Chara Krangle is the CMO of Oat of the Ordinary.

TAP INTO YOUR CREATIVITY TO STAND OUT

Tap into your creativity to make your brand stand out? Yes.

Publish your creativity without any research or guidelines to stand out? No.

This was a massive lesson for us when launching Oat of the Ordinary. (Yes, we love the name too). When we made the bold decision to create an oatmeal brand that was anything but ‘ordinary’, you better believe it came with its challenges. We wanted to go bold, busy, and BIG with our branding instead of showing a bowl of oats on the packaging, which almost all of our competitors were doing. Turns out, they do it for a reason. Who knew?!

As much as we wanted to lead our way onto our nation’s top retail shelves, there is a rhyme and reason as to why category leaders are all somewhat similar. They know the habits and behaviors of their target market.

As most of us know, a customer will take less than a second (maybe two if you’re lucky) to understand what your product is, if they will pick it up and if they will put it into their cart. Turns out, having a bowl of oats on the packaging to show that the product is, indeed, oatmeal is not such a terrible idea.

After focus groups, collecting feedback, and placing our prototype packaging next to our competitors on the shelves, we felt we had collected the research and guidelines that allowed us to be creative while still setting a clear and impactful first impression.

If you’ve seen our packaging, you’ll notice it’s not like any other oatmeal packaging in the market. It was a massive risk but not an uncalculated one. Now our packaging is one of the most reposted food products in our province and soon-to-be country (wink wink).

GETTING OVER THE FEAR OF REJECTION

Okay, we are fully aware that this is much easier said than done. However, if every time you felt rejected, instead of feeling down and out, take that as a gift from the universe redirecting you. You will cut your moping time in half. We entrepreneurs don’t have time to mope anyways, right?!

There have been many times an influencer, retailer, and distributor have turned us down; instead of allowing the negative, not-good-enough attitude to take over, we say one simple phrase that turns our day around: rejection is redirection.

And you know what? Some way or another, we’ve found out that the opportunity wasn’t for us and something even better would come our way because we stayed positive and chose to look at the bigger picture. It’s a chance we continuously choose to take.

Just this week we were feeling down and out about not having a great sales month. After we caught ourselves amidst a pretty decent-sized pity party, we decided to use that energy to focus and strengthen other areas of the business. The next day, we had a massive celebrity reach out, place an order and offer the potential to work with us.

Yeah, these tools work.

PUT YOURSELF OUT THERE

From day one, we’ve put ourselves out there, sliding into the DM’s of successful founders and people we admire asking if they were willing to share their knowledge. And you know what? We’ve received many more yes’s than we have no’s.

We take a risk at being shot down every day, but for all the incredible conversations we’ve had with some of today’s leading entrepreneurs, we’d do it all again (and still do every day). Doing the above is how we have gained some of our most valuable knowledge and connections. You know what they say, nothing good in life comes easy.

WE COMMEND YOU

Being an entrepreneur means taking many risks every day; to some degree, I think we all knew that deep down when we first started. We take chances, with some of them landing and some not. However, amongst all the failures, we get back up because we love entertaining the challenge that each new day brings within our job. So whether you think you are a risk-taker or not, we’re here to tell you that indeed you are.

Take a bow. Give yourself a high five. And go take another risk, just because you can.

TRY IT NOW!

Discount code for the CPG community:

Code: STARTUPCPG

Link:https://oatoftheordinary.com/discount/STARTUPCPG

Offer: $5 off your first order of $20 or more