- For Starters
- Posts
- 22,000 preorders
For Starters is the essential weekly briefing for the next generation of small business owners. Inspiration and ideas, every Friday – for free. It’s curated by Danny Giacopelli, formerly of Monocle and Courier magazines.
Hey, starter! Read on for…
Inspiration ➠ Airstreams & ice cream
Advice ➠ I built Diaspora Spice Co
Ideas ➠ WTF is a MEHKO?
Resources ➠ Visual rabbit holes
Town Hall ➠ Community shoutouts
👋 For Starters is read by thousands of business-builders, including new subscriber Neil, who’s building the place-based branding studio eNaR. Welcome!
➠ Get inspired
Beit Kotn | Credit
1. A home for creatives. As a business, it’s always cool when you can’t fit neatly into a box. You’re not just this, but you’re also that. Just look at Egyptian clothing brand Kotn. Excellent vibes, high quality products, sustainability at the forefront. And this month they’re swinging open the doors to something non-clothes-related…. Beit Kotn (’House of Kotn’).
It’s a residence and workspace above their Shoreditch (London) shop, that’s 100% free to use for artists, designers and creative/cultural types from the Middle East and North Africa. More:
Essentially, if you’re from the region, working on something in London, you can book access to the space via a portal on Kotn’s website. All you have to do is describe what you’re working on, and they’ll give you access to the space based on availability, through a first-come, first-serve basis.
2. Also, this ice cream shop is for sale. I mean… 👀
3. And what’s in a name? Besides making extremely cool Airstreams from a coastal farm in Oregon, Perpetually Devastated has an absolutely fantastic name, no?
—
➠ Starter wisdom
Real talk: I love companies like Diaspora Spice Co. and starters like Sana Javeri Kadri. Here’s why…
Back in 2016, Sana was living in San Francisco, working in marketing for a grocer, and watching turmeric lattes explode in popularity. But… something was a bit off. The flavors didn’t exactly match the spices she grew up with in India. As she found herself digging into the long, complex history of the spice trade, she realized the system hadn’t evolved much in centuries.
So, instead of shrugging it off and moving on with her life, Sana booked a ticket home to Mumbai for what she describes as “seven months of highly unpaid market research” – 40+ farm visits, endless unanswered phone calls, and a “life-changing” meeting at the Indian Institute of Spices Research.
A year later, at only 23 years old (!), she launched Diaspora Spice Co, which today sells 40+ spices, works directly with 150 farms across India and Sri Lanka, and has helped spark a broader conversation about equity in the global spice trade.
Below, Sana explains…
The big decisions & mistakes that shaped her brand
Dealing with 22,000 preorders as a one-woman biz
How Diaspora navigated a $300,000 tariff hit
Why she’s opening up a brick-and-mortar shop
💬 Hey Sana! What were some early, fork-in-the-road decisions you made that ended up being crucial?
There were two big decisions that really made an impact.
The first happened in April 2020, right at the beginning of Covid, which is when I opened up Diaspora Spice Co for preorders.
At the time, the company was just me and one part-time person in Mumbai who ran ops and export – and that was it.
I basically said to potential customers: “I have no idea when I’ll get you these spices. It might be three months, it might be seven months, it might be nine months. If you're in a hurry, don’t preorder. But I’m working with seven amazing farmers and I’m obsessed with what they're doing. I would love to pay them 100% advances on everything they’re growing this year. Then, when the world opens up, we’ll work to get you what you ordered.”
And guess what happened? From April through to October, we got over 22,000 preorders.
💬 Holy crap. Your Shopify must have been ding, ding, ding, ding...
Yeah, I’d actually just got Shopify two months earlier, so I still had that cash register sound alert. It was literally all day, every day.
💬 22,000 orders is nuts.
It was nuts. I was working with a 3PL that had no idea how to deal with that volume.
From April to October, I wrote to people every month, explaining why I couldn't send them their pre-order yet. In July, I was like, I promise I’m not a scam, here’s actual footage of our farmer literally grinding your turmeric and chilies, and here’s footage of my export coordinator taking his scooter around Mumbai, literally feeding mutton thali to all these people trying to get our shipments cleared.
On October 15th we started shipping. We became a $1.7 million turnover business by the end of 2020 – now with just me and two part-time people. It was bananas!
So, big decision number one was having the audacity to launch the pre-orders, and take people on every step of the journey, with transparency.
💬 People were definitely forgiving during that moment in time, too. Every small business was going through it.
They were, totally. We ended up keeping our preorder model until 2022. That’s when our customers started saying, Nah, I want this right now. And so that’s when we had to fundraise and change our model, because my cash model didn’t work for anything but preorders.
💬 What was big decision number two?
Hiring someone to run ops for me.
Up until August of 2021, I wasn't making a salary. I was taking a stipend that paid my rent, and I was doing photo gigs on the side to pay for things.
But in January of 2021, I hired Wynne McAuley as my operations manager. She’d worked in cocoa and coffee importing and had experience taking a commodity ingredient and making it a premium, transparent, specialty product. She’d only ever worked in sales. She had no ops experience, but she was keen to get into ops.
I offered her a job, and I had no idea how I would pay her salary because, for me back then, it was a boatload of money. But five years later, she’s my COO. Wynne fully runs the company – ops, finance, and half of sales (I oversee the other half). She has a team of seven now, which is pretty awesome.
💬 Investing in good people is so key.
Another reason was: I’m not a spreadsheet person. I’m very much the marketing and sourcing girl, and I can tell a damn good story. But spreadsheets weren’t intuitive. The only people that could understand my spreadsheets were my dad and my brother – to the point where I was using my biannual trips to Mumbai to sit at the dining table with my dad and figure out my cashflow and business model.
But to Wynne’s credit, she taught herself everything. At one point we were really struggling on cashflow and we couldn't hire our fractional CFO anymore. Wynne was just like, I’ll just learn how to do it.
In six weeks, she was running our P&L, working directly with our accounting team. In the last fundraise, she built out all my projections. Like, who does that?
So decision number two was knowing very early on what I would be very bad at doing long-term, and then paying people more than I was paying myself to do it. That was the best thing I ever did.
💬 What’s a big mistake you made? Something you wish you could have done differently?
I had no leadership experience.
A 23-year-old was suddenly in charge of hiring people. People often say a founder should set culture early on, but I had no idea what that meant. And I was a grade-A people pleaser. And so out of inexperience and people-pleasing, I didn’t set clear boundaries or strict HR rules early on. And that hurt the company for several years.
When you’re a young woman hiring other young women, it can feel like a gang of gal pals. But it just started to get too close for comfort. At some point, you realize there actually is a hierarchy here – and by not acknowledging it, I’m doing my employees a disservice.
Since then, Wynne and I as a duo have built a culture that’s transparent and very feminist and caring – yet we also have boundaries and rules and don’t take our work home with us. I love my team. They’re the absolute best. But I don’t socialize with them. I go home to my family after work. I’m pretty strict about that stuff now.
💬 Let’s talk tariffs. In the summer I read an article where you said the Trump administration’s tariffs on Indian products hit you extremely hard. What happened? Is that still ongoing?
It was devastating. Last year was meant to be our super profitable year. We’d put into place everything to take over the world. We were going to make a few crucial hires. We were going to expand. And we had to table everything in order to pay the US government more than $300,000 in tariffs.
It was horrifying and heartbreaking. That’s my profit margin. That was everything I was going to reinvest into growth this year. And the money was so hard-earned. Do you know how many $12 tins of spices we have to sell to earn $300,000? A lot.
As of late last year, we got an exemption for spices thanks to Costco’s lobbying and lawsuit, which basically says, “If you don’t want the cost of food to go up and mass inflation, you need to create exemptions for certain food products that aren’t domestically available.”
They’re currently suing the American government. If Costco wins, we could get a refund.
💬 Whoa.
A lot of my eggs are in the Costco basket right now.
💬 Go Costco.
Yeah, shout out to Costco.
It’s honestly been five really hard years for small businesses. I've been lucky overall and our company has been resilient because we fundraised at the right time. We've been really lean.
💬 How lean?
Our OpEx is about as lean as a company can be. We don’t spend willy-nilly. Our marketing is very scrappy and organic. Our ad budget ranges between 1% to 2% of revenue, which isn’t the norm in DTC at all! We spend only what we have to with profitable CAC. That's it. This is a company built for farmers, so I can't mess around with magic money.
I’m currently fundraising from a small group of angels this year to fund our growth plans. This is probably the year that we’ll return to profitability, which feels really good.
💬 What are some juicy/interesting business opportunities you’ve spotted recently?
In India there’s a brand called Cosmix which sells protein powders specifically marketed to women, and they just sold to Marico, a Nestle-type company in India, at a 10X multiple, only five years in. Right now, if you’re a high-turn CPG product in India, even if you’re sort of ripping off a business that already exists in America, you can get a 10X multiple in under five years pretty easily. I’ve been excited about the Indian business ecosystem for a while. There’s so much potential.
The American grocery sector is so much harder. It’s such an outdated model with so many fees. Unless you have a really fast-moving product with really high velocity, this industry is nuts.
💬 Paint us a picture of the difficulties there…
If you’re a brand trying to sell into the likes of Target, Whole Foods, Kroger, Sprouts, Albertsons, etc. – any of the ‘slightly better for you’ US grocers – then times are tough right now, and really expensive.
You essentially have two routes to succeed:
You either have a really high-turn item that you can scale really fast without raising too much money, or
You have a medium-to-slow-turn product and you raise a shit ton of money to support the expansion of it
And I say this as someone with a slow-turn product who hasn’t raised a ton of money! So, as a result, Diaspora has been looking at unconventional avenues…
Okay, the sneaky thing I’ll tell you is that we’re opening our first brick-and-mortar this year.
💬 Whoa – is this a scoop? Congrats!
I can’t tell you where it’ll be yet, but yeah it’s exciting!
Some of the best spice companies globally have succeeded by having spice shops. People love visiting a spice shop every six months and getting all their spices in one go. There's a discovery and experiential element to that which is really cool.
💬 Fantastic. One more: what are you reading, watching or inspired by these days?
I love Dan Frommer’s newsletter, The New Consumer. He wrote one of the first great big business stories on me. I always learn from him and he does deep-dives on the things I care about.
I’ve also really been enjoying Express Checkout on Instagram, which is fun, and the newsletter Snaxshot, which has a very particular point of view.
Finally, I always rely on my founder friend group chats. I’ve got a tight-knit group of friends like Jing from Fly By Jing and Aishwarya from Brightland. We’ve all gone through a lot of hard things together. Talking about it gets us through the week. ☼
—
➠ Good ideas
Hotel bakeries 🥐 → They’re becoming just as important as the hotel bar.
MEHKOs 🧑🍳 → The catchy name for Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operations: small, legal food businesses run straight out of someone’s home kitchen. Here’s how they work in LA.
Function-washing 🤢 → Brands marketing and upcharging for functional benefits that they're not really delivering.
AI’s impact on small biz 🤖 → A big new study from Gusto says small biz AI adoption leads to higher revenue. (But then again…)
—
➠ Toolbox
🛠️ Resources
Same Energy, a platform for endless visual design rabbit holes…
📚️ Reads
How will the miracle happen today? Kevin Kelly
The World’s Rarest Fragrances Live in a Shopping Plaza in Lake Tahoe. Allure
How London’s oldest establishments stay in business. The Londoner
S.F. offers $50K-$100K to fill empty storefronts in the Excelsior. Mission Local
🧠 Findings
7% → The rise in global toy sales last year, thanks in part to rising spending by so-called “kidults” (i.e. adults, like me, who buy Italian villa and jazz bar Lego sets). Here in the UK, the group is behind £1 in every £3 spent on toys.
🙃 Fun
An incredibly starter-friendly Nintendo Switch game: Tiny Bookshop, “a tribute to daydreams of running away to coastal towns and starting a mini mobile bookshop.”
—
➠ Town Hall
Mega congrats to FS subscriber Alec Ginsberg, owner of America’s oldest apothecary, C.O. Bigelow in New York’s Greenwich Village, which just got named one of the world’s best beauty stores by Conde Nast Traveller! 🎉
Check out my interview with Alec here.
—