Start With A Win - Delivering Happiness with Sugarwish CEO, Elisabeth Vezzani

Episode Date: November 27, 2019

Elisabeth Vezzani, CEO of Sugarwish, joins us on this episode of Start with a Win. Elisabeth and her co-founder noticed a paradigm shift in gift giving when sending e-gifts started to gain traction and the mentality switched from the giver choosing the gift to the receiver having the power to decide what they wanted. They started Sugarwish as a way to provide the receiver the joy and satisfaction of choosing their ideal candy box which has already been paid for by the giver, featuring over 80 different types of candy and over 50 types of popcorn to choose from.The magic of Sugarwish is that there are multiple touch points that feel magical to the receiver and that also serve the purpose of keeping the giver top-of-mind. Elisabeth says that 80% of Sugarwish’s clients are business professionals who are looking for a creative and fun way to send gifts to their own clients for various reasons. Many business professionals wonder if they are striking the right note in their interactions with customers and leads, but by sending them something from Sugarwish which they get to pick out themselves, you can rest assured that your interactions will always end memorably.Elisabeth speaks to building and maintaining a startup, emphasizing the importance of prioritizing your next tasks and steps, and realizing that you can’t do everything. She also talks about the impact of a good culture by investing in your human capital while your financial capital is still getting where you want it to be. Like many other successful people, Elisabeth starts her day with a win by making her bed and setting her mind on the priorities of the day. Connect with Elisabeth:https://sugarwish.com/http://instagram.com/sugarwishgirl#http://www.facebook.com/sendasugarwishhttps://twitter.com/Sugarwishgirlhttp://pinterest.com/sugarwishpins  Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/ https://www.facebook.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContos https://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/ 

Hey, Wynn Nation, make sure to stick around to the end of the episode. We got a little sweet surprise for you. Atop of the 12th floor of the Remax World Headquarters, you're listening to Start With A Wynn with CEO Adam Kantos. Our guests are always like, what is all this dancing? Yeah, on top of the 12th floor of Remax World Headquarters. Adam Kanto start with a win. Beautiful day in Denver today, and we have one of our local businesses with us, Elizabeth Vizzani with Sugar Wish. How are you doing?

I'm doing great, and I'm really happy to be here. Well, we're glad to have you here, and you brought us treats. I did, yes. So that is our classic box, which has eight different candy choices, and it's Sugar Wish. You are welcome to the show anytime you want. All right, well, I'll be here every day. I love it. That's how I'm going to start my day with a win.

There you go. You're CEO of Denver-based company, obviously called Sugar Wish. You guys deliver smiles to people. That is the whole concept, that it's all about sweet happiness delivered. We have done a paradigm shift on gifting that allows the receiver to pick what they want. So they are basically guaranteed happiness. I love this. All right, let's break this down a little bit. So 2012, you start this company. What's the history behind this? So I was doing business development for a staffing firm and sending gifts and thought that there were not many clever options, that everyone was giving the same thing over and

over. And it's kind of the front end of e-gifting where people would send maybe gift certificates, but there wasn't an actual experience given. You would just print out your gift certificate and bring it to the store, but that was a way you could deliver something over email. And I thought, well, I want an actual thing sent to me. So how could you mix sending it by email or text and a physical gift? And so my co-founder, her name is Leslie Lyon, she had worked in New York City, and she had talked about going to the candy stores at lunch

and the thrill of picking a little of this and a little of that, and that it had very little to do with the candy itself and more about getting to pick what you wanted in the anticipation. We like to say the kid in the candy store feeling. And we came together and decided to create something that could deliver that and allow the person who got the sugar wish to pick exactly what they want and capture that kid in the candy store feeling. This is like all fun. I can't think of, I mean, how do you have a bad day in this business, right? But you know the truth, that we get to see so much goodness.

It's everybody sending like, oh, you're wonderful, or thank you for this, or it's all, and everybody getting it's happy. We get to see firsthand just so much goodness, just people thanking people for referrals or thanking them for business, and then the other person just being thrilled to get it. We are in the front line of delivering happiness. Why don't you share with us one of your experiences that you've had, something really cool that's happened as a result of this. Somebody telling you a story about, oh, I did this sugar wish gift to somebody,

something like that. Do you have any of those? Well, right when you're in for about a year, we're working on it and, oh, is this going to work? And should we do it? And then we worked on it, launched it. And we saw right away, someone in Colorado gifted to someone in New Mexico and the person in New Mexico picked their candy. Granted, they'd never received the box. They just had the fun of picking and then they sent it to someone in New York. And then that person in New York had sent it to someone in Michigan. And all these people never even received the candy yet. They were just thrilled

with getting to pick candy themselves and the actual feeling we deliver. So right away, we were like, we've got something here. We knew it. Right on. It was just like the feeling of paying it forward. Right. And then we even have that as the button when you're done picking your candy. The button doesn't say order Sugar Wish. It says pay it forward. Oh, I love that. Brilliant. Yeah. So that's the win we always think about because it's just something that right away, we agonized over the packaging and making sure the candy is fresh.

But that people were getting it and sending it before they got any of that. But it was really just about the picking of the candy that people enjoyed so much. That is so cool. So Sugar Wish, obviously the company, you gift the ability for somebody to choose their treats. Right. So right now we just launched popcorn last week. But what it is is you pick a size, and you pay for everything up front. There's just one cost, and that includes shipping anywhere in the United States.

And so you allow them to pick two candies or four or eight or 16. You pay for it, and then you send it electronically. So you send it in their email. So all you need is an email. Or you send a text, Slack, social media. And then they click on a button that brings them to our virtual treat store, either the candy store or the popcorn. And then on the candy store, they have over 80 choices.

And in the popcorn store, they have over 50. And then if you granted them four choices, they pick their four favorites, put in their address, and we ship it to them. And you look at the value of time for the gifter and the gifty. Right. A lot of times people have to meet someone somewhere to receive something, or you've obviously got to go to the store, go hang out in the store, figure out what you're going to do. It's hard to make a choice of what to give somebody, but you've taken all that burden off of everybody. Right. It's like sending a gift basket and then you've received them and you're

like, well, oh, I don't really like oatmeal cookies and I'm going to throw this away. And then you feel a little bad. You're picking, you get exactly what you want. And as the sender, you can't get it wrong. And in business, you don't often have their exact address or know when they're going to be in town. This, you have their email, you can send it instantly. So it's their birthday today, or you want to thank them after, you know, you did a house tour and they sent someone your way. You can do it instantly.

The normal, you would send it, you'd ship it and it'd show up five days later, but you want to thank them right now. You want the impact right now. You get the impact several times, too. That's the other. We always talk about the touch points for sales. They think of you right now, and then they think of you in a couple days. I mean, if you're doing it for sales reasons and marketing and standout, we help you out there. The satisfaction of receiving a gift is not necessarily just the intrinsic, the item in your hand or eating it here. For this case, it is actually that feeling that we get in our heart that our brain gives us some chemicals that says, oh, this is a loving situation. This feels good.

You guys give that to us several times here. I love that. We give you to you several times. You get the message. There's a personal message there. Companies can put their brand. But also when you think about big events in your life, anticipation is one of the greatest feelings. So we give you that. You pick your candy and then you're excited and waiting for it to come. Christmas Eve is more fun than Christmas. Oh, totally. Yeah. The kid on Christmas Eve, right?

Right. And then just thinking about this, I'm always looking for, okay, how do I maximize this situation? And you look at it and you go, what if I had a child, my kids are grown and they're in college and stuff, but they love candy, by the way,

but have a younger kid sit down and spend the time with you picking your gift. Right. And then the anticipation together. There's so many wins out of this. It's so neat. Right. And it's the thrill.

The shopping, the thrill of picking is the fun part. But you don't want to mess with, oh, the shopping cart and the pain and the shipping costs. So we've taken all that out and just left the fun part. So for kids to pick, oh, Swedish fish, and oh, a bit of honey, just the thrill of seeing it and that you can pick it if you want is fun. And sparking conversations about childhood favorites, because they're all there. All your childhood favorites are there.

And then some new things that are just kind of fun to try. Awesome. So we always talk in business about really what creates value, what creates customer experience, things like that. And I know you really look deeply at that from your business perspective here. And when people do business, so many times they end a phone call, they end an interaction, and then they think to themselves, did I end that on the right note? You give them the opportunity to make sure that they end it on the right note. We do.

I mean, right then you can send it and it'd show up instantly. And you could do it as a text or an email. And we have gifts that start, including shipping, at $19.50. So it's very easy to add a little sweet touch. Ah. Dare I say it. Fantastic. There you go. You can be the fun person at the party. We do. We do.

I love that. It's hard. It's pretty easy to open doors with candy. It's hard to say no to, sure, I'll take a little candy or popcorn. So it's a nice way to arrive at a party or to open any doors. You're like a professor in gifting, obviously. Sure, that's what I call myself. Really? No. Oh, okay.

I could see that. I've learned a lot in six years, but I'm still not sure I could call myself a professor in gifting. Okay, well, congratulations. Yeah, thank you. I have a new title. Follow my call myself a professor in gifting. Okay. Well, congratulations. Yeah. Thank you. I have a new title. You need like a – Follow my new Instagram, Professor of Gifting, starting after this podcast. Yeah.

You could start a new class at the business school up the street. You look at it and you go, okay, what other things do people like to see in business gifting? What gets the most attention around here, or really in any office, in our real estate offices, things like that, is something that you can eat. So obviously that's the space that you guys work in. Something else is something you can display. You guys have kind of taken care of both because your box is really cool here, the packaging for this whole thing. What do you guys see as kind of the fundamentals of gifting? What is necessary in the gifting process? Because you just don't want something to show up at somebody's doorstep and then go, oh, that's kind of cool. I think they meant to be nice to me. Are there any

fundamentals that you think are absolutely necessary in this process? I mean, we always try to keep in mind over and over that we want to deliver that feeling of happiness. In the world, when you can run to the mall, Target, online, buy yourself a sweater, any shirt you want, anything's really at your fingertips. The whole point of gifting is to deliver that feeling, to deliver the spark of joy, and to keep that in mind. So everything we do is we keep it simple. We keep everything happy from the process of buying it to the receiver picking to showing up the box. Everything we keep in mind is this delivering a happy feeling is the first thing they see the you deserve candy gives them a little smile or candy break,

just constantly trying to add little touches, little bells and whistles that deliver the feeling of joy and happiness because that's the whole point of gifting. So cool. I got a question for you when it comes to gifting. What are the biggest challenges that you guys find in your business? I mean, you've got a really fun business, a cool business. You make people smile, things like that. What kind of challenges do you guys face? Well, just throughout the years, as you're growing as a startup, you have lots of great ideas, lots of things you want to accomplish, and you can't do them all at once. So kind of you can do anything you want, but not everything you want type of adage that just picking and choosing what you do next, what's the most important, what will have

return on investment, growing it with keeping the happiness, keeping our office feeling great, the people working for us happy, but still growing. So constantly trying to figure out what you do next, what you prioritize. I think as a startup, that's been one of our, you know, you have this giant list of wishes. And then just what are you pulling off next? So the giant list of wishes and then the limited time to focus. And funds and growth and just, so what do you, what's next? What is your, we'd like to do this, this, this.

So just last week we launched popcorn. So for the last couple of years, we're like, we've been doing candy. We'd like to do another, we'd like to prove we can do it with another product, but it's got to be a business product. It's got to be something a business wants to send since that's 80% of our business. What would work? We sent out surveys to all our customers asking what they'd like to see. But really, we've wanted to do another product, and we finally put that at the top of the list and pulled it off. Cool. Yeah.

How's that going so far? It's going really well. That's awesome. The first week, it's 15% of what's being sent. Wow. That sugar wish is really granting the wish of what the person wants versus a candy gift. It's really more about the receiver picking. I think you feel a little bit better about what you're ordering also. It's popcorn. It's

healthier? I don't know. Well, it depends. I mean, we have Dr. Pepper flavor. I doubt you'd put that in the healthier thing, but there are. And we do on the candy thing have nuts and cashews and savories. So we have healthy things in both options. Popcorn probably has more healthy options, but it is fun. It is a gift. So people always do pick kind of maybe one of the crazy ones to give it a shot. What are the crazy ones? So you got Dr. Pepper, obviously.

Dr. Pepper's crazy. I mean, there's pickle, like dill pickle, which is actually surprisingly good. Really? Blueberry, birthday cake. I mean, we have all the normal, the caramel and cheese and the caramel and cheese mix. The Denver mix is so good. But there are the crazy ones that you just, bubblegum flavor popcorn. Interesting.

Yes, it's a little crazy, but fun to taste. Are those manufactured locally? Yep. Yeah. So we have suppliers. So we have all different suppliers for candy, and then we have local suppliers that are popped daily. So when the order comes in, we give them the order and then we ship it out the next day. Oh, so it's all fresh. All fresh. Wow. That's awesome. This is such a cool business model. It's just fun to talk about because you're

making people smile and kindness doesn't happen enough in this world. So you guys are contributing a great deal to that. So thank you for doing that. A few questions we always ask the people that are on the show. How do you define starting your day with a win? Other than making my bed every morning. I love it. I always do this. I love it.

The Navy SEALs teach that, right? I do, yes. I start with a handwritten list. It's a little old school, but I do like to write out what I have to do, and that helps me prioritize, and just the actual process of handwriting it does something for me. You have a favorite book? I'm reading The Big Leap, which is about beating your upper limits, but a favorite book all time is The Book Thief. The Book Thief. Yeah. I think I've read it

many times and with my children while they've been in... That's cool. Yeah. I love it. I read it there with wonder, I guess. There you go. Another child favorite. Right on. Yes. Do you have a favorite quote? You can do anything, but not everything that I've already mentioned. And work hard and be kind. Good things will happen. I love it. Those are great. Very nice. Any key success tip that you would give anybody that's listening right now?

I feel like the thing I say the most in our business and to others is just move forward. And it doesn't have to be perfect. Just take the next step. I love it. Elizabeth Vazani with Sugar Wish, an amazing local company here in Colorado that really sends out smiles. It's a really cool, innovative gifting model

where the giftee gets to pick their gift, but they get a smile several times in the process. Really cool candy, popcorn, and who knows what's next. So I love it. Thank you so much for being on the show with us today. I know our audience got a lot out of this. Where can people follow you and find out more about what you do? So we're sugarwish.com and our Instagram is sugarwishgirls. Same with Twitter. And just find us there.

Thanks so much, Elizabeth. All right. Thank you so much for having me. I loved it. Thanks for listening to today's episode. Make sure that you head over to startwithawin.com slash sugar wish in order to receive a 10% off coupon code for a sweet treat this holiday season. Bye.