, surprised at how things turned out. “We thought it was the bee’s knees to be a successful actor, but pursuing that would have never opened up this world to us.”

To juggle it all, they share responsibilities fluidly. Drew has more downtime during filming, so he’ll work on Scott Living while Jonathan is on set. “Between shots, we’re always on email,” Jonathan says. “Our team knows that we divide and conquer; if Drew has responded [to an email], I don’t.” The success of that system has kept them keenly aware of the importance of partnerships. They’re better together — and sometimes, better with others as well.

Over nine years of making TV, Drew and Jonathan have come to rely on the scores of local contractors and designers they work with as they film in cities throughout North America. As a result, those entrepreneurs’ profiles have risen. And that, the Scotts realized, created a new opportunity worth capitalizing on.

In October, the Scotts launched a consumer-­facing design platform called Casaza. It showcases rooms designed by people the brothers have personally vetted. Every item is hand-selected and available for purchase. Eventually, the Scotts say, users will be able to hire the site’s featured designers along with local “Casaza pros” who will come to someone’s house for measurements, while Casaza will refer contractors to do the work. Unlike other home sites that charge designers for viewer eyeballs, Casaza showcases them free of charge. 

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Featured talent is already seeing results. Jessica Davis is a Nashville-based designer whose firm has been featured on Property Brothers six times. She sees Casaza as a way to further legitimize her work. “Clearly, if these very successful professionals are willing to work with me, I might have an idea about this industry,” she says.  

Keia McSwain feels similarly. She’s the owner of Denver-based firm Kimberly + Cameron, as well as president of the Black Interior Designers Network. Casaza, she says, is one of the few platforms that seems explicitly interested in showcasing minority designers. “Who else has reached out to us as far as being inclusive?” she says. “Nobody.” The site has already brought her new clients and business partners. “They’ve given me confirmation and affirmation. With them it’s less about the ‘say’ and more about the ‘do’. ”

Image Credit: Jake Chessum 

The Scotts love hearing feedback like that. At this point, the value of partnerships just feels like a truism to them. “We want our company to be the easiest relationship anyone’s ever had,” Drew says. “A lot of talent on shows are high-maintenance jerks. At the end of the day, people want to work with who they like. We have the same thing between us.”

In an hours-long interview that stretched throughout their busy New York day — before and during breaks at the Today show, through their time at the textiles company — they were pressed repeatedly about the potential fault lines of their partnership. But the honest answer, they say, is that there’s no drama to speak of. They faced it already; they saw what it was like working solo and then what blossomed when they were together. 

“There is never one defined right or wrong brother,” Drew says. “We each have our individual truths. But together we’re the better truth.”

Listen to the Property Brothers offer up advice on building a business with a co-founder on this episode of Problem Solvers. 

February
25, 2019

2 min read

After Jose Fernandez sold his legal-focused software company in 2011, he jumped into a whole new industry: bottled water. It was all based on a hunch that alkaline water (with a higher pH level) would be the next big thing in H2O consumption.

He was eventually proven right, as his company, TEN Spring Water, has seen revenue grow by 100 percent year over year, with revenues expected to be between $7 million and $9 million this year, according to the company. TEN is now sold in 8,000 U.S. stores. But it was a slow start in 2012.

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“Coming into an industry I knew nothing about, it was tough,” Fernandez said. “You need to have a very big war chest to pull it off.” He self-funded the company.

Fernandez became interested in alkaline water after seeing it on shelves in Florida, but he noticed all the products were either made with tap water or reverse-osmosis tap water. He figured spring water with a high pH would be a more appealing product. So he and his partners started calling natural springs who co-pack and label water for them. The company now employs four springs.

With product in hand, Fernandez started approaching small retailers to sell their water, eventually scoring a partnership with UNFI, a major food distributor.

Image Credit: Courtesy of TEN Water

“Getting an appointment is a challenge unless you know the right people and have a good story and product,” Fernandez said. “You’ve got to be able to prove that before they let you in the building. You’ve got to be patient, you’ve got to keep knocking on that door, and eventually the door will open.”

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So what does he see as the biggest differences between his old business in software and selling water?

“I used to sell software for $1,000. I now sell a bottle of water for a dollar,” he said. “When you’re developing software there’s a long bug list that never ends. You can’t do that with this stuff.”