Fabian Geyrhalter:
Welcome to the show, Margaret and Ian.

Ian Wishingrad:
Hi, how you’re doing?

Margaret Wishingrad:
Thanks for having us.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s so good to have both of you on. Ian, I know you come from advertising and you hosted a podcast for Ed Week. That sounds like it is not too different from this one as far as talking to founders about their brands. But do you both come from the creative fields and how did you end up running the healthier for you cereal brand Three Wishes?

Ian Wishingrad:
Sure. Yeah, so Margaret and I have been working together pretty much since we started dating or soon thereafter. And yeah, I’ve been doing marketing and advertising since I was a teenager. I enjoy it. It’s filmmaking for people with Attention Deficit Disorder and Margaret’s been at work working since she’s been 13 years old. And so we just enjoy doing things together and bring different sets of skills to the table. Margaret has a really good design aesthetic and really if you think about advertising as three parts strategy; copy, and ideas, and then design. Margaret plays more the art director designer role aesthetics, and I’m a little bit more idea and copy-driven.

Margaret Wishingrad:
And I think that makes us work as a couple as well. We have very complimentary skill sets, so where Ian thinks copy, I’m his art director, other half.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That sounds like it makes a lot of sense. Now how does cereal come into the play?

Margaret Wishingrad:
So we love to eat, so that usually helps. But it really started from our now five and a half year old, but when he was six months old and started to eat little finger foods, one of those recommendations was cereal. And I think naturally as we’ve built brands for other people and we’ve been working in the brand space for so long, we always had a little bit of a desire to have our own brand. But it wasn’t until we had the idea that really started this whole world of wishes. And once Ellis started to eat cereal and I realized there wasn’t anything out there, that’s the moment when I turned to Ian, that was my aha light bulb was holy cow, this entire category is really just sugar and grains and there’s nothing for myself to consume as a healthy adult and there wasn’t anything to feed my kiddo. And that was the very beginning.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And what a fun category to “disrupt” because it seems like it’s been owned by the same three, four conglomerates and they’ve all been doing the exact same product with the exact same marketing for a long time.

Ian Wishingrad:
Yeah, I totally agree. When she said it, that’s what lit up. I have a weird brain where I’m not really the guy that thinks about, oh, let’s do a cereal or whatnot. When we were conceiving this, this was a few years after all these categories that I never thought would be disrupted were disrupted. Casper comes out and does a better mattress and Warby does a better glasses and Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s is a better razor and you just keep going, wow. But I don’t think like that. So when she said cereal, I’m like, oh, that’s a big one. You knew it fit the same formula as all these other categories, where it’s old incumbents that have maybe gotten a little lazy and there’s room to disrupt. So it was very exciting.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, and it’s interesting because a lot of these brands that you mentioned, the question is, too, are they better or are they just different and better at branding and marketing, right? Then it’s like-

Ian Wishingrad:
Well, I think that’s a case by case. I think you can’t cast a broad net here. For us, we definitely are incredibly different. I mean, we’re technically not even a cereal. If you look up the definition of a cereal, it’s a grain and we are grain free. So we have totally changed the game in that respect and also knew that ultimately if you’re going to win in this category, your packaging can be cute, your growth strategy could be great, you could try to find an arbitrage online. None of these things we did, by the way. But my point was ultimately, when you eat a food, it has to be incredible. And so we really made sure that our food is incredible more than anything else.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And I can’t wait to taste it, and I will. I wanted to do it before the show, but then life came in a way, but I will because I’m actually looking for something like that. But you camouflaged it as a cereal, which, like you said, it technically isn’t, but it seemed to be perfectly fitting into that category. How much of that was a strategy of let’s call ourselves a cereal, let’s play in cereal even though we’re technically not.

Margaret Wishingrad:
Yeah. So I mean, it quacks like a duck and it looks like a duck. So for us it was a duck, but-

Ian Wishingrad:
It is cereal.

Margaret Wishingrad:
It is cereal, right? So the biggest thing for us was we wanted to change the makeup of what the actual product was made. So we removed the grains and we brought in these plant-based proteins. So you actually had some nutrition in your morning, which is probably something someone should do. But for us, it was, let’s recreate all of the things that were super familiar but change the core. So packaging, it was in a box the same way you knew that cereal comes in a box. The shape is an O, just like all the other O cereals that you’re super familiar with. And especially when you’re looking at the demographic that we went out to get this product to talk to was, how do we get kids, families, adults?
So it had to feel really familiar from what it looked like visually. And then on the taste side, we really worked hard on making sure it tasted like the cereals, you know and love. So we have a cinnamon that tastes like your cinnamon toast crunch, for example, or a honey to give you that honey nut Cheerio-type flavor. So we wanted to play on all of the classics and change that one really important thing, which was nutrition and macros. But everything else, we wanted to feel super familiar because I think cereal’s one of those very nostalgic, warm, enjoyable types of foods.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I love that. And I would’ve asked you that next because the cereal container designs and the marketing is also happy and colorful like all the other cereal brands, and that you did very, very purposefully. That is part of the strategy. And obviously, playing the health card in the space could have backfired and this, it still feels like this is a warm brand, that’s a brand that’s fun. It’s something that you want to have in the morning and it’s not like, hey, we’re going to get you on the health trip. It doesn’t have that vibe at all, your brand. Even though it is much better for you and completely different as far as anything else in the cereal world is.

Ian Wishingrad:
Yes. And since this is a branding show, I’ll get into some of the real nitty gritty of the strategy.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Thank you.

Ian Wishingrad:
We never wanted to nor thought it was a smart move to try to take on the legacy dessert cereals that are just basically sugar and corn, or sugar and rice, or sugar and oat. We would never be able to compete with them on straight taste, because you just can’t, and the nutrition and the price. But we did do though, is there’s always a section of the store that’s the healthier cereals or what people believe to be the healthier cereals, and they look more natural and they have that cardboard color. There’s something farms and something this and something mills.
And so what we wanted to do there was walk a very fine line which reflected in our color palette, which reflected in a lot of things was we wanted to look like the fun, tasty, healthy cereal in that category. But we didn’t want to go too extreme where we looked junky because when you do walk the aisles and you haven’t heard of a brand before, moms in general, I’ll call it mom, but it’s anyone who shops that aisle, you make a lot of judgment just based on what your eye tells you. And so it was a very tough balance to look fun, different, and healthy. It was very important to look healthy, but we didn’t want to look like all the other cereals. So it was a very nuanced exercise to get to where we are with the packaging.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And I think that’s fascinating, and how much can you actually tell is store or a chain to carry your product in a certain aisle at a certain placement because for you strategically that’s where you want to be.

Margaret Wishingrad:
So we really, and this I guess goes to launch strategy and how we wanted to create that consumer path to purchase in store. It was definitely let’s launch and build a brand where we know it’s set up for some real success and where we know the consumer’s looking for a product just like this. So we initially launched in more of the natural stores, so the Whole Foods, the Sprouts of the world, to make sure. And so that’s the only aisle, right? It’s a healthy store. So your cereal aisle is your entire aisle. And then as you look into some of the more conventional sets, we know that we would fall by just what the macros and ingredients are. We would fall into that slightly more healthy set.
So we knew that that’s where we would play to begin with. But just, the one thing that, to go back on Ian’s piece of when we carefully crafted it, we wanted to make sure we didn’t create a character. We wanted to make sure we didn’t tell you how to consume it. So we didn’t do milk or we didn’t do a bowl or a spoon. So there was a lot of little intentional details in how we wanted the customer to perceive the product and how we wanted them to discover the product as well.

Ian Wishingrad:
There’s a really important trick is that you want to look novel yet familiar, and that is a very tough line to tow. But if you look at the successful brands, at least in our industry, liquor, other categories, you’re willing to try crazy things for a night, but we want to be something that people consume on a daily basis. So you can’t be that radical, and none of these are firm rules. I’m sure there are people that will be very radical, but what we find is people like, okay, it’s a box of cereal, it’s Os. Everything about it is familiar. But I could also distinctly see something that’s different, that feels to be a very winning formula, at least in the path that we’ve chosen to grow and build the brand.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s super smart. Yeah, it’s like fitting in yet standing out and it’s such a fine line that you’re riding really, really well. Yeah, it’s fascinating how that was crafted. And the two of you, plus your son, Ellis, are known amongst friends, or at least, so I read on the website as the Three Wishes. I guess, now it’s four wishes, right? Because it’s the four of you now.

Margaret Wishingrad:
It is four of us now.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Rebrand.

Margaret Wishingrad:
Well, everyone’s always like, “So you’re going to make it four wishes?” I’m like, no one calls it four wishes. I might at some point have to have a third kid and then that becomes the three wishes, but yeah.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Is the idea of the Three Wishes, the three of you as you were when the product launched, the brand launched, is that the beginning and the end of the cereal brand name? Because knowing how strategic you are, I have a feeling there’s more to it that the Three Wishes actually most probably go to product attributes that you were seeking. Tell us a little more about the name because it’s interesting.

Margaret Wishingrad:
By the way, the name story is a really good long story.

Ian Wishingrad:
First tell the brand double entendre, and then yeah. So the reason we’re called Three Wishes is twofold. The truth is, there are high protein cereals, there are low sugar cereals, there’s like un-grain-free cereal. Things alone were not what interested us. What we found was if you can make a high protein and low sugar, the way to make a high protein, low sugar cereal by way of making high protein and low sugar, you need to be grain-free; grains are not rich in protein.

Margaret Wishingrad:
Or you’re fortifying it or utilizing something that you may not want to actually be putting into your body. So the really was the happy marriage of those three things, and those were the three things that we really felt the category needed some change in.

Ian Wishingrad:
So it’s more protein, less sugar, gluten, and grain free. Those are the three wishes for the product. And then, Three Wishes obviously worked with our last name Margaret, Ian and Ellis Wishingrad. And I must give all credit honestly, as someone who does branding and usually is probably the one solving it for the clients on both sides, the packaging design was Margaret, she found that inspiration. I remember exactly where we were when she was mood boarding and I remember exactly where we were right outside our wedding venue. We got married outside of the Central Park boathouse. We got stumped because we had a name we were going to launch with that had a trademark issue. So we were really getting far along with everything, launch strategy, we’re about to fundraise, branding, and then we had to go back to zero and we were very stumped. And then when she said Three Wishes, I was like, oh, there’s no way we could get that.

Margaret Wishingrad:
Well, so that this was actually really fun. So we as marketers, I always talk about it. I’m like we were shoemakers without shoes, is how it felt once that name trademark situation happened. And so we take Ellis, and we went for a walk in our old neighborhood, which was near the park, and we walked to the Central Park boathouse. We sat outside, Ellis was snacking on something, we’re both looking at each other, and we’re like, “Ugh, what are we going to name this thing? Why is this so difficult?” And it was driving us nuts. And I was scrolling through my own Instagram for inspiration. I don’t know why, but I was. And when I was pregnant with Ellis, I didn’t share with anybody. I was super superstitious about it. And when I had Ellis, I took a picture of his hand next to my necklace that said Wish.
And the hashtag I used was Three Wishes, because now it’s the three of us, and I turned to Ian, and I remember I have the still photo in my head of this moment and I turned to Ian and I’m like, “okay, crazy. But what if it was Three Wishes?” Because we have three wishes. It’s the three wishes. He was like, “Margaret, there’s no way on earth that’s available.” He quickly goes on his phone to uspto.gov to see if the trademark was open. He looks at up, he’s like, “Oh, my god, it’s open.” We ran home from the park to go and apply for the trademark because we’re like, this is too perfect, it’s too perfect. And it was meant to be.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
But then the next thing is you’re like, well, what happens when you go to threewishes.com? And I’m sure you realized what happens. It’s this lingerie website that’s nsfw, do you care or does it really not matter this day and age?

Ian Wishingrad:
It doesn’t matter because people Google Three Wishes cereal. And I actually wound up working my way to the owners of the website because they are three wishes, but the number three. And I said, “Would you let me buy Three Wishes?” And they said, “No.” So once they literally said no to me, it was fine. But no, it’s been absolutely no issue for us. And I’m sure you’ve seen how Google works these days, but if you’re willing to buy your keywords when you go to search something, they’ll make sure that sponsored link that takes you to the right website goes there. And we don’t plan on making any grain-free edible underwear at the moment. So I think we’re in.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Hey, never say never. Four wishes. There’s a whole brand that it could be. No, the only reason why I looked at it because we do naming for a living, and so obviously when there was Three Wishes Cereal, I’m like, I wonder what three wishes is, right? And so I totally agree. It is absolutely not that important anymore. And I saw it, no one else would ever see it besides everyone on the show now. Sorry, don’t go there, just don’t go there. It’s fine, threewishescereal.com. Let’s talk social a little bit. Having a few brands come together to host a giveaway to gain followers. I know you’ve done it recently, is it great ROI or is it a waste of resources or how do you see those campaigns?

Margaret Wishingrad:
The exposure’s relatively small, right? You’re giving away a small amount of your product in exchange for borrowing someone else’s audience, essentially. So I think it’s always about which brands you’re doing this giveaway together with. So if it’s like-minded brands with a similar mission or product offering, it makes sense because you’re more likely to have a great consumer that is following the other brands that now have given your brands some eyeballs. So I usually think those are great. And then just overall our thoughts on social, I think, and it’s obviously very platform specific, but Instagram’s a great example. We’re talking about giveaways.
That’s a platform where I think people have lost some trust when it’s a paid or a sponsored-type influencer or just advertisement. So we’ve really looked at Instagram as a more organic thing and so we’ll do some send outs to some different influencers. But for us, nothing is a better endorsement than someone going, “I’m not paid to tell you this, but this is really good.” That for us converts better than someone going, “Hey, this company paid me some money and here I am talking about it.” So that’s been our approach is really just growing this brand organically and we’ve done that across different platforms and overall as a brand, that’s been a strategy that’s really worked well for us.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, thankfully, because that’s what everyone strives for and it’s not easy. You make it sound easy, but it’s not easy. A lot of work goes into that. And I’m going to play your cards, Ian, from your I’m With the Brand show, and I’m going to ask you, so after having launched this brand and having worked with your customers and doing marketing. What marketing and brand building really worked for Three Wishes and how does the brand, or why does the brand resonate? What have you learned in the last years?

Ian Wishingrad:
Well, a lot of the same way people don’t give me one answer, I’m not going to give you one answer and I-

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I’m sure there are lots of answers. Yeah, that was a big question.

Ian Wishingrad:
Yeah. If you think about the marketing funnel, there’s upper funnel and there’s lower funnel and there’s mid funnel and that goes true to everything. And then people say omnichannel, and that matters. So I think to Margaret’s point is we try to move as fast as organically possible. Organically, meaning how much we can afford to spend on marketing and how much we want the brand to be discovered at certain points. So a huge part of our marketing is literally our channel strategy. Why are we in this grocery store? Do you want to discover this brand at this store or do you want it to start here and spread from there? There’s a very influential, there are some super influential grocery stores, specific stores that are places to grow brands. So I’d say our lower funnel is doing discounts at shelf and getting end caps at the aisle that is one-on-one brand building for us.
Then, as Margaret alluded to on social, we send out a lot of just free boxes. We hope people post, if they post, great. If they don’t, they don’t. But that’s a nice endorsement for us. And then also we try to fill super top of the funnel with a mix of PR and a mix of buzzy marketing tactics that make us relevant in the moment and then our own channels as well. Just making sure we are on our own social channels, on our LinkedIn pages. And you could just kind of, that’s it. But as I say, it’s kind of organic. We’re not a super-backed thing spending tons and millions online trying to get sales going. We let them grow over time.

Margaret Wishingrad:
And I think to Ian’s point, when we discuss channel strategy, and another thing I look at is maybe the way I discovered perfume when I was younger, when it’s exclusive to one store and you discover it there and then you see it at other retailers, it changes your perception of that brand. And I think similarly with our brand, making sure it’s in the right places. And I think we think about a specific, let’s say, this one consumer, what stores are they in? How do we bombard them in a way with Three Wishes so it feels super real and tangible. And so they’re seeing it in all of these different stores that they shop at. And for them it feels like the biggest brand, when in reality it probably in the scheme of the world is not. So we wanted to make a really big impact on a core group. And then we know from there it’s spreads. And so to Ian’s point, anything you can do to stand out in store I think is also really important, and that’s really worked well for us.

Ian Wishingrad:
Yeah, that’s well said. The perfume’s a good analogy. And also people always say influencers. Influencers are not just people. Retailers are influencers. A lot of some people that aren’t traditional influencers do influencer you. This is a food item, it’s not a piece of clothing, it’s not fashion. So yeah, so that’s it. And then I’d say a secret sauce thing is honestly, which is very difficult for me, is patience. Time is a huge factor. So my agency’s been around for eight years. It is a lot easier for us to get clients in business now than it was in the early days. And a lot of it is just, wow, you’re still around and you’re growing.

Margaret Wishingrad:
That’s why they call it the test of time.

Ian Wishingrad:
Yeah, it’s the test of time. I mean, when Margaret said Three Wishes and we got the trademark, I’m not lying to myself. I think Margaret and I might have multiple businesses over our lives, but we are never going to have a brand as stars aligned as Three Wishes. It’s good. And we knew we need this one to really last. We want this thing to really last.

Margaret Wishingrad:
And the statistic that Ian mentioned to me a long time ago is that to create a household brand, it takes, what? An average of seven years.

Ian Wishingrad:
Seven to 10 years to really, if you’re doing what we’re doing, you’re going full on as well as you want. It takes seven to 10 years to even start resonating the way KIND bars, or certain things do. And we’re approaching your three. So when you start to understand that there is a little bit of a rules of thumb in this road and rules of brand building and then the ones you really love, you’re like, wait, Red Bull’s been around since the 90s. Okay, these things have been around for a long time. So that lets you just exhale a little bit and it turns the anxiety down a little bit because time needs to happen.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s incredibly difficult. During the pandemic, I launched a product brand, myself, and actually we went straight back to the drawing board the last couple of months doing R&D again over. It is so stressful. For me, I feel like if my tribe, which right now is very small, right? If my tribe doesn’t hear from my brand for two weeks, they think we’re dead. And it’s like, no, no, you’re just in the beginning. You barely have a product out. But it’s extremely nerve-wracking and I can very much relate to the agency thing because I’ve been running an agency for, what? 25 years now or whatever. And now that you’ve done it so long, you don’t need the work, the work just comes to you and you can talk to people about not necessarily needing the project or wanting that project and guess what happens? You get more projects because word spreads.
So I think it’s a nice cushiony place where you’re at when you’ve done something for a long time and it sounds like Three Wishes is on the way to get there eventually. When I was talking, when I asked a question about what marketing and brand building worked for Three Wishes, I got fantastic answers about a lot of the tactics. I’m also wondering, though, from emotional, from a voice, from a posting point of view, what did you realize over the last years, what worked for your audience? What are some associations that they love making with your brand that are not one-to-one with, this is cereal, right? But what are some posts or what are some stories that you tell? Is it a lot about your story about a young family? How do you create content that you feel over time started to actually, really work?

Margaret Wishingrad:
Yeah, I think what’s worked so nicely for us is the brand Three wishes is about the three Wishingrads. And I think more than anything, consumers love buying from people, they love connecting to someone. So we’ve just brought who we are, that becomes the tone of our brand. We didn’t do, and it’s so funny because for clients in the past on the agency side, you create a whole brand tone and all these, the voice in the tone is Margaret, Ian and Ellis sometimes. But –

Ian Wishingrad:
No, it’s modified. It’s very sterilized. We speak a lot blunter than our brand.

Margaret Wishingrad:
No, but it’s really just fun and light. We’re big personalities and we love to bring, our packaging is really fun and who we are. So we just try to bring who we are to our consumers and hopefully, and fortunately, they love that. And then the same, if you look, we’ve done really fun little touches on our packaging to create little Easter eggs, also to keep people constantly on their toes. So the back of our box changes depending on the flavor. We also started something really fun and this is just like we were doing a team hang and we’re all talking about our box and analyzing it and we’ve realized the bottom of our box where we have the UPC is empty, there’s nothing but the UPC, and we’re like, we have a piece of real estate we haven’t utilized. So we started going down this whole thought of what do we do on the bottom of the box and how do we create more of a consumer engagement and a good touch point?
And we started writing these really funny blurbs that pertain to the particular flavor. And then we direct the customer to bottomofbox.com where they go down this fun rabbit hole. And because you spent all this time reading and going on the website and engaging with us, we then reward the consumer with a discount for all of the time spent. But we’re just thinking constantly what are these fun little ways that we can have the customer feel connected to us as founders, to the brand and the product and how do we continue bringing them on the inside and making them feel like they’ve touched the brand in a way, whether it’s suggesting a new flavor or where they want to see us sold. So we’re just trying to constantly openly communicate with the consumer and making them feel like they’re a part of the Wishingrad family.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And isn’t it interesting how that changed with the entire D2C time or movement or whatever where suddenly people are like, wait, when you send a box out to people, you can use every single piece of the box to create a certain vibe, right? To set a moment. And even barcodes, right? Remember 20 years ago, suddenly someone said, “Hey, a barcode could actually be more creative.” It’s like, what? So I think I love that when it’s like we have real estate, let’s use it and let’s create something that gets people deeper into our funnel. As you worked on the brand and as you saw the brand grow and now you’ve got a couple of SKUs, you do limited runs over the holidays. Looking back, what was that one big breakthrough moment where you felt like, you know what? We are not really a startup anymore, we’re kind of like a brand now. People use Three Wishes like they use other brand names. What was that moment? Was there a specific moment that you can link it to where you feel like, whoa, we are turning into a brand?

Margaret Wishingrad:
I still have that moment every day.

Ian Wishingrad:
Yeah, I would say so. There’s a few things that come to mind, but seeing it on shelf in a real display at real grocery stores near us was special.

Margaret Wishingrad:
Or even traveling, we’ll go to a different city. So when you see it in your local grocery store, it’s like, oh, of course, it’s here because we’re local. And then you go to a completely random city you’ve never been in and you walk into a store that you didn’t even know carried it and you see it on shelves.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Amazing.

Margaret Wishingrad:
Yeah. You’re like, okay, wow, this is trippy.

Ian Wishingrad:
I’ve been stopped a few times. I like to wear the merchandise. So I wear my Three Wishes hat a lot and I got stopped twice, once in Los Angeles, once in an airport, and that was cool. But I’d say-

Fabian Geyrhalter:
But they stop you and they say, “Are you Ian from Three Wishes?”

Ian Wishingrad:
No, no, they don’t know.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
“Can I have an autograph?”

Ian Wishingrad:
Which is kind of cool. It’s the exact right amount of recognition. I want the brand to be much bigger than we are. And I love that later we get to say our last name is Wishingrad. And they go, “Oh, that’s cool.”

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah, totally.

Ian Wishingrad:
But I think the thing that made me feel secure was the real test for us was. My background’s advertising and when you’re doing advertising, you’re usually getting engaged by a chief marketing officer, which usually means the company has real budgets and I’m helping write TV commercials or stuff. That brand is way more mature, way farther in its life cycle. Granted, I’ve developed packaging and stuff for other brands, but the point was to see that our product, without much support at all, just good packaging in the right store on shelf, and you start getting sales reports every week and it just keeps moving. And yes, we’ve done things externally to help pull it off shelf, but it’s kind of organically working. Those are the numbers I always look at to make sure that we’re in a new door, that it’s moving on its own. And now, obviously, there’s been reputation, and we do other things, but it’s really not being overly inflated by anything. It’s truly organic and that is a really sign of a healthy brand.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Super satisfying. Very, very satisfying. Especially, since you know how much money is usually being spent, right? And then on the flip side, look, I mean, doing a product is difficult. Doing a food product is 10x difficult. Doing a food product from someone who hasn’t done a food product before is 100x difficult. This is not easy. I mean, it’s easy to talk about it now, but it must have been extremely difficult to get the product made, to launch the product, to get it into stores. Things go wrong. I had Stacy of Stacy’s Pita Chips on the show, and she loved that question. She’s like, “Oh, my God, what went wrong? Where do we start? How long do you have?” And I’m like, really? It’s like, yeah, food is difficult. What was a ginormous, or maybe not ginormous, but what was a big brand fail that you went through that maybe people know about, but it’s fun to share because you’re like, oh, my God, we’re doomed. Did something happen at some point where you felt, because you know how advertising is, too, right? Some things work, some things don’t work, but with a product it’s much more difficult.

Ian Wishingrad:
Well, let’s just clarify because your question was a brand fail and I think I have two brand marketing things I could cite. But if you’re talking about product things, that’s more of a Margaret question. So which fail are you talking about?

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, I don’t want you to talk about fails for the next 10 minutes because that would not look good on you. So let’s talk about the brand fails.

Margaret Wishingrad:
So I think having these businesses has… I mean, one, this isn’t our first entrepreneurial journey. So you have the memory of a fly when you’re in this business. I have a fire come up every 20 minutes. There’s always something happening because you’re in the world of getting a product to a shelf, to a consumer. There’s always something happening, right? So I don’t remember any of these things. You move on, you go really quick and you’re like, all right. I have the next thing I need to tackle and I need to keep going and growing. So you don’t necessarily think about it. But yeah, so Stacy’s point, I mean, if I needed to sit here and highlight all the random things that go wrong, there could be a million, but as long as you get what you need done by the end of the day, you forget about it. And then what were you-

Ian Wishingrad:
No, I would say I agree. So if you’re talking about any like, oh my gosh, pivotal moment, knock on wood we haven’t had it and God forbid, we don’t have one.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Absolutely.

Ian Wishingrad:
We’ve had a bunch of little things, a billboard ran with one word missing. So instead of saying the World’s-

Margaret Wishingrad:
Oh, that was funny.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s good.

Ian Wishingrad:
The World’s Best Tasting Healthy Cereal. It just said the World’s Best Tasting Cereal. So that was funny.

Margaret Wishingrad:
I stand by that statement by the way.

Ian Wishingrad:
Yeah, so we’ve had a bunch of little-

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, that’s good.

Ian Wishingrad:
A bunch of little things. I try to react really quickly to things in the news. So at one point last summer, John Oliver has a show on HBO and he did one of his rants all about cereal and why isn’t there not a new cereal? And I was almost dying when it was running, going, “Oh, my god, is this a paid thing by one of our competitors?” Is he about to announce a new cereal? So I scramble like I’ve done in a million other kind of stunty, last minute news-jacking opportunities and I got our cereal truck with my son to pull up to the front door of the studio 24 hours later and drop off a ton of cereal and was hoping that we would have a viral moment and nothing, they didn’t even like nothing. I never heard from them.

Margaret Wishingrad:
The video was really cute, though, but it didn’t go anywhere. But that’s okay because I think in the creative agency side is, we’ve learned also, you can come up with a million ideas for a client and 999,000 of them might get killed. So it’s okay. We’ve taken none of these things to heart and I think that’s what allows us to keep pushing forward, is it’s like, all right, this a speed bump in the long drive that you have. So keep on going, keep on driving, keep on riding. As long as your tires are attached to the car, you’re good.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s awesome. I love those stories. If you could take your entire brand and you put it through a funnel and out comes one or two words, which I call your brand’s DNA. What is really at the heart of it? For Liquid Death, it would be mischief. For Everlane, it would be transparency or radical transparency. You are very familiar with all of these brands and every brand has something like that. What could it be for Three Wishes?

Ian Wishingrad:
Ours would be ageless.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Tell us more.

Ian Wishingrad:
Well, everything we did, I mean, 90% of US households, and I don’t know the statistics for the world, have a box of cereal. And 90% of households don’t have children in them. There’s grandparents, there’s single people. And there’s something, really, we’re in an environment where everyone is so hyper-targeted and everyone’s so segmented, and I hate that. I really super broad categories like chips and soda and water and just broad American categories. And I think we really wanted to make sure the brand is ageless. Liquid Death is awesome and they’re kicking butt, but they really have a very strong point of view, an amazing way, and they’re doing a wonderful job. So all props to them. I think they’ve taken no innovation, right? Bubbles in a can and turned it into something. Where we have done an incredible job innovating a product that’s incredibly unique. And we don’t want to just be for certain people. We’re not just for vegans, we’re not just for people who are gluten free, we’re not just for healthy people, we’re for everyone.
But being for everyone is a very dangerous brand position. So that’s why I just say I make sure the brand is ageless. If you read our copy, if you look at our packaging, it’s universally liked. That’s our test. Does my mom think it looks good? Does my kid think it looks good? Does our copy make everyone smile? We’re really trying to be a crowd pleaser. And so timeless is what a brand is, like a Coca-Cola when you’re around forever, iconic, that’s around forever. We strive to get to those places.

Margaret Wishingrad:
We’d love to go from ageless to timeless.

Ian Wishingrad:
Yes. But I think ageless as a brand is kind of it. If you know how to read English, the box is appropriate for all ages and that’s our filter. And yeah, I think ageless is what we’re trying to do.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That is amazing. I mean, that is the ultimate brand fight you’re fighting. It’s like, we are in a category that is completely broad and we are catering to everyone. Our audience is specifically defined as everyone who eats, right? I mean, scary as hell to a brand marketer, usually. But I love how you totally took this on and you’re actually thriving in that and you say no, this is what is exciting about the positioning.

Ian Wishingrad:
Right. And the positioning, though, of agelessness is not our go-to-market strategy. So we’re incredibly focused on knowing where to build the brand, who are the first movers, the early adopters. So we’re not going for-

Margaret Wishingrad:
We know who we over index with.

Ian Wishingrad:
Yes, we’re not going for everyone right now, but the brand is going for everyone. The brand will eventually get to everyone. But that is our North Star, ultimately. That’s what gets me really excited. I love the universal products, I love the pantry. Grocery stores are not age-gated. Everyone goes to the grocery store; people in walkers and babies in the grocery cart. And it’s very important to me to make a brand like a Heinz Tomato Ketchup, all these things that are just truly enjoyed through all ages. We’ve always aspired to be like Yellow Box Cheerios, which is just a very broad-

Margaret Wishingrad:
It’s the first food eat and the last food you eat.

Ian Wishingrad:
Yeah, pretty much. I mean, every mom feels really good about putting Cheerios in a little Ziploc bag as a soft, easy-dissolvable snack for their kids. And then, if you’re older and you’re trying to be healthy. So we came around. I know that was a very easy choice because it’s not loaded with sugar. So those are the kind of brands we try to be.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I love it’s the first food you’ll eat in the last food you’ll eat. That’s like more the Liquid Death direction of advertising. It’s so true. I never thought about that with cereal, right? It comes around. Fascinating. What does branding mean to you? I mean, you’ve been in the branding slash advertising industry for a long time. You say you’re a serial entrepreneur, right? Not a cereal, even though with my Austrian accent that could turn into a pun. What have you learned and what do you think branding really is to you?

Ian Wishingrad:
It hasn’t changed. So I don’t know how. It’s just reinforced the importance to me. And I think, also, the thing that I found most interesting about branding is to stand the test of time. When I talk to people or I talk to clients and they send me logos or brands or iconic marks, they like, a lot of them, aren’t great. They’ve just been around forever. And if you’ve been around forever, your brain can’t delineate between it’s actually a good mark or it’s just, it’s so familiar, you know it and it’s safe and you’ve been exposed to it for so many times.

Margaret Wishingrad:
It feels good.

Ian Wishingrad:
It feels good. So I would say the actual key, I put it back onto the operations, putting it into Margaret’s court. Margaret is the reason the brand will exist and last, because your ability to actually run the business day-to-day, the ability to operate, the ability to make sure the product’s great. I mean, I can’t even tell you how many times I have these great campaigns, not for our product, but for other brands. And the product doesn’t hold up to it. And as a famous ad guy once said, “The fastest way to kill a bad product is good advertising.” So a huge real win for us has been the proof is-

Margaret Wishingrad:
In the product.

Ian Wishingrad:
… is in the product. The product really tastes great. We’re not pulling the wool over people’s eyes. We’re not trying to get them to buy it once. I’ll give you a fun analogy. As in the marketing world, I have a mix of projects and I have a mix of retainer clients and you obviously love the retainers because you could sleep at night. It pays for our salaries and our employees’ salaries. But at the same time, the projects are usually more profitable. But you want to have a mix of both. And I really looked at this going out and going, I want to get a small retainer from everyone in the world. If everyone can spend whatever, five, six bucks on a box of cereal every couple weeks and give me that retainer business, I’m going to have an amazing business. And that’s how I always thought about it. Because I have-

Margaret Wishingrad:
It’s what we call repeat, right?

Ian Wishingrad:
Yeah, repeat.

Margaret Wishingrad:
In retail, we call it repeat. So for us, the project is like I’m on sale, will you try it for the first time? And then that repeat when you’re buying it for the rest of your life, that’s what we want. So those millions of little retainers is actually precisely it.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I love that. The terminology that crosses over into the advertising world of retainer, a serial retainer.

Margaret Wishingrad:
Yeah.

Ian Wishingrad:
Yeah, because we could all get it. Everyone will try-

Margaret Wishingrad:
Everyone could get a project.

Ian Wishingrad:
Everyone could get a project, but you want to get them coming back.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah, absolutely. What’s next for the Three Wishes brand? I know a whole lot. It sounds like it. What are you excited about in the next six months?

Margaret Wishingrad:
Well, cereal’s a really big category, right? So there’s a lot of work for us to do here to become a leading cereal brand and really to become a household brand, which is what we’re working really hard to accomplish. But the thing that’s wonderful about the name and how we’ve positioned the brand is we can allow it to be a platform. We didn’t come out and create chickpea Os, happy Os. It was let’s create Three Wishes and you fall in love with our cereal and you hopefully trust every other product and innovation we can continue to create and to put out there in the world. But right now the laser focus is definitely cereal.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And how can people follow you personally or get to know the Three Wishes brand.

Margaret Wishingrad:
The Wishingrads, yeah. So you could follow Three Wishes on Instagram and all of these other social media platforms, we’re @threewishes. And then, personally, we’re mbwish and icwish.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
How perfectly branded of a family and a cereal brand. This is awesome. Listen, thank you. Thank you both. Really, that both of you actually took time away from the business. That is really, really tremendous. We appreciate those last 40 or so minutes of you sharing all your insights from the marketing, the brand, the advertising, the product perspective. Really, really appreciate your time.

Margaret Wishingrad:
Thank you. This has been really fun.

Ian Wishingrad:
Thanks for having us.