A.J. Calvin

The episode

A.J. Calvin joined balaveda about two years after the product existed. In his words, they had a product but not a business — forty or fifty stores and just over a hundred thousand dollars in product sales for the year. It is now in over 400 stores, aiming at two thousand by year end, with a KeHE Golden Ticket and 90 Krogers across Tennessee behind it. He puts this year at five to ten times last year, and says five is the one he is confident about. The number that makes this episode is what it cost to get there: under 2% of the company budget went to marketing. His reasoning is arithmetic rather than ideology. balaveda converts in front of people — at the register, at a sampling table, at a buying show — and does not convert on social. He had 110 TikTok videos made and sold two units. So the money goes where the conversion already is: sampling, two or three buying events a year, and Amazon, which he treats as a retail channel rather than DTC.

What A.J. actually said

1. Before he joined, he audited the entire marketing function — spend, customer acquisition cost, ROAS, every number he could get hold of. His advice: audit the department you are joining, even if you are only being hired into it.
2. Brand essentials came before the website. Brand book, mission and pillars, then channel alignment — does the social look like the packaging, does the packaging look like the site. The website was fixed later.
3. Process from the start: a project management tool, Slack, and a written communication manifesto covering what gets said where and during which hours. His argument for bothering: SOPs are the difference between a business that sells at 3x and one that sells at 6x.
4. The KeHE Golden Ticket came from applying on a partner’s suggestion. Winning opens distribution centres for free and buys access to the KeHE network — which is what actually mattered.
5. He built the trade show booth himself in his garage over about a month, designing it in AI first. It won best booth out of roughly 850 vendors, and they closed about 85 stores in a day and a half. A buying show is where retailers come to buy, not to browse.
6. Both mornings he walked the floor handing shots to the other vendors before the doors opened.
7. That one show in June turned into 90 Krogers across Tennessee within three months.
8. 187 Tennessee gas stations sold out in six days, on brand awareness he describes as small — the product converts at the counter.
9. Marketing ran under 2% of budget. Count the booth as marketing rather than sales and the combined figure is 8–10%.
10. The 80/20 retail-to-DTC split is a decision about effort, not just a description of revenue.
11. Amazon is treated as retail, not DTC. First page for “wellness shots”, ROAS around 2.4, and it now funds its own ad spend out of sales. Reviews come through Vine, traffic through Creator Connections rather than his own social.
12. 110 TikTok videos converted two units. Influencers in the 50k–100k range did not convert for them either, so paid influencer spend stopped — it is product exchange only now.
13. Most of the retail marketing budget goes to sampling. One grocery store demo sold 53 units.
14. He would launch with two or three SKUs rather than seven. Retailers want two or three facings of a line, and fewer SKUs is easier on production, ageing and shrinkage.
15. Buyers need the numbers to work and the relationship to be real; neither alone is enough. His framing: if one side is giving too much and the other is taking too much, that is a toxic relationship, same as any other.
16. Brokers are worth paying. Founders get scared of the commission or the retainer, and the broker network was one of the things that carried them early.

In A.J.’s words