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In This Episode You’ll Hear About:

• How most of his childhood was spent outdoors in his hometown near Seattle
• How even as a kid he had an entrepreneurial spirit by upselling pizza slices to his schoolmates
• How his different jobs of working the door at nightclubs in San Francisco, to working in event planning and working music festivals gave him the experience needed to start Evermill
• How cooking and grocery shopping all the time sparked the idea for Evermill, along with wanting a more environmentally friendly spice system with a modern look
• The process of designing the Evermill jars, getting a patent on the idea of self-aligning jars, and putting the product in motion
• How his dream goal for Evermill was to be featured on Oprah’s Favorite Things list and they achieved it
• His lessons learned bootstrapping and now finishing up fundraising 
• What Evermill has coming next and their plans for the future

To Find Out More:

https://evermill.com/ 

Use the code Stairway30 to get $30 off! 

Want the Inside Scoop?:

• Text Lee at 310-510-6044
  

Quotes:

“People spend a ton of money on their kitchens and they just cannot figure this out because it's like it comes from everywhere, and there’s a lot of waste in it, because they buy it for it to be used, then it sits and then they don't know how to use it, or they buy another one because they need it, they don't know if that's fresh or not. So they throw it out.”

“I was very frustrated by the issue of spices and so I started to kind of try and solve that problem.”

“Buying things once and refilling it with a product and packaging, has to account for a lot of ways.” 

“Evermill blend is what we think of as the most universal blend. It's salty, garlicky, it's got a little bit of heat, a little bit of lemon in it. It’s one of those you can throw it on a chicken, you can put it on some fish, you can put it in a salad dressing, roast vegetables with it. It just has kind of a catch all for everything.”

“Then we came up with the teardrop idea of all the jars  self-aligning because if we were going to charge this much for a spice rack and there's going to be this beautiful thing that was so well thought of, I would hate for it to be ruined by misaligned labels.”

“We started this company 13 months ago in October of last year. And our PR was like ‘who's your number one goal?’ And it was Oprah. Oprah’s everyone's number one goal. And then a couple months ago I heard back, asking for us to send more product and we said of course, then shortly after we found out that we were selected.”

“Our ideal customer was a host and just like constantly having people over for dinner, and being a very nurturing, generous host. And so that's who's kind of embodied in and who we want to create products for.”

“In terms of getting a company off the ground, you just gotta do it.”

“I mean, it’s a 24 hour job, you are constantly working, there's not a lot of breaks, there's not a lot of vacations. You can't really. We're a three person company now. So, you know, if someone goes off, there's not a team to watch what's going on.”

“Right now we've got a great set of 12 and 18, and they're the building blocks of most spice blends. So you can build any blend you want from these. So getting to the point where people can choose what they want is their number one piece of customer feedback.”

“Just do it and start and just keep working at it. Just don't give up. It's going to get there eventually.”

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