Tag Archives: CustomMade

Grunge watercolour painting of cows grazing in a field with rura

The stories we tell: Foundational motivations can evolve with a company

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A little more than two years ago, we started ButcherBox in the offices of a friend’s Cambridge creative agency. We have grown exponentially since then — we now have more than 25 employees in Harvard Square and elsewhere across the country. Proudly, we still haven’t had to take any money from venture capitalists or other institutional investors.

From the beginning, ButcherBox has been a project of passion. I will get into that more a bit below, but basically, two forces — family and health — led the groundwork for what has become the company that our amazingly loyal customers have grown to know and love.

Initially, it was a health problem my wife developed that drove me to learn more about the potential benefits of more humanely-raised meats — grass-fed beef, heritage-breed pork, free-range chicken. A few years back, she developed a thyroid issue. One of the suggestions to improve her health was to look into adding cleaner foods to our diets. Over and over again, we kept discovering grass-fed beef popping up on lists of foods it was suggested we add to our diets. We did more research on the topic and soon started eating grass-fed beef.

The other major influence that led to ButcherBox’s founding was the birth of my children. Knowing we wanted them to eat healthier from the start, I set out to find ways get quality, humanely-raised meat in a way that was affordable for a family. This led to my first involvement in a cow share and eventually to the realization that a lot of people wanted grass-fed beef and similar meats but didn’t have access to them.

These experiences are why ButcherBox exists today.

To be clear, the reasons my co-founder, Mike Filbey, and I founded ButcherBox haven’t changed. This fundamental part of our story remains solid. It is, after all, our foundation.

However, as we have grown, I have been thinking more deeply about the story that is ButcherBox, and, strangely, I have discovered that it was quite inevitable — more than I had realized — that I’d spearhead an endeavor promoting healthy, humanely-raised meat.

First, and I don’t know how better to explain this, but I have been surrounded by cattle — smiling, grazing in fields, peaceful — my entire life.

On a recent visit to my mother’s house, something struck me that I had never thought about before. You see, my mother’s home is — and has been for as far back as I can remember — decorated, floor to ceiling, with cows. There are cows on kitchen decorations, pictures of cows, and more.

I believe our home has been this way since my mother immigrated —  with my three siblings and me — from Uraguay to the United States when I was a mere six-months-old. Uruguay is one of the grass-fed beef capitals of the world, and, quite possibly, this is the inspiration for my mother’s decorative leanings. My father still lives in Uruguay, and that country has always called to me.

In some way, this has subconsciously impacted a lot of my choices. Believe it or not, I have a large painting of a cow displayed in my bedroom. It has been there since well before ButcherBox was a thing.

While the overall influence of cow-laden aesthetical decisions of my family may not be as personal as the two reasons mentioned above, I can’t deny that being surrounded by calming cattle art didn’t somehow serve as a bias towards being an advocate for more humane cattle industry practices.

This idea that there is a better way, for consumers and cattle, is also something that I have been thinking about for a lot longer than I realized.

Trying to find healthier meats for my wife and children was, without a doubt, the main catalyst for the birth of ButcherBox. But it has also been part of my business ethos, whether I realized it or not, that there is something fundamentally incorrect with how specific industries treat their products, and then how this impacts consumers relationship with those products and industries. This too is part of the founding story of ButcherBox.

Recently, I was looking over a slide deck from when I pitched my former company, CustomMade, to investors. One of the slides quickly caught my eye. I had completely forgotten about the slide, but it featured two cows. One was a cow on a feedlot; the other was a cow grazing in an open field.

We had used this slide as a way to explain what we thought about the marketplace for creatives and craftspeople. For CustomMade, we wanted to highlight how consumers in the digital age wanted to know the story behind what they were purchasing. This shift was occurring in the food industry well before ButcherBox’s founding, and we highlighted the parallels to the craft industry for CustomMade.

As we saw it, more consumers better understood that the state of feedlots was a miserable existence for the products they were purchasing, when it comes down to it, for the pleasurable experience of eating a steak. The happier cattle on the range was more in line with the overall story that makes consumers feel better about the meat they are buying.

Rediscovering the slide again made me realize how the concept product storytelling — specifically, giving customers the products that align with their beliefs — has been a priority in my business life for a long time. It took the old pitch deck to help me make the connection.

Why do I tell these stories?

Businesses — the ones that people can get passionate about — aren’t borne out of thin air. The stories of how they came into existence tell a lot about the people that built them and where they are going.

For ButcherBox, the cornerstones of our mission are health and family. This permeates all we do, from how we hire to how we treat our customers. But there are other key values built into the foundation of the company. One is making others happy, bringing joy in some way. I was reminded of this by returning to my mother’s cow-filled home. The other is that we are on a mission to improve the world. The slide deck from CustomMade brought home this part of our story.

As we grow,  more and more people will contribute to the company and they too will add their own positive influences to the ButcherBox story. That’s the only way to build something that can truly resonate.

MikeFarm

The difference having a product makes: What has surprised me most about building ButcherBox

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Although this is my second time leading an early stage venture — the first go-around being at CustomMade — I’ve been surprised by some of the differences building and growing ButcherBox.

What has been most exciting is the realization that I really, really love selling a product.

CustomMade was, from when we started the company, a marketplace that allowed talented makers, tradespeople, and creatives to connect with customers in search of unique products. While various items were sold through the site, we were only an intermediary. (That has since changed, as the current iteration of CustomMade, still run by my co-founder Seth, is now focused solely on jewelry.)

The experience of selling an actual product with ButcherBox, being able to deliver high-quality meat directly to our customers’ doors, is so different. You just have so much control over what your customers receive — in both price and quality. More than that, it has been astounding to see the impact that a great team can have on a business when working with a product.

And that’s really awesome.

For example, it is empowering to have the ability to tweak how much chicken we send out in one month or to cut the beef in different ways. Having this type of control is so much better than relying on others to delight and meet the needs of customers.

Also, when you get up to a certain volume of sales, what is fun is figuring out how process improvements can impact the bottom line. There are tremendous savings that can be made just by looking at places where the customer gets no value, but where you are paying a lot. With a product, you can target those areas and try to figure out how to improve them.

Take, for example, a way we improved a process that we initially thought was the only way we could procure meat.

Before Michael Billings, our amazing meat expert, arrived at ButcherBox, we would buy meat from one part of the country and ship to another to get cut — at a cost of 57 cents — and then we would ship it somewhere else after that — which cost us 35 cents more. So that process would make each piece of meat have an additional 92 cents per pound cost attached to it.

So we found ways to improve this system, shifted how we buy our meat, and now we buy right in the same city that we have it cut. Now, a process that once cost close to a dollar costs us only 6 cents in shipping.

The customer received no benefit from the way we were operating before. It is just waste. No one was getting any benefit other than the companies getting paid to move the meat from one end of the country to the other. We have decided to focus on these areas where customers get no value, but we are paying a lot and to change them one by one. In the process, we are building a much better customer experience while focusing on driving the most value possible for our customers.

Now we are able to take that money saved and put it back into the Box; we can give customers better value, give them more product. We can do this by being more efficient with operations related to the product.

And, whats more, having a product to work with has allowed for our teams’ creativity and operational excellence to flourish.

Whats cool about this company is that we have two types of people here. Our marketing team is like this really “blue sky” crew. For instance, one day recently, someone just chimed in during a meeting and said, “Let’s do a ‘Bacon Day.'” And everyone was immediately like, “Yeah, let’s do ‘Bacon Day.’”

And then we have this crew on the operations side that gets really fired up if they save a penny on the product. A penny!

But in reality, that makes an enormous difference. Saving penny per product on a trailer-load of our meat ends up resulting in $400 we don’t have to spend. So let’s say we do two trailers each week, saving that penny ends up as $800 a week, or about $40,000 we save per year; and that is a salary to add someone else excellent to the team right there.

I love that working with a specific product lets us get to be “blue sky” about some things, where the team has the mindset of “Let’s do this, this will be fun.” But I also love the operations side, who get thrilled figuring out how we can save 15 cents per pound. It is amazing.

What I’ve discovered with ButcherBox is that when you are in a product business, when you sell an actual product, and the volume of that increases, you can do things that just aren’t possible when working on a marketplace or app.

What’s most exciting is that in the end, through these processes, we are able to delight our customers more.