Seed for Success | Empowering Women Entreprenuers

If theYahoo! Seeds for Success grant consisted solely of meeting David Vinjamuri – and nothing else – it would already be a rocking program.

My mom is in marketing and writes a marketing column for one of Germanys’ leading business magazines. Vinjamuri is long since a household name – at least in my parents’ household. So I was super-excited when I realized he was the branding expert we would be meeting with as part of the Seeds for Success program.

Vinjamuri is young, casual and totally compelling. Tamar and I walked away from our meeting converted to the Vinjamuri way of approaching a start-up.

Vijamuri’s over-arching message was: “take things slowly.” For his recent book “Accidental Branding,” Vinjamuri followed several entrepreneurs who started small and made it big. He says for most of them: “The first few years were often exceptionally excruciatingly slow.” This was a very comforting notion for Tamar and me. Since we started Dapple, we have always felt outside pressure to rush. Rush to he market before a competitor gets there first. Rush to finish a product before a big expo. Rush to get word out to as many people as possible. Vinjamuri convinced us that it is okay to slow down sometimes. Be deliberate about growing the brand in the first couple of years, establish a core group of devoted fans and take it from there.

Part of that message was Vinjamuri’s advice to pay attention to every last detail. It took us nearly two years to formulate our first two products and we were oftentimes frustrated with how slowly things were going. Today we are grateful that we never compromised on any parts of our formulas - that we kept on testing and refining until we felt that they were perfect. We are now in the process of changing our packaging and designing custom molds for all out bottles. This is not a cheap undertaking but Vinjamuri’s focus on details reinforced our own commitment to design excellence. In a couple of months we hope to be able to put that prefect formula into the perfect bottle.

Another related Vinjamuri message that really resonated with us is “persistence.” Almost every one of the successful entrepreneurs that Vinjamuri followed experienced lulls and slumps in their early stages and some even considered throwing in the towel. While so many exciting things have happened to us in the last couple of months - we are now available in boutiques all over Manhattan and Brooklyn, internet sales are going great, we are being approached almost on a daily basis by retailers who want to carry Dapple and we get amazing feedback from customers across the US - there are certainly also days where nothing goes our way. People don’t return calls, buyers are rude, we get turned down. At the end of such a day we are often overcome by self-doubts and at such times it is really helpful to remember Vinjamuri’s words.

After our meeting, I picked up a copy of Vinjamuri’s book. It’s a fun read and the case studies really solidify his messages to us. But now Vinjamuri is in trouble. On page 16 of “Accidental Branding” he writes “do we really need 24 flavors of toothpaste or 14 kind of dishwasher detergent?”

“Yes Mr. Vinjamuri: the world needs at least one more dishwasher detergent.”

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Posted by drubinstein