A Founder's Diary | 2024 Marlow Wrapped ??

Welcome to A Founder’s Diary! Every night, I grab a cup of peppermint tea, light a candle, and journal about my day. This newsletter is a summary of those thoughts and pages.

My goal is to demystify entrepreneurship by showing the behind the scenes of being a founder along with lessons learned, strategies, health and wellness tips, resources, and much more.

This will be the last Founder's Diary newsletter for 2024 (and it's coming out on a Friday instead of Monday!). It includes my overall reflections for 2024 and what's coming up next for 2025 for Marlow!

2024 Marlow Reflections and Learnings

2024 was an incredible year of growth at Marlow. We grew our revenue by 7X, raised $1.5M bringing our total funding to date to $2.7M, won Forbes 30 under 30, launched on Amazon, and so much more. We're proud of the growth that we achieved but along with that came many learnings including:

1) FOCUS FOCUS FOCUS! This was the biggest lesson we learned in 2024. As an entrepreneur, it's easy to get distracted with the next shiny big thing. When it comes to marketing and distribution, we're always trying to test and learn to see what sticks. However, this year, our investors encouraged us to dial in and focus on what's working well. Because of this, we doubled down on our Amazon channel, putting more resources into this channel and dialed back on Shopify and retail to focus on growing Amazon as much as we can. As a startup with a limited budget and small team, you have to be extremely focused and prioritize your time and resources accordingly.

2) Ride industry tailwinds! In July, a number of news articles came out about a study from UC Berkeley that found toxic metals such as arsenic, lead, and mercury in tampons. The articles created a huge spike in search volume for better for you tampon brands and an overall consumer sentiment shift to look into what they’re putting into their body and to switch their tampon brand. We capitalized on this trend at Marlow by emphasizing the key aspects of our product. Our products are tested against a list of over 1,000 substances including arsenic, lead, and more according to OKEO-TEX Standard 100 to ensure they're safe to use. We quickly adjusted our Amazon listings to emphasize these qualities and capture consumer demand. The result for Marlow was a significant increase in our sales and our product is now ranking #1 for many key search terms in this category such as toxin free tampons, lead free tampons, and more. We even received the Amazon's choice badge!

3) The role of investors and advisors. We could not be more thankful for the incredible investors and advisors we have in our corner. This year we brought on new ones and they have all been incredibly supportive in our growth. We have quarterly advisory board meetings and meet with some of our advisors bi-weekly as well. They keep us accountable to achieving our goals, help trouble shoot roadblocks, open up their networks for us, and more.

4) The importance of inventory management. This year we had significant revenue growth but along with that came challenges with inventory management. This year, we set up an entirely new inventory tracking dashboard so that we can better forecast demand and corresponding inventory levels.

5) Spend time understanding your marketing funnel. This year we spent a lot of time understanding all of the details of our marketing funnel. We wanted to see what were the most effective channels for awareness, consideration, and conversion. This exercise is going to really help us when executing our 2025 strategy.

There are so many other learnings I can share but these are the top few.

2024 Personal Reflections

This year was also incredible for me on the personal front.

1) Engagement: I got engaged to my partner. We trained for two months to summit Mount Kilimanjaro and he proposed to me at the top!

2) Family Trip: After the climb, our families travelled together around East Africa. We also went back to my Dad's hometown to see where he grew up. He hadn't been back since he moved to Canada. It was such a special moment for all of us to spend quality time together and we will never forget this trip.

3) Giving back to Ivey: This year, I took on a new position as the alumni engagement lead for Ivey entrepreneurship. Marlow started through the Ivey entrepreneurship program so it has been so full circle and rewarding to give back to a program that has given so much to me.

4) New friends: This year, I got close to a new group of friends who are all founders or involved in the startup ecosystem. These women inspire me constantly and it's so nice to have people to turn to who understand what you're going through. In the last quarter of the year, one of my best friends and I made a new ritual: Wednesday date night. Despite how busy we were, we always made it a priority to show up to Wednesday date night and to catch-up on each other's lives.

5) Health and Wellness: This year, I realized the importance of health and wellness and sustainable habits more than ever. Entrepreneurship is full of ups and downs and fundraising is extremely hard. These habits were a grounding thing to come back to everyday. I realized the ones that helped me the most were: yoga, walks, strength training, meal prep, journaling, and a good night's sleep. This year definitely wasn't perfect but I know that I want to make these all a continued priority in 2025.

Looking ahead to 2025

I'm excited for the year ahead for Marlow. Some things we're working on include:

1) Continuing to grow our Amazon channel and expose many more people to the Marlow community, brand, and products

2) Scaling the Marlow Collective ambassador program and investing more into our community and content strategy

3) Launching a new product - stay tuned!

4) Growing the team!

Over the break, I'm excited to recharge, spend quality time with family and friends, binge Christmas movies, do yoga, get a massage, and read a TON. How will you be recharging over the break? Reply to this email with your plans!

Thank you for being here and following along on my journey. I am so grateful to each and every one of you and I hope you have an absolutely wonderful holiday season! Catch you in the new year ??

All the best,

Nadia

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