Episode #212
Ep 212: Monica Nassif: The Founder Of Mrs. Meyer's On Bottling Her Mother And Building An Empire
Monica Nassif grew up in a town of 600 people in Iowa, one of nine kids, raised to cook, clean, sew, and garden. She turned every one of those skills into Mrs. Meyer's Clean Day and Caldrea. She started at age 43 out of a spare bedroom with maxed out credit cards, two daughters, and a backup plan to drive a UPS truck. She grew to 20,000 stores and sold both brands to the multi- billion dollar household cleaning empire, SC Johnson. And Mrs. Meyer is real. She's Monica's mom, Thelma, who is 93 and still out in her garden tending to her geraniums. In this episode, Monica takes us inside the messy business of building. The moment in a store in Atlanta that turned into a business plan on the plane home. Why she decided cleaning products should be personal care for the home. The decision to knock off her own successful brand before someone else could. And the investor who told her he hated consumer deals but liked her anyway, and became her greatest champion. She also gets honest about her daughter's cancer diagnosis while she was building, and what her mother said that got her back to work. The two companies out of four that flopped, and what each one taught her. Why she kicked her own brand out of Target before Target could. And what it feels like eighteen years later to have sold her own mother. Monica now sits on the board of Barkeeper's Friend, coaches early stage consumer brand founders, and just published her memoir, “I Bottled My Mother.” Her motto: Bet on Yourself. Connect With Monica LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/monica-nassif-686876335/ Website: monicanassif.com Book, “I Bottled My Mother”: available at Amazon, Walmart, and Target Recommended in this episode: The Experience Economy by Joseph Pine, and his new book, The Transformation Economy
