When Joe Barneto faced difficulty finding simple, timeless, and sustainably made tableware as a gift for his mother, he decided to create Fable as a solution to this problem. In this episode of Shopify Masters, Joe shares his approach to launching in one city at a time and the importance of influencer gifting.
Starting a Business Outside Your Expertise
Felix: Tell us about the journey that led you to start this business. Did you start by looking for the perfect gift?
Joe: This happened in 2018. My mom was renovating her kitchen. She was very excited about it, and I decided that my sister and I would set up the entire kitchen for her. After searching in Vancouver, I was able to find some pots and pans at The Bay store, if you know them. But I was having a hard time finding the tableware and the dining table itself.
After going back and forth from many traditional stores and vendors, I was exhausted and frustrated. I ended up buying some cutlery from The Bay for my mom, which is beautiful, but the biggest challenge I faced was that it was a 12-inch plate. And that diameter is not the standard measurement to fit your cupboard.
The large and expensive set I bought for her, which I was very excited about, she couldn’t use as dinner plates. She had to store them on the top shelf, at a complete tilt. She’s very short, so she couldn’t reach them. I was very upset and frustrated with this experience.
Felix: So you had this frustrating experience. How did this experience lead you to solve the problem yourself by starting your own business?
Joe: That was the first time I encountered that or actually tried to buy home decor anywhere other than IKEA. About a year later, I was trying to upgrade my own home. I was now working at a technology company in Vancouver. I was getting my first place, and I thought to myself: “What if I didn’t go to the bars or do that? I have a lot of friends; we do wine tasting. Why don’t I upgrade my tableware from IKEA to something more special and memorable, something I could be proud of in front of my friends?”
I turned to the same stores because they were the only options available in Vancouver. I went from store to store in all these home decor shops that claimed to have the most beautiful tableware and home accessories. Again, I faced the same challenge of not being able to find cutlery that I really enjoyed.
The biggest problem was cutlery that matched. I’m not an interior designer, and I found it really hard and frustrating to find plates that matched the pots, wine glasses, mugs, and my table overall. It’s a variety of different pieces, and I couldn’t really put together a set that looked great.
Felix: You mentioned that you are not an interior designer. What is your background? Why did you decide to start your own home decor business?
Joe: That’s a great question, and it’s a question I ask myself all the time because that was not at all my background. I was a former accountant. I worked at an accounting firm. I’m from Regina, Saskatchewan, from the plains. It has nothing to do with technology at all. I moved to Vancouver to search for warmer weather. I found this accounting company called Bench Accounting.
I was very lucky to join when they were still a little smaller, and I was one of their early employees. I benefited from the entire tech experience and watched the company grow from 30 employees to 250 by the time I left. At that time, I was amazed, envious, and jealous. I wanted that for myself; I wanted to create a startup. At that time, I was just searching for the right idea, the right problem that I felt passionate about, or that interested me in the right way. And it happened to be those two experiences with tableware.
Are
Do you consider yourself a technology company or a home accessories company?
Felix: Do you consider yourself a technology company or a home accessories company?
Joe: We definitely consider ourselves a technology and innovative company. We have benefited greatly from our experience in the technology field. Both founders behind the company also come from technology backgrounds. The way we operate and the theories we apply to the problems we solve align perfectly with the high growth mindset in the tech sector.
Felix: What have you relied upon from your experience in the tech industry and applied to this field?
Joe: Some of the core concepts we talk about are getting a product to market that you can test and see how people adapt to it. Instead of trying to develop the best product in the whole world. We really see Fable as a journey and something we continuously evolve and build upon.
Another thing we learned at Bench is the idea of getting a product to market and putting it in the hands of users. Seeing what they think. Listening to their feedback, evolving based on that, and making changes quickly. That is the essence of Fable, that’s how we operate and that’s how we have developed the company.
Felix: How does the approach you take in tech startups differ when it comes to physical products, like developing your first product?
Joe: It takes longer to get things done. In tech, my experience has been, “Oh, we have this bug here, we can fix it in minutes.” Our website can do that, but if we create a product that has a flaw or serious issue, that requires a lot of work to go back and replace it. It’s not a quick fix that can be done in a week or two, it’s something that needs to be replaced over the next six months because it needs to be developed and created, then supply chain components.
We need to think longer term given the longer time frames. Perhaps not as quickly and nimbly, because we have to plan for some of these longer time frames for products. “We have to think long term because we have to plan for the longer time frames for products.”
Tell us about the first product you launched as a company
Joe: We talked about launching the company in November 2019. We actually launched a different MVP under a completely different name and learned a lot. We sold about 200 dinner plates, something very small. We were really excited about that, but we started by buying some products from Alibaba. We didn’t design them ourselves.
We were looking for a product that could do mass production for us. We weren’t very hands-on with the design side at that time either. What we found is that we learned very quickly that it’s important to find the right creator who aligns with what you’re looking for. We didn’t have a greater focus on sustainability at that time either. Many of the products we received, and I don’t think many people know this story, but they all came scratched.
We had over 200 dinner plates, all scratched. I remember Max, Tina, and I sitting in our storage space with all the plates on the floor. We were trying to count them all and document all the scratches for compensation, it was a complete disaster. That was the lesson we learned when we said, “We will only work with suppliers who think about the world the same way we do.”
Was this experience valuable as a first step for many people starting a business? Would you have preferred to skip it from the start?
Joe: It was definitely valuable. I wouldn’t underestimate it. I learned a lot during that time. If I had known it was the wrong first step, I would have definitely skipped it from the start. However, I am really proud of our journey and our current position. I wouldn’t change the past, but I wish we didn’t have to go through that. I wouldn’t recommend anyone do that in the future.
Felix:
How did this wrong step impact the search for the second round? What exactly were you looking for, and how did you find it?
Joe: One of the real positive outcomes of that situation was that we had some products, a very small batch, a very low minimum order quantity (MOQ) that allowed us to put the products in the hands of consumers. Once we were able to get them into the hands of those consumers, it became clearer what they were looking for. There were certain aspects of those products that they really enjoyed. Some aspects of those products still exist today. There were things they absolutely did not like. That helped us pinpoint who we wanted to work with and what the system should look like.
When we were sharing the products with people, one of the things they wanted to know was who made them, how they were made, and what types of materials were used. Are they non-toxic? Are they good for the earth? What is our stance on sustainability? Part of that is because we are in Vancouver, which is actually a big part of the mindset in that location. However, when people think about ceramics, they think about the earth, and it reflects onto sustainability. We were able to take a lot of those conversations and customer interviews and learn from them, and then apply that to the next version of Fable.
How did you find the right supplier after knowing this is the list of criteria you were looking for?
Joe: I wish I could say it was a fantastic effort, but it really wasn’t. We identified two places that we thought made a lot of ceramics. We were able to narrow it down to Portugal and China. Those two countries compete in ceramic production. What we found was a government database from Portugal that had a list of all the people who make ceramics. It was a commercial list of hundreds of companies that produce ceramics. Not just tableware, but any kind of ceramics.
I was staying up all night because we were in very different time zones, with an eight-hour difference. I was just calling all these places, as they didn’t have many websites, and asking them: “Hi, do you make tableware? That’s what we’re trying to make,” and sending email after email. We were able to narrow that list down to 10 key creators across different teams here in Portugal.
This led to me quitting my job and traveling to Portugal the next day to meet them all.
What did you see in that opportunity that made you so confident to do all of this?
Joe: A lot of this goes back to our original launch or more of the MVP version of Fable and the feedback we received from customers. We received a lot of validation. The problem we were trying to solve was there. There wasn’t an obvious solution to it at that time. They really wanted us to solve it, and they were very excited about it. It became more and more clear that working full-time in the tech industry wouldn’t allow me to make Fable successful or allow our team to do that. “We received a lot of validation. The problem we were trying to solve was there. There wasn’t an obvious solution to it at that time. They really wanted us to solve it.”
How long did this process take to find the new supplier that was ready to sell?
Joe: It probably took two months. Not long at all. From the moment I found that list on the government website to the moment I met them in Portugal and we placed the first order, it took about two months.
When
I landed in Portugal,
Source: https://shopify.com/blog/fable-influencer-gifting
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