How Maxwell Cohen Created A Brand Architecture That Goes Against The Grain And Sets His Products Apart

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Maxwell created his company as a requirement from his parents while in college. Fast forward and he appeared on Shark Tank where he flopped. Now he is successfully running an array of disposable bed sheet brands that are available internationally.

You created the company as a requirement from your parents first, and second, you flopped on Shark Tank, and you actually highlight both in your bio. I’m impressed by that. Tell us about the parental requirement to start a company.

M Cohen: I come from a family of serious entrepreneurs where we were pushed to start businesses before we turn 27, and that was based on the experience, and knowledge, and wisdom that you get building something from the ground up. Something from the idea stage to the actual product stage, and then having customers and selling. So, all the experience you learn whether you fail or not starting a business is fantastic for any future growth, and for any future employers of course. And if you didn’t fail, you’re onto something at a young age, and when you’re this young you really don’t have much to lose. I don’t have a wife, kids, a mortgage, and so it’s a perfect time to try, and start, and execute on a dream of starting a business that could potentially make people’s lives better.

Usually, it’s the lemonade stand when you’re five years old, but I love the idea that this happens while you’re in college. That’s the requirement that during college you don’t just slack off, but you actually do something and try to create an actual product or service?

M Cohen: Yeah. I mean when I was in college I noticed my friends never wash their sheets when I came home. I noticed that my elderly grandmother had trouble washing her sheets on more than a daily basis. So, that was an impetus on starting a business. I’m an environmental water resource economics major, so water is a big concern to me. So, a product like this helps many countries around the world that suffer from drought and water shortages will always have clean, sanitary sheets.

This is fascinating to me because your brand narrative, as we call it in the industry, seemed to have changed over the years. In the beginning, it was more of the benefit of convenience, which was based on college students slacking off, and them being lazy, and then today it goes much, much deeper into that environmental angle, which is usually surprising to anyone that hears about a product that’s disposable. But you actually have really great claims behind it, and it sounds like it was always intrinsically part of your brand thinking that you can actually save water by doing that. Explain how the sheets work, and how that narrative changed over the years.

M Cohen: I just want to make it clear on how simple this product is: It’s the fitted bed sheet that we’re all familiar with, with the elastic at the bottom. We use 100% latex-free elastics since we sell to healthcare, and then it has five layers on top. Each layer could be slept on for seven to 10 days, and then you simply peel that layer off to instantly reveal a brand new layer beneath. Each layer is incredibly soft, and each layer is 100% waterproof. The impetus behind the product was to go around the laundering process, which uses up to 50 gallons of precious water, bleach detergents, which is a chemical pollutant, time, electricity, and money. So, that was the original plan of a product like this, and then once you start using it and learning who your customers are, it actually is the other way around where it started off as saving water, and then it actually turned out to be the ultimate convenience for people that need a product like ours. When you’re starting a business, you want to define who your customer is. This is a bedsheet. This is a product that everyone you’ve ever met could use. There are people that you believe should use it. When you’re starting a business you go for the people who you believe need a product yours. So, our product in my eyes is the ultimate convenience when it comes to the bedding industry, and having to change your sheets. The traditional way is a hassle. It could take up to 15 minutes of changing sheets. With ours, you instantly have a brand new sheet no matter what happens.

It’s a convenience with an added benefit of actually doing better for the environment. So as you got to know your target audience, and as you started to segment them based on your learnings, you actually created several brands: There are Peelaways, then there’s Peelaways Health, but you also have Crib-A-Peel, Camp-A-Peel, and Dorm-A-Peel. What was the appeal, excuse the pun, to create this brand architecture, and was separating the brands out like that by audience effective?

M Cohen: We’ve created brands specific to our end customer that allows them to understand our product sooner rather than later. If it’s on a retail shelf, you have six seconds to get the message across. The main product we sell is called Peelaways. Peelaways come in all sizes from twin up to king. It’s very obvious what the product is once you look at it after 60 seconds because the name is very simple. And then we broke out into the clever branding with the 'A-Peel.' We have three brands that utilize the A-Peel, which is Crib-A-Peel, Dorm-A-Peel, and Camp-A-Peel.

When you’re selling to customers you have to know who your audience is. You have to know the right lingo, you have to know the right verbiage. So, a brand like ours has many different brands because we have to cater the message to the specific industry we’re going after. We’re lucky enough to have many industries that really enjoy the benefits of our products, but it also creates a little bit of a challenge because you have to brand everything separately, and branding is incredibly important because it has to get your end customer to believe what I believe as the CEO of the company. The reason I created this product, I had to get you to portray that this is something that you need, and getting the branding right off the bat is an incredibly smart, fast way of getting people to believe what you believe.

Looking back, what was the one big breakthrough moment that propelled your idea into a real brand? Was it Shark Tank despite it not going quite as wished?

M Cohen: I mean when you’re starting a business, you want more than one big moment, and to me changing the name of the company was incredibly crucial. Telling somebody, “I’m the CEO of AfreShseet.” They go, “A what?” And it gets very frustrating. So, when you could translate what you could do more smoothly, “I’m the CEO and Founder of Peel Away Labs.” And so you get more of an understanding of what I’m doing immediately just by the name of my business. And a big crucial part is changing the name of the business as well from AfreShseet to Peel Away Labs, and AfreSheet seemed to only limit us to bedding when really my paddings encompassed all things that could be potentially multilayered in Peel Away. So, it doesn’t just limit us to sheets.

But to your question about Shark Tank: When I went on Shark Tank, I was young and the company was even younger. We only had a few beta products, and we had just the test market for summer camps and college students. So, looking back of course as you can imagine when somebody looks at you and says, “Your product is a dog of a product. Shoot it, get rid of it, and do something else with your time.” I take that as, “I need to be here and prove you wrong. I know the product has validation, I know there’s a market for it. But I’m young, the company is even younger.” So, there are no real hurt feelings as you can imagine. Of course, just natural frustration, which is inevitable, but to me, I took it as motivation. I got the product into Walmart without the help of the Sharks. We’re vendors with Buy Buy Baby as well as Bed, Bath and Beyond without the Sharks. And actually we see the largest purchase order QBC has ever given for a new product in February.*

And now that you look back, I didn’t really have a business. There was nothing really to invest in anyway. So, you recognize that Shark Tank is not for pre-revenue businesses, it’s for revenue-generating businesses. It’s really growth capital. The experience itself was fantastic. It made me smarter, faster, wiser.

To catch my full interview with Maxwell, stream this episode of Hitting The Mark – Conversations with founders and investors about the intersection of brand clarity and startup success with your host, brand strategist, and author Fabian Geyrhalter.

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*Condensed and edited. The original interview was conducted in January 2019.