Navigating Marketing Challenges and Opportunities in the Evolving CBD Industry

Thanks for having How do you want to kick off? The origin story or how Sunday’s Scaries is the name?

Yeah. My background originally is in finance finance hedge fund analysis, then went to hospitality, owned a couple of bars and restaurants, and then moved into CBD. So a diverse background.

Yeah. No crypto stops in there, though. Okay. Yes. Then we came up with the name Sunday Scaries in 2016-2017 when we were launching the company because a lot of the existing companies in the space were named Meta This or Canada or Cindy This. Yes. Very ingredient-based branding, and we wanted to make it fun. So Sunday Scaries is a term that there’s actually studies on this by monster. Com, by sleepjudge. Com, by LinkedIn, that over 90% of millennials suffer from Sunday Scaries. Yes. In a great alliterative term for the anticipatory anxiety you feel on Sunday afternoon when the weekend is ending, the impending doom of Monday is upon us, school work, responsibilities, errands, scheduling. We felt that that would really resonate with the problem that we were trying to create the solution for, which is the opposite. You have companies like Calm that invoke the solution feeling versus you don’t name a pain company pain. It was a little counterintuitive, but we got the name.

There was an inflection point. My business partner, Mike and I, were just super stressed out running a full-service bar and restaurant. I think we had 52 employees at the time. Sixteen-hour day, seven days a week, you’re never off. You’re getting calls at 3:00 in the morning because a dishwasher got in a fight. Just things you have to deal with. We wanted something to take the edge off. Obviously, There’s a lot of other vices in the hospitality world. We wanted something that wasn’t simulating, but took that stress and anxiety away. So the inflection point was on a golf course. Our buddy, Garrett, gave us CBD. We loved it. We started taking it. This is 2017, and we didn’t When we searched to find a brand that would resonate with us, at the time we were 30 years old, we couldn’t find a brand that we really felt we connected with, I guess. Everything was ingredient named. And so we We started our own, started manufacturing our own gummies as a side project, gave it out to our family and friends. Eventually, it started taking off. People really liked what they were tasting. Cbd was also new at the time, so it wasn’t newsworthy.

No one knew what it was. It was really the initial marketing strategy was largely educational versus actual marketing. It was what is CBD? It went from there.

How was that a change? It was a dream because in early End of 2017, early 2018, Facebook didn’t even have policies against CBD because they didn’t even know what it was. It was so new as an ingredient in the market. Of course, the 2018 Farm Bill passed in December, really putting it into the mainstream media. We would just advertise gummies for anxiety on Facebook, driving to our product pages, and we scaled really, really quickly. Our first year, we went from basically zero to $2 million with a skeleton crew. And then Facebook caught on. And then that’s really when… Also at the time, influencer marketing was really in its infancy. So we’d have influencers. Creator wasn’t a term back then, but we’d have influencers that would have 50,000, 100,000 followers. They would be willing to post for $5 per sale, and they would convert really well. Because it just wasn’t a thing where influencers were promoting brands. So between Facebook paid and Instagram organic, we really grew fast. And of course, that changed really quickly at the end of 2018, which brought a lot of challenges. Cbd is virtually either prohibited or highly restricted on every major platform, whether that’s Google, Bing, whether that’s…

And then under Google, you have YouTube and GDN, PPC. Amazon actually bids on our brand keyword and drives it to fake hemp oil products. There’s a lot of difficulties there. We’re not Twitch, TikTok is restricted, X is now cannabis friendly, but your primary ones are really difficult to get by.

Major metropolitan area is always Chicago, LA, San Diego, New York, Houston, Miami, or Houston, Dallas, and Miami. More progressive, forward-thinking, early adopter, technologically advanced areas. Because like you were saying, the other counterparts to CBD as a cannabis derivative, you do have religious factors, you have government employees, military, who can’t take the products because they’ll test positive for marijuana as hemp and marijuana are both in the cannabis family. We did see a large growth in Metropolitan areas first.

It’s interesting you said that we actually, in our weekly meeting, my business partner and I just went over a November survey that our customers completed, and I can pull it up. That has the demographic breakdown that was offered by them.

Let me just grab that really fast. Check your time. On the age scale, children, state, age. Our lowest age bracket is 18 to 24. I’m not just taking on the survey. This is based on Google Analytics. We do see lower sales with boomers compared to our competitors, largely because we focus on stress, anxiety, and sleep, not pain, inflammation. And then we also… Our branding is very millennial versus medicinal or pharmaceutical, which a lot of CBD companies are branded as. So definitely our biggest chunk is 25 to 45. I’d even venture to 55. Fifty is the new 40, right? Yes. I mean, I’m almost 40, and I feel like I’m 28.

So, yeah, it’s really the millennial market that understands what the term means and resonates with our more irreverent deadpool-esque brand archetype.

Yeah. So fortunately, while we don’t do a lot with original content, we have really good VPC creators, but we’re definitely not a content machine. But comparatively in our industry, we are a top content producer as far as funny videos and engaging content because most of the other companies in the CBD THC space are more dispensary, more our, like I said, pharmaceutical, medicinal focus. Why I think we resonate with Gen Z and millennials is we take the anti-hero approach.

Everyone tries to be perfect, we’re the shining, glowing star. We’ll say, Look, we’re not fucking perfect. John McLean, right? He saves the day and the diehards, but he’s also divorced and an ex-alcoholic, right? Shrek, he’s a big ugly ogre, but he saves the kingdom. Exactly. That’s more reflective of us as a company and our customer base. It’s like, no one’s perfect. You have these flaws, but it doesn’t mean you can’t save the day and do the right thing.

That’s more of the edgy, irreverent nature of our branding that we feel really resonates with our audience.

Like the dead pool of wellness.

Everyone wants to be Superman and Batman, but we’ll take dead pools.

That makes Yeah, that links into our marketing. It gives us spaces of communication and advertising and marketing that our competitors can’t really reach. We could put up a Facebook ad that said, Gummies to handle your drunk political uncle at Thanksgiving, right? But Charlotte’s Web and Med Terra, it wouldn’t make conceptual sense. It wouldn’t be in brand alignment if they made those types of Facebook ads. They’re more polished, well-rounded, great origin stories, but completely different from our own. It gives us that meme-esque edginess, funniness that really opens. If you’re going to get a new customer, one of the easiest way is to bridge that gap with humor to get them to appreciate the brand before making a buying purchase. Humor is really a bridge to new customers that we lean on.

There is a fine line between sarcasm and being irreverent, exaggerating something that’s normal. We do tote that line, but we don’t go into the offensive or brash Which category?

Certainly. Trump was the one who signed the 2018 Farm Bill, de-scheduling hemp. And all of the THC that we sell is derived from hemp, but it’s chemically identical to the THC that you get marijuana. There’s a lot of… The biggest challenge now on the educational side is people… We sell THC gummies online across state lines, and it’s legal and it’s real. And people have a really hard time grasping that it’s the same THC that they’re buying, they’re getting in marijuana. It is. Delta IX is chemically identical, whether it’s derived from hemp and marijuana. It’s actually the differentiating factor between the two plants. They’re both in the cannabis family. As far as national legalization, we have too many other things to worry about. We’ll cross that threshold when it comes. As far as what will happen in the industry, I think there’ll be a lot of consolidation, but we have a good customer mode. We have a lot of brand loyalty, and we treat our customers really well. We’ll just stand behind our brand and do what we’ve been doing. As far as innovation and regulation, that’s what we want. We want more regulation. All regulation is going to do is block those barriers to entry that a lot of startups have.

So that itself will create a bigger moat around what we’re doing right now.

I wasn’t even- And then one thing in the US, there is a big social trend of social tonics, whether it’s functional mushrooms, psychedelics or cannabis, replacing alcohol. We’re seeing a lot of alcohol declining sales. Okay. That’s interesting. People are switching. One of our best ads is, replace three glasses of wine with one gummy. You’re not ingesting 500 calories.

Now, 18 ounces of liquid, you don’t have a hangover, and you’ve got 17 calories in a couple of grams of sugar, right? Versus versus the latter. And so we are seeing a shifting trend. You see that with CAN, C-A-N-N, as a social tonic as well. It’s really taken Hollywood by surprise as an alcohol replacement in the form of a ready for sale beverage.

I don’t know anyone that smokes cigarettes. Yeah, me neither. I rarely see people smoking cigarettes. I mean, it’s something that doesn’t It’s not even cross my mind.

Vapes. There’s obviously the big Jules Scandal, which is an awesome Netflix special. But yeah, vaping. Then in San Diego, Whether allowed or not, you can walk down the street and smoke a joint. As long as you’re not doing it right in the cop’s face, I’ve never had a problem with it. I’m not saying that’s illegal, but I’m saying as far as how society perceives it, if someone’s smoking a cigarette, people perceive that as significantly worse than smoking a joint or taking a vape hit.

Certainly.

Yeah, it’s a good bridge into SEO. We do use it for content, both imagery, video, and SEO, written content. Of course, it’s not copy paste, so it supplements with an in-house designer who’s phenomenal, and we use AI as a backbone to save him time. We use AI as a backbone for our customer happiness team for customer service tickets. As far as really interacting with customers, though, that’s all human. So we’re talking We don’t have anything AI interacting with customers. Probably not as significantly as we could be taking advantage of AI. But right now, there’s not a lot of openings that we can see for how it would optimize us further.

Yeah. The problem with AI for us is that the best features are largely tied to marketing and advertising. Yeah, sure. In which we’re already really restricted. But while there’s all these great AI split testing tools for Facebook business manager or MetaFit business manager for TikTok, for TikTok shop, for content creation and distribution, we can’t utilize because it will inevitably create restricted content that is restricted. We have to do that all manually right now.

We have an SEO agency that we work with. We have I’ve organic link building as part of that, content building as part of that, schema and website architecture as part of that. From a technical and content backlinking perspective of the three pillars of SEO, AI is involved, but not on the execution phase. It’s more in research and developing fun ways to engage in content that save us time.

We will supplement. If we’re looking for three funny ways to reduce anxiety, certainly ChatGPT will be helpful for that. We do have a lot of content, but maybe Midjourney will be good for some high-quality life-like imagery, especially as we roll out new products. But other than that, everything is checked by my co-founder sits in the SEO seat. He’s really the human hand that flips the pages on the content that we’re distributing.

One of our unique selling props is that we’ve really just focused on stress, anxiety, and sleep. And then that, obviously, in a larger nutshell, refers to mental health. But right now, regardless of the presidency and how you feel, there is an epidemic of mental health crisis in the United States. People are more anxious. I honestly think it’s just social media and phone addiction. But I think most of it stems from there. And so really working with the right partners, with the right creators, the right subject matter experts. For us, we’re just focusing on stress, anxiety, and sleep, and I don’t think there’s a shortage of that going into 2025. That’s what we wanted to solve for ourselves originally, what we still deal with and what we can still relate to. That’s what we’re looking to help other people with.

Like I said, regardless of what side you’re on for the presidency, it goes beyond that. I think it’s really just… Yeah, sure. I honestly think it’s social media addiction and people spending an average two and a half hours on their phones, especially for families. My question is, do you spend more time at the end of the day with your screen time or face to face with your kids or your loved ones? What we’re focused on is just providing incremental benefits through our gummies and our oils to help people take the edge off and reclaim that collected nature and just be able to disconnect from all the noise that the world spits out because it’s always available on the TV and on your phone, so it’s highly accessible. Just helping people out. That’s the ultimate goal.

We’re launching THC Sleep Gummies. We’re also launching our first non-cannabis product, which is exciting. It’s two-pronged. One, we have a gap in our product SKUs, so it’ll be an energy and focus gummy that’s functional, mushroom-based. That’ll achieve two things. One, That’s what our customer base has been asking for, second behind Sleep Gummies. Second, it’ll open up all of those marketing channels that have been restricted to us for seven years. We can put them on Amazon. That’s going to be brilliant. We can put them on UGPC, we can put them on YouTube, you can advertise unimpeded on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, TikTok Shop, TikTok affiliates. Amazing. That’s really the next realm for us is moving into a different vertical than just CBD THC.

I know we’d actually be able to ship those to Portugal.

I promise you.

I don’t know that we’d expand. We were in the UK, which was a nightmare for a handful of reasons. A lot of novel foods, GDPR. There’s a lot of restrictions over there. Very expensive, too. But yeah, we’ll be able to ship our… Just for situations like this, we do a lot of podcasts. We have a lot of creators that are in other countries. Even Canada and Australia, we We can’t ship to for risk of being seized at customs. We need to respect international law, and we just keep all of our products in the US right now. Functional mushrooms, then we guys send something out.

Those should launch in Q1 after the holiday. Amazing. That’s where it’s subsided.

Our Instagram is just @sundayscaries. No periods, no dashes, just @sundayscaries. If anyone, business owners, agencies, or contractors, want to reach out, they can always reach me at squad@sundayscaries. Com. It’s our partnership inbox.