Ilay Karateke:
If you don’t have brand, it doesn’t resonate with people, people don’t see it being part of your daily life. So what you end up with is having a customer acquisition cost of hundreds and hundreds of dollars to make sure you occupy the mind space of the consumer with money. What a terrible thing to be in, honestly, if you think about it, because a lot of the fantastic brands that we see growing becoming from the early days and then blowing up and becoming unicorns are a part of your lives.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
This was Ilay Karateke who together with her co-founder, is on a mission to bring labneh to kitchens around the United States, or maybe this more of a sprint than a mission because their brand Bezi is going fast. Product development started in the kitchen a year ago. Today they’re in stores across New York City with e-Commerce starting in December, and I can almost assure national distribution to follow shortly. This is one of the very few super early startup brands and I’m talking as in only weeks on the market that I invited on my show. And very quickly during this episode, you will understand why. We talk about the power of design, of data photography, brand strategy, and social media growth strategies, and so much in between. If you are a founder, a marketer, or someone working with brands, this is an episode not to be missed, a quick but heartfelt. Shout out to the new members of the Hitting the Mark Circle, Dominic Ayuso, and welcoming back Martha Garza. If you want to support the show and keep it ad free, check it out. You might want to join, head on over to hittingthemarketcircle.com to find out more. Now without further ado, over to my inspiring conversation with Ilay. Welcome to the show, Ilay.

Ilay Karateke:
Thank you for having me. This is fantastic.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, this is super cool. So I tend to feature brands that have been around for a bit. Many are still startups, but they are much, much further down the path to brand success than you are though I recall when I had the founder of Liquid Def on the show, I just read about him in a local business journal. They had no press yet, they just launched and obviously it was a tremendous interview and long before they became the number one brand case study everywhere. So I feel similar about Bezi being, I mean you guys are so early stage today. Just to give my audience a little bit of a background today, Bezi has under a thousand Instagram followers and everyone go to the Instagram because it looks like you would have hundreds of thousands. You are only to be found in New York City markets, but a good amount of markets, but only New York City right now. So we catch you really, really early on. As I told you in our little conversation offline prior, my Creative Director, Jessie, she actually caught your packaging design and she was completely obsessed with it. Then I looked at it and I’m like, this is awesome. And then I looked over your socials and I just knew I had to have you on the show. So thank you so much for taking the time.

Ilay Karateke:
Thank you for having us and we are with great company, all the brands of your podcast are fantastic. So we were like, is this real? This turns out it was real. So thank you for having us.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It sure is real right now. Yeah. I want to paint a little bit of the picture and you can course correct me, but you just have the picture, perfect background for going into the business of making selling and marketing labneh. I mean, in the summer of 2019 you were working at a cheese farm in Turkey making cheese from scratch. After that you worked at McKinsey and you received the sponsorship to get your MBA. Then in 2021, which is crazy because it’s 24, I mean, so three years ago you entered into the world of grocery startups with Getir, which then later merged and it’s fresh direct. And to add to all of this, your partner in the venture, Hassan, and I think I’m telling the whole story now, but the partner in the venture, Hassan, he’s a Berkeley trained engineer and he comes from one of Turkey’s largest cheesemaking families with a legacy spending over 60 years.

And it keeps going because what is even crazier, and this will definitely be the longest intro ever on the show, so my apologies, but it’s almost to the day. I think it’s a couple of weeks, a couple of weeks later, but you did some kitchen experiments that became the foundation for Bezi about a year ago and now you launched a brand a couple of weeks ago, so about a year from idea to shelf. That’s remarkable. So I’m going to shut up now. So you tell us a little bit about that journey, take us back to that kitchen and how all of this transpired.

Ilay Karateke:
Absolutely, and that was a wonderful intro there is a bit of a story actually on how we met with Hassan, which is also very serendipitous. So my time at Getir, there was a leadership conference that all of the heads were meeting in Chicago and Hassan was actually an intern working at Getir, putting down the slides and make sure that everyone has their coffee and whatnot. And his surname is actually the name of their brand and I knew of them. So I’m like, oh hi, I love cheese. I tried making cheese. So at that point for my little farm experiment, I never thought I would ever have a cheese company, but I was really passionate about it and I had all these recipes of trying to do a healthy cream cheese myself. So just want to chat with Hassan, honestly on cheese. So I was like, Hey, how are you doing? So him and I became really good friends in that leadership conference and after that I went to Hassan’s boss and I was like, Hey, do you need this guy? This guy is great.

Give it to him. I think I have bigger projects than you do. I need this guy for the summer. So she was like, okay, whatever, take Hassan. So him and I worked together for a year and we actually became great friends it was, I really enjoyed working with him. I really enjoyed chatting about cheese business, everything. And after that one year of working together, he was like, Hey, I want to go back to my family company. It was great working at Getir, but I think I had my time, so I’m like completely makes sense. So he went back to work for the family company. While he was there, they had some idea to do something in the US and at that point, I mean if you look at my background, I’ve worked at a farm, I’ve tried making my own recipe. I am obsessed with cheese and I’m also obsessed with the CPG place in the US in general.

So I was like, Hassan actually have an idea rather than trying to do this ethnic cheese, why don’t we actually bring labneh to the us? These are all the Google trends. It’s actually picking up, when you look into Google Trends, you would see people googling twice more, Labneh from 2022 to 2024. If you go out and have dinners and restaurants, especially in New York City, you would see Labneh coming up in the menus like a, B, CV at the Mark Hotel or the Soho House. So I was like, there is a baseline for this category to pick up and there is nothing equivalent in the grocery store.

And I was like, this is such an opportunity, I think we should do this. And he was like, huh, this is a great idea. So that was back, I would say July of last year and we were like, okay, I guess we’re doing this. So after that idea, we kind of honed down into what kind of Labneh would pick up here first, it just couldn’t be the branding of the family company. And the reason being is that of course it’s a fantastic cheese, it has so much brand equity back in Turkey but doesn’t necessarily resonate with any of the American consumer whatsoever. So we were like, we need to create something from scratch around the same feeling. We’re like, we need to create a completely new company because it has to be something that appraised in its own scrappy way that is very different from the big company that we have back in Turkey.

And we were along with the same lines, we need to create a different recipe that would resonate with the US consumers here because I would say the same for feta. The feta you would have in Turkey and feta you have in the US are actually two different Fetas. You would say that they’re feta, but I think there’s something to be said about making sure that the product does resonate to start with. So we were like, we need it creamier, we need a completely clean label and we need flavors. So I think it was 23rd of September of last year, we were like, let’s try getting these recipes into a Christmas that we want them to have. So probably Hassan, and I have tasted every Labneh that is possible in the US to start with. Plus every dip that is possible, we would buy anything that we see. We were like, oh, this one is new and just buy it in center a factory. So it was a long, I would say couple of months really eating everything that we could find in the restaurant and grocery stores and really crafting something that would hit the taste notes but still have something that is fantastic that no one can replicate. So that process started a year ago.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Amazing, unbelievable. And then you did all of this in your kitchen and did you send back and forth to the factory? When did you move all of that to a factory? How did this work?

Ilay Karateke:
We did and it was like this, I mean it is so funny because a lot of our early buyers actually had some of this process in them, but how we worked was these things would be produced back in Turkey in an industrial way and for me to taste it, Hassan would bring them into his luggage flying from Istanbul to New York. So if any of our buyers are listening to this, I am so sorry, that’s not the process right now, but back when we would get these little factory sample cups, put them into bunch of ice with a cooler bag and kind of low key smuggled them through the border for us

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I think so this is recorded this right

Ilay Karateke:
In my mind, I’ll let you know at the end of the podcast, but that was the process. It was literally the process.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
So cool

Ilay Karateke:
Doing that back and forth. I would literally try something here in our kitchen and I think the biggest nuance to hit a good recipe is the salt and acid kind of balance. So we would really measure how it would look like and then take it back to the factory and they would try something. Then I would fly back the next time I would try it there and they would fly something back. So it was very much of a back and forth and I made my friends taste bunch of suboptimal red pepper, Labneh. I’m like, how’s this one? How’s that one? So that was part of my kitchen part of this Labneh that we kind of smuggled from. I stumble

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And I mean look, if we have a whole coming out session here, my mother has a vineyard in Austria and every time I fly back, which I do at least once a year, sometimes twice, I bring back wine and I literally, I mean I’m talking about 24 bottles or so, literally two cases that are next to my luggage and I just kind of roll through security and customs with 24 bottles of wine once they pulled me over and they’re like, what do you have here? And I’m like, wine. And they’re like, well you got to go over there and do the whole thing. And I’m like, oh, okay. And you’re not going to bIlayeve this. This is hilarious. So I sit in there in the interrogation room and they basically take the alcohol percentage of each bottle and based on the alcohol percentage I have to pay import taxes. So if the wine is like 10%, you pay a buck or two per bottle. So it didn’t even matter. But imagine you’re bringing a 70 or 80 proof bottle of cheap alcohol and you’re paying $200. So it was just hilarious. I’m like, okay, I give you the whatever, $30, thank you very much. But yeah, it’s kind of funny how that works. So now we know it’s a science that went into making Bezi to what it is today, but it was also art. I mentioned how the design of your product, the product packaging was crucially me making this podcast episode a reality, right? Because I saw it and I’m like, this is so different. This is so whimsical, it feels so down to earth and different. How do you see the power of design now that you witnessed it yourself with your own brand? How important is it to the success of your CPG brand? What do you already feel? What do you already sense out there?

Ilay Karateke:
Yeah, and that is I think a fantastic question because everything we did apart from the recipe was really hitting that. So looking at Bezi, and I’ll speak about Bezi, but I think this would be relevant for a lot of the businesses. We are a retail first brand. So meaning that you’re going to discover us in a grocery store, you’re not going to discover us through some paid ad that I’m going to force pay myself through. So it needs to be almost like an organic discovery. And I’m also launching a new category there. Only Labneh that is available here in the US right now are Lebanese ethnic Labnehs. And that necessarily didn’t help the category to flourish at all. Hummus is everywhere, but Hummus is so Americanized that there’s nothing ethnic about it coming from Middle East, I think I can say that easily, but labneh was completely unknown category for everyone.

So design and the power of design was everything I had. As I’m convincing people to buy Bezi, of course taste come later, taste is what’s going to drive frequency, but design is what’s going to convince you at the shelf. So with that, we were obsessed about the shelves and how it looks, especially in natural grocery stores. So we would go to Whole Foods, I would look at the shelf, I think I know every other brand’s packaging so well at this point. And I would take pictures of the shelf and look how all the designs look like. And I think there are two components on how I see the design work for a CPG food product. The first one is, am I actually getting the attention that I will be needing from you? With a beautiful design, you would be like, oh, this is cool, I want that. Oh this is cool. Pausing moment, which was huge in terms of how we built our design. And the second piece was once I got like, oh, this is cool, when you look around the package, would you feel like, oh, this is healthy and this is good for me and I would like to eat it. So speaking about Bezi’s package, and I’ll go into more details about the shape and whatnot later, but you would see that the main almost display area we have is the top of the package, which is also unconventional.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yup

Ilay Karateke:
Don’t necessarily see it. You would see the size and within the top you would see two bubbles that would say all natural and 12 grams of protein per pack. And to even find what we would say there, we did many, many consumer research, sent all these surveys to all the people we didn’t know. People were like, shall we say no artificial flavors there? Shall we say probiotic, whatever there, what would resonate with people with something that we were also very obsessed with?

I think one, if you have a cool design, if you don’t have the other, it is still tough because thinking of myself as a consumer, I love design, but seldom I would buy something frequently just because I love the packaging design, it needs to be good for me and then I would really need to the taste. So hitting those two components for the design was so important for us. And Red Antler was an amazing partner that worked us through because we were like, oh, this looks cool, but we need more artificial flavors on the side right now. So a lot of, I think that process is really balancing both

Fabian Geyrhalter:
For sure. And you already mentioned it, but I love that you took a very different route also with the shape of the packaging. It was away from the typical round container. It’s more into a space that was mainly occupied, I guess by Philadelphia to cream cheese, which to me is double smart because you want to stand out from all the round containers of Hummus, etcetera, and B, you want to come close to cream cheese as something that is more relatable to the US population. Was that part of the strategy of the container or not?

Ilay Karateke:
Yes, absolutely. Actually we also had a bigger consumer research on where we should be on the shelf. So what we’ve asked for about 500 people, friends, friends of friends, random people that happened to get the link somewhere, we were like, what aisle would you be willing to try a different product? How would you use dips and what is your price sensitivity? And when it comes to dips and spreads, people were very much open to trying different products. The price sensitivity there was actually not that strong and people would like to share something which creates this. I think once you want to share something, you also want to feel elevated and cool that you know this. So a lot of, I think the behavior around dips and spreads was very much open to experimentation and to the counterpart. When you look into cream cheese, people were going for either Philadelphia or a private label.

They are not looking to actually change for anything else, and the price there was quite high. So they were actually looking for the cheapest option to do the job. So with that learning at play, and this was very early on, we were like, we need to disrupt and be around where Hummuses are at. And with that, I think the clear disruption is changing the packaging type. So everything in a hummus aisle, especially speaking for the US is beige. It is round, it is shallow. So we are like, okay, let’s change this. We want this to be rectangle to actually create almost cuts through that noise of random beige. We want something to actually have a smaller shelf space than a tub of hummus. So when you look into, which is very important for retailers,

When you look into a tub of eight ounce hummus, it would consume about maybe 25 to 30% more shelf space than Bezi. So we were like, let’s create something that is tinier but also has such a strong design element that’s going to really pop out. So that was why we want it to be and the shape that we want it to be. But when we look into it, of course fab, to your point, I want to be an alternative to cream cheese as I’m getting more and more popular. So when you put be into a dairy aisle, it doesn’t necessarily see this product is out of place. It feels like it’s a dairy product, but when you put in the omic aisle, it creates the value that I will be needing for consumers to give me a try.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Totally makes tons of sense. And I love how the package reads really well on the shelf at an angle where you can actually see the top facing you, which is very unconventional, which is really what you do all the way across. But is that difficult to pull off at retailers for them to actually stack it like that?

Ilay Karateke:
Yes, absolutely. I think having, what is really funny is doing a design, you have all these ideas about your brand, you’re like, oh, it’s going to be put like this, it’s going to look so cute. And then going to grocery stores, there are a couple of folks at the aisles on local grocery stores that would do the shelves. But of course for them to actually go about your brand instructions are quite tough. So oftentimes we would find be next to a cottage cheese, for example, that we would sell much less if you put us next to a hummus or they would not use the top area, they would use sideways, which still would be fine. You would see Bezi. That’s why we did both sides. But you were like, it would’ve been much better if it was facing onwards. It is a learning process. As we become bigger and more known national grocery chains, we’re now experimenting on a springer that is going to make Bezi stand up straight with minimal effort on the grocery store team at the store.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh wow. And that would be a universal springer that you would dIlayver with the product.

Ilay Karateke:
Exactly. That is the vision we have not, of course with this local groceries, I think those are tougher, but for a bigger chain.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah. Yeah, very cool. Very interesting. So the design, you already mentioned it, it was almost unmistakably done by Red Antler, the New York City agency, but yet in my eyes it was so much more whimsical than most of their usual very trendy work coming out of them, which is actually why it spoke to me so much. But how did you all come up with the name, which is another super important part of the whole location we haven’t talked about yet, right? What is this story behind the name? I’m sure there is a story. I mean it’s short, it resonates, it’s easy to remember, but what’s the story?

Ilay Karateke:
Yeah, so first of all, I think Red Antler team has become really good friends. I think there’s a lot of it that they did this as of though it was their company, which I need to do a shout out to Michael Ciancio, Gülru Soylu, that was very much involved with everyone else on the team too. So I think that helped having, they were an agency, but they were Bezi team fully. So how the name came up was actually quite fun because Ru’s friend Jason, which Ru is also a Turkish background, also works at Red Antler, and they were trying to come up with names. What we knew as an instinct is that it needs to be short, it needs to be this similar to how Labneh would look on a plate. It needs to be bolder. So we were obsessed with the letter B, And I know this is so random to say, but when you look into our logo and you would look at the B, you would see this feels like a dollop of Labneh. And we were trying to find names. There were a couple of ones that were like, ah, this is not great. And Jason, which has been around a lot of Turkish friends, came up with the name Bezi. So bez means cloth and how you would strain the cheese would be through a cloth. We are not straining Labneh, we doing in a different way, but bez such a big component of the cheese making culture in Turkey. So Bezi was almost like a made up name out of that which resonated so well. And I remember telling us Bezi first and we’re like, Bezi, what is Bezi? And then now I’m obsessed with Bezi, what a wonderful name it was. But that was a process and having, I’m not sure about Europe, but in US it’s quite tricky because I mean trademarking a name is tricky. There is of course a Bezi Design 3D design company for example, and we have our trademark for food specifically, and of course we’re Bezi labneh, which is very different.

We’re not colliding at all. But it was really tricky to find almost like a white space that would feel like us, but also no one has taken that before, so be Bezi worked quite well.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s how Bezi was born as a name. Yeah, we do a lot of naming here. And so everything you said resonates very deeply with me and I love that there’s this component of that story and yet it checks off all the other marks that it short, easy to pronounce, easy to remember. It has that little bit of that vibe that comes with it. And I love that For you starting with a B or having a B in the name was so important to actually signify the product experience, which I think is really, really deep. And it is great. And I’m still so completely in a that all of this happened concentrated in one year because it must’ve been a very intense relationship with the agency, like you already mentioned because you are also very data focused. I mean, you did a lot of research, focus groups, all of that with naming, I always feel like it’s so dangerous to do focus groups because everyone has an opinion and people don’t like what they’ve never heard. Did you do any of that too? Or was it you saw Bezi and you’re like, that’s it.

Ilay Karateke:
No, we haven’t done that on purpose because it is a terrible feeling for one of your friends to be like, Bezi sounds ridiculous. And then you’re like, I am stuck. So we did not do that.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I’m glad

Ilay Karateke:
You didn’t. Yeah, and Red Antler was actually very smart for telling me not to do that. Don’t do it because I mean, I think Fabian, you kind of understood who I am as a person. I love design, I love data so much. So it is very hard for me to actually let go of the data on some of those instances. I think this is one of them that I really trusted the team and I was like, I am not going to, sorry this thing, but I love data for everything we do. But this was something that was complete gut feeling and I’m glad we did that. I couldn’t be happier. It feels like everything I do is busy right now

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And it’s what I advise all of our clients when it comes to names specifically, even when it comes to logo and design to a certain extent, but with names specifically because it’s just you would never get to an end point, right? So that’s great. So you had agency assistance to get the brand going, but now you are likely left to your own devices. I assume you were given the brand guide, but now are you doing all the photography, the copy, the posts, or do you have a team at this point?

Ilay Karateke:
So for all the assets, I’m doing it. I have Figma, actually before talking to you, I was doing our recipe cards. I think I would consider myself having a really good eye for design and then build some capability to be able to do that. So I am doing everything that you would see on our socials, see on our influencer packaging, all the collateral. It is my design. But when it comes to photography, I actually found Kelsey Cherry, she’s a New York Times photographer based in New York City. She works with a lot of very cool brands in the city taking their photographs. And I actually ran into her work, this was about two months ago. We knew we wanted to have a big lifestyle photo shoot, but doing it in a very unconventional way because how a lot of, I think the CPG food brands would do is, I mean they would have their beautiful packaging, they would have the product on a plate and maybe a little bit like flavor cues.

So if you’re doing Red Pepper, you would have the packaging, the Red Pepper, Labneh on a plate and then you would have a couple of red peppers around it. I just didn’t want to do that. It was a gut feIlayng of that would be so within a predictable, and not that it’s like that, but I don’t think that is a brand. I don’t think that is the design that we built within our brand. So I wanted to create a vibe of wanting to eat slop ne since it is such a unknown product, I felt like I needed to create the universe around it. I still think of it the same way, by the way, I need to create a universe around Labneh so it fits into the context that makes sense. So for that reason, Kelsey was a fantastic fit. I had a big dinner party turn up my apartment with a bunch of be. So it was like we created a couple of recipes with Bezi, my good friend Heath, which she works at Food Network, but she helps us with the recipes. So we put these really cute plates, put a lot of Bezi on the table, and I literally invited my best friends and I’m like, okay guys, this is the photo shoot. And Chelsea took these pictures.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s like a disclaimer outside, you will be on camera if you enter my, exactly,

Ilay Karateke:
Exactly. So I told them, I was like, so try to wear red or pink or blue. It was one of I think the best memories that I will have about Bezi because I am known to throw a lot of dinner parties at my home. It’s called Cafe Ilay. And I would have served labneh without Bezi. Lne was mine. So it was almost like a full circle of capturing that moment with my friends. And Kelsey did such a fantastic job that when you look into our photographs, which we’re now started putting more and more on social, you would see that it captures the essence of Bezi really well. But it was literally a dinner party at my home with my friends and that felt very much like Bezi.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s amazing. I mean so many thoughts about what you just said, but of course you have a New York Times photographer do this because I mean, I look at the channel and I look at 700 something followers or whatever you have right now, and I’m like, that does not make any sense, right? I’m like, this is so cool and this is so exciting. But you can sense that it is special and you can sense that it comes from the heart. And I also think, and this is important to share with fellow entrepreneurs, people listening to my show by now know that I have a startup on the site, a product startup in the vinyl record space. And early on I just asked people that I would never think would ever be interested in helping me to help me. And you have the same boldness where you’re like, Hey, yeah, I know you do New York Times and I know you’re at Antler and I know you, but hey, let’s talk. And so I have the owner of Cambridge Audio on my advisory board. I have the founder of Hydro Flask on my advisory board. I talk to him once a week. But it’s like you just have to ask. And people usually, if you do something exciting, they want to be part of that. And I think that’s really important because who else has a New York Times photographers do the very first photo shoot of your brand? I mean, that’s just remarkable.

Ilay Karateke:
I know, and I think that is a fantastic point. I think within my very early on journey, I’ve realized just putting yourself out there and asking the question is very scary that a lot of people don’t do it for obvious reasons. You would have a rejection and sometimes that feels a little too scary, but when you look into the outcome, having them saying no is the same situation. I don’t have it Now if I ask it and they say no, it is the same situation. There’s nothing,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Same outcome,

Ilay Karateke:
Detrimental, same outcome. So I’ve realized that being able to not be afraid and asking the question, and I think for both Red Ambler’s case and Kelsey Cherry’s case, they were very excited about what we were building. So similar to how you had with your board members, once you have that connection, you would be surprised how people are trying to make it work for you. That was my relationship with Red Antler and that was my relationship with Kelsey. I was absolutely not within their, I don’t know, average budget of doing anything, but they went above and Beziond to be there. Kelsey was at my apartment with bunch of my friends, everyone’s shoes off, she’s taking everything. She was like, eat the Labneh, you do this. It was fantastic. And that just happened because I wasn’t afraid to ask.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And most of the time people are afraid to ask. So you think that everyone gets all these questions all the time, but they don’t. And if they do get a question that’s already so bold that they’re like, this must be special, this must be different. But how, I think for you it’s going to be extremely important and it might already be to work with other brands. Do you already start flirting with brand collaborations? Do you have brand ambassadors already? Are you working with them? And if so, what’s the most fun aspect? And on the flip side, what is the hardest part of all of

Ilay Karateke
That? Yeah, so I would say it’s a loaded

Question. Yeah, it’s a loaded question. And I would say the social, and you mentioned it, right? We have 700 followers. Social is the trickiest piece once you’re a retail brand that is also trying to be out there. Because if you think about it as chicken and egg, I need to be everywhere for people to buy me. But if I am vocal about what I do right now and not be present, I think the attention span is quite low right now. If you don’t get to taste fuzzy, you would think that, oh, this is so cool, but then forget about me in a month. So every day we’re thinking about what is the point that we really start spending money on social and being more present? And how does that couple, with us being everywhere, especially in New York City, that would make sense. So for that reason, we’re now hopefully we’ll have more of a solid distribution. We currently distribute our products ourself being two weeks, but once we, yeah, two weeks, that’s crazy, that’s crazy. That is my other life. But once we have something solid that we can build our business with, we’re going to start doing a lot of the things that you’ve mentioned. So this is what we have in our plan.

First, we want to create almost content with either ambassadors, gifting myself that would resonate with the brand in all of the steps of the funnel. I think the upper funnel is like, I’m going to get to you with the vibes of Labneh lower level, I’m going to get to you a bunch of recipe content and benefits content. Because what we currently, the recipe we have, we have the same protein as Hummus, but we healthy the calories. That is very powerful when you’re thinking of dips and spread space. So how does that message come to life and how does the recipes come to life? And the last one, which is the boring part, but it is very true, is how do you get people to come to the aisle and get your product, which there are a lot of conversion focused products out there that is giving customers coupon that is outside the grocery store. We’re doing a lot of demos right now, so it is a big funnel. So within this big funnel, we’ve started flirting with a lot of the brand partnership that would hit every part of the funnel for the upper funnel. What we have started doing, and we’re going to do more, is do community dinners. So we work with early and supper club here in New York City. They had a whole Bezi Dinner that was appetizer main course and dessert with Bezi.

We have another one coming with Food Baby Brooklyn. Again, these are wonderful, I would say dinner club and influencers that has a very loyal but relatively small following, which I think is the perfect range for us, for the brand to actually pick up and feel authentic. We have a lava hour coming up this Sunday. We want to do the same with restaurants and coffee shops. I am flirting with a couple of places. Of course we’re a baby, nothing landed yet, but we want to do some of the colabs with a couple of pastry shops, a couple of bagel shops that we’re currently heavily flirting. Also the cracker brands, the bagel brands. We have a few ones that we’re actively flirting. So that’s all to actually create a universe around how to eat Labneh. And for the middle ground, we are actually looking for a recipe creator.

We have a recipe section on our website, but we want that to come alive even more with the recipes on our socials to have people imagine how they can eat latte day. Again with the whole promise of, I will get you with the vibe, you’ll be excited about having BEI in your table because it’s going to look really cute. I’m going to get you thinking about how you can use it and how it is good for you. And the final funnel is I’m going to be out there literally in your faces in grocery stores doing demos, shelf talkers, whatever that is to seal the deal when you’re in fairway shopping. So we have started the upper funnel. We’re doing heavily dIlayver funnel conversion. We have some work to do in the middle, which is my goal for the month of October.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
What an amazing playbook you just shared with us. No, I mean you’ve got it all down. I mean, how exciting that will be now you just need the time and the day. But other than that, I mean, it sounds absolutely amazing. And I mean one of the setbacks is that you’re not an e-commerce brand, right? Because that’s when social becomes a little bit harder. But I mean, you’re going to flourish on social with the content that you already have. It is already so balanced and it is already so fresh and you already get so much commenting on it that I think it’s going to be amazing to see Bei in a year from now or the speed you’re going in six weeks from now.

Ilay Karateke:
I hope. So what was really interesting is the fight that you have with the algorithm, which I’m sure you can build a fantastic brand and try to make it come alive. One of the posts that I put in for a camera roll in September I think out about these numbers are ridiculous, and we have so much work to do. It had around thousands views, but a hundred people liked it.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Amazing.

Ilay Karateke:
This is fantastic. Who gets 10% of the views as lakes? So I think once we find our niche, I also bIlayeve that the vibes have so much potential for people to resonate and wanting to do the same at their homes. So that’s what we’re betting on.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
No, it’s fantastic. And especially a lot of the content that you do is very, it’s very quick tongue in cheek natural, organic kind of content versus super overly produced and what you will see, and that’s something that we saw, we sometimes spend thousands of dollars in weeks in creating one amazing video that’s perfectly scripted, and then I just do something really quick with the product. And that video that took me 10 minutes to produce is way, way outperforming, which is so interesting, right? Because it’s really kind of reminds you of keeping it real.

Ilay Karateke:
Absolutely. And I think even for the Bei, and you mentioned the whimsical qualities of it, we don’t want to be put together. I think there are a lot of brands, if we were doing a caviar brand, I think it has a feIlayng of put togetherness within the identity of the product. We would like to be Labneh, if that makes sense. So it is effortlessly chic.

Effortlessly is just like, it looks beautiful and it tastes beautiful. So that is the niche that we’re going to capture in our socials, which is tricky to have a brand come alive, repetitive in every content. But I’m very particular about it. If a content doesn’t feel like Bezi, I don’t want to put it on my socials. But also having, I think there’s a lot of learning that I’m doing as a founder of what is really Bezi. It is an interesting discovery journey, but I think we’re going to learn a lot of things within a few months.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, a hundred percent. And talking about learning as we slowly come to an end of this episode. I mean, you just launched a brand you worked at McKinsey. You must have a lot of thoughts about what really does branding mean to you now, right? Because I mean, it must have meant something six years ago and it must probably must have meant something a year ago. And what does it mean to you today? Because the word branding is so misunderstood. Oh, it’s a logo, it’s a color, but it’s so deep and there’s so much to it. What does it mean to you?

Ilay Karateke:
It’s a great question. So I would just put it in a math format and then maybe elaborate more about it. If you don’t have branding and you just have a service, you just give make dairy or you send groceries or whatever that is. If you don’t have brand, it doesn’t resonate with people. People don’t see it being part of your daily life. So what you end up with is having a customer acquisition cost of hundreds and hundreds of dollars to make sure you occupy the mind space of the consumer with money. What a terrible thing to be in, honestly, if you think about it, because a lot of the fantastic brands that you see growing, becoming from the early days and then blowing up and becoming unicorns are a part of your lives. And that is the power of branding. If you can able to actually give that message and give the feIlayng of how consumers would feel using your product, that customer acquisition cost goes down so little because people naturally pick it up.

People naturally feel amazing and they feel encouraged to share with your friends. I’m sure you would remember when Uber started, Uber didn’t force put it to my face through a Facebook ad. Maybe they did eventually, sure. But once it started, it was such a natural product that we now say, especially here in the us, I’m going to get an Uber even though you’re going to get a lift. But I think that whole feIlayng of effortless consumer adoption for me is branding and it means everything. And I think I’ve been into many use cases of companies that don’t have that and pay so much, so much money just to be relevant and top of mind to the consumer because that fundamental does not exist.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Perfect answer for someone who’s about to own a category, that’s what you need to do, right? That’s like you’re getting a Kleenex, you’re getting an Uber, and you’re getting some busy.

Ilay Karateke:
Yeah, I mean, yeah. So one of my really good friends, she’s great, Victoria, she was like, bring the Bezi. And I’m like, this is great.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And you’re like, that’s it. And that’s exactly it.

Ilay Karateke:
Exactly.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
If you can put your brand through a funnel or a cheesecloth, what is one word that would come out that you feel is the perfect vibe of your brand? What would that one word? I call it brand, DNA, but you can call it whatever you want.

Ilay Karateke:
God. Okay. One word is tricky, but I want to say I think effortless, but in a beautiful way.

I think it takes, I love the idea of lowering the barrier of having something healthy to eat, loving the barrier of having something chic to share with your friends that you would feel elevated. So that feIlayng of just effortlessly being wonderful, elevated, giving happiness is where we want to be. So that’s why I think the tub looks fantastic because you don’t necessarily need to put it on a plate. It would look chic. You open up, you just dip in a cracker or a carrot, it tastes great. You don’t necessarily have to do anything about it. So I think the DNA, I would say if I need to choose one word, I need to go with effortless, but not in a non elevated chic way, if that makes sense.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
But effortless is never effortless is always elevated because if you see something that looks so effortless, a lot of effort went into it in order to get it to that point.

Ilay Karateke:
Exactly. It’s like the French style. You think French looks so effortless, but I’m sure there’s a lot of style knowledge

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And thinking. Oh, exactly. You go through 30 pages of advertising in the New York Times, times Magazine, and all of those shots look so effortless and exactly was a three day production. I love that word. And it’s interesting because a word like effortless would usually come to mind with a service company, but in a way it is a service that you give people that they’re able to do something in this way. I really, really like this to close it off, any brand advice that you have for founders, maybe first time founders, bootstrap founders? I mean, I know there’s a lot, I’m sure you can write a book by now, but anything that comes to

Ilay Karateke:
Mind? Well, very early on in the journey, but I would say two things. First, really thinking about what kind of product you want to create and how does that translate to your packaging and branding I think is a good exercise when you have time. It would be really difficult for me to think about it while I’m on the market trying to get the customers to buy more and more bei. That would be a very tough conversation to have. So I would suggest really investing in thinking about who the brand is, what the product is, what does it mean for people in a more deeper way. I have don’t know a celebrity equivalent of Bezi. That’s literally how deep thinking that I did prior, which I think is helping me right now because I don’t think about it at all. I think this fact that this podcast is happening, and a lot of, I think news publications and magazines are picking us up is because of a lot of the deep thinking that we did previously. Not anything that I’m currently doing right now. I’m not even actively doing PR pitching. So I think that’s number one thing and number two thing, which I’m learning this more, is making sure that whatever you created for your brand is replicable in your own bootstrap way. Because it would be really tough. Let’s say I’ve created a 3D design kind of thing within my own branding, let’s say I’m that type of edgy brand

Who would not produce that, and that would’ve actually taken a lot of time and resources and money to be able to keep up with the branding that you have. So one of the biggest things that we were speaking with our team at Red Antler an was like, I need to be able to replicate this for this brand to live because my branding is not my brand book. No one sees that. You see my social, my website, all of those things, which having, I built it, I built my website. So that needs to be that easy replicable, I think for it to make sense as an early brand so you can keep the brand alive with minimal funding afterwards, if that makes sense.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I so agree. And it is so important that that is, and that shouldn’t even be a directive that comes from you, that comes from your branding partner who sets you up for success like that, that you can actually take it and go with it. And every brand will expand organically, right? You will be a different brand in six months than you are today, but it’s still has the same DNA, it still has the same vibe, but it pivots around and you need to be able to do that. I think it’s great advice. What’s next for the Bezi brand? Everything, I guess. But what are you, I mean, you must be excited about everything right now, but what’s the next big milestone? Or in other words, when can we actually purchase Bezi more nationally? What’s the scoop?

Ilay Karateke:
I dunno if having that. That is a tough question. I feel like I need to send you some now.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah, you definitely do. We all heard it.

Ilay Karateke:
Yeah, I think our biggest, so we have two steps into different areas. I’ve mentioned it’s chicken and egg. I need to be everywhere so I can start talking about it in a more loud way or else I get the attention and people forget about it. So I think our biggest step is to land a solid distribution. It is so important for A CPG like our stage because I hand delivered my goods to faraway yesterday before our demo. And if you think about it, that is not a sustainable way. So that’s our big, big, big milestone that we’re hoping to hit in a few weeks. And our second big milestone is on the social side, is really becoming more and more vocal with having our brand partnerships started realizing more recipe content. I would want the brand to be out there everywhere in a more self-sufficient way. So as I mentioned the funnel, we’re now trying to get the components of it. So those two big things are what is ahead of us for the month of October. But I think our biggest thing there is an Expo West show in LA.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s down the street for me actually.

Ilay Karateke:
Yeah, Bezi is going to be there and that is going to be your big step, almost like moving from a baby to I would say a more like a toddler stage. That is what we’re anchoring on. And for that we have a new flavor coming up that we’re experimenting and that’s when hopefully we’ll have great data of velocities that we did in New York and ready to become a bigger brand for the US and that is our bigger milestone, and that is March of next year.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I had so many brands that are CPG brands where that Expo West was their make or break moment, right? That’s usually such a huge part of their trajectory. So I’m so thrilled that you’re going to be there. I’m super excited for people to start seeing you everywhere very soon. I’m sure you get distribution until then. What would you like people to do to get in touch or to follow you personally or to start becoming part of the Bezi universe?

Ilay Karateke:
Oh, that’s very sweet. I think follow us on EatBezi, on Instagram and TikTok, we will actually launch a D2C, a baby one, for holidays coming up. So we’re going to have a labneh tasting package, which will have three or four flavors. So if you are in the US and want to gift that, try that. That’s going to come across in November.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, how perfect of timing. I mean, who needs a good spread for Thanksgiving or the holidays? I mean, I just don’t know. Who would that be? How perfect. This is exciting. Well, listen, this was so nice. It was such a great episode. I so appreciate you taking the time because looking at your schedule and what’s about to happen, and we are already in October right now when we record this. So it’s a big month ahead of you. We wish you all the best, all the luck, and we are going to root for you from the sidelines.

Ilay Karateke:
Thank you.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I’m still amazed by the speed at which Ilay is moving and more importantly, speed that does not sacrifice quality and strategy. I cannot wait to see what is in store for Bezi or which stores Bezi will be in. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I have this conversation. If so, please, I know I always say it, but do subscribe, rate the show, share the show with others Hitting the Mark is produced by my consultancy FINIEN, where we create clarity for brand transformations. This episode was edited by the wonderful Everett Barton and the Hitting The Mark theme music was written and produced by the equally awesome Happiness One. I’ll see you next time, when we once again will be Hitting the Mark.