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1. Collaborative journey: Gravel’s mission is to make traveling easier and more efficient with well-designed, minimalist products and a customer experience that’s designed to remove barriers between the customer and their next adventure.
2. Grass-roots funding: From its first Kickstarter campaign, Gravel’s product development has been driven by designing functional and elegant solutions to specific problems that travelers face on the road.
3. First-person research: Lance is his company’s own customer, using a recent six-week family trip through Asia as an opportunity to identify specific problems that products could address.
4. Raising the bar: A recent rebrand spurred Gravel to reexamine all of its products, elevating the taste level that goes into design decisions.
5. Keep it moving: One way Gravel maintains its brand integrity is by reserving discounts and sales for less-popular colorways that won’t be produced again. This clears space in the warehouse for faster selling products without undercutting the brand’s value.
The company can be traced back to a successful 2017 Kickstarter campaign that generated $165K to build the best toiletry bag for travel. Today, Gravel is a full-fledged e-Commerce brand with a devoted following of travelers who love its durable, minimalist products. As you read Lance’s story, it’s striking to see just how much the company reflects the values he has not just as a traveler, but as a person. “We aren't here just to to sell you something,” he says. “We're here to make it easier for you to travel and more comfortable to travel and to get outside and to move in general.”
Lance Cassidy is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gravel, which was founded in August 2016.
The name provides the first hint that the company gears itself for customers who prefer taking the backroads to driving on the freeway. Gravel’s mission is to make it easier to get off the beaten path, providing products for people who travel for the story they’ll have when they come back, not the status.
Lance has a background in visual arts, having worked in photography, video and graphic design. His career as a creator goes back even further, though, as he was crocheting beanies he then sold to his classmates as far back as the sixth grade. Lance became very involved with Kickstarter campaigns, and in the spring of 2017, he designed a toiletry bag geared specifically for travelers. That turned out to be the first step on the path to building a thriving E-Commerce brand.
The core team is very lean, handling the company’s creative direction and design decisions. The more action-oriented operations like e-mail, paid-media campaigns and Amazon management are outsourced to smaller teams. Having a tight team means that everyone has a feel for what is going on. “I think it brings something special with every member being so involved,” Lance says. “It just has a different vibe to it, so it's not something I would trade, but there definitely are times that I wish that we had another 30 employees.”
Lance keeps an eye out for customers who stick up for the brand online whether that’s posting consistently in forums or standing up for the company’s products when someone starts complaining. On a number of occasions, a member of the team has reached out to get a customer’s address and sending along some free product or – in a couple of instances – had a pizza delivered. “Just different stuff to create that customer experience,” he says, “and just lift up the people that are lifting us up.”
Lance and his wife have four daughters, all under the age of 10, and they recently took a six-week trip that included stops in Vietnam, Thailand and Japan. It was an incredible vacation. It was also research. “Just keeping your eye open is a huge part,” he says, “If you are your own customer, it's so easy to see gaps in the market.” Those experience have shown what makes a great travel blanket or why silicon squeeze bottles are great for hair care products.
Holiday sales can present e-Commerce brands with a bit of a challenge. On the one hand, they’re great to spur sales and take advantage of the busiest shopping time of the year. On the other hand, you don’t want to undercut the value your brand has built. Gravel has come up with a way to balance those two factors by taking the bottom couple of colorways of each product, declaring them dead stock and discounting them for immediate sales. This provides an incentive for customers, and it also makes room for a new version of the product that will (hopefully) sell better at full price.
Gravel recently underwent a full rebrand with Actual Source, a design studio that is based in Utah. It was invigorating for the company, Lance said, changing the taste level he envisions for the company’s products going forward. “We actually have a new standard,” he says, “And so we need to shift everything up to the standard of this rebrand.”
What’s one piece of advice you’d offer to an entrepreneur just starting out? “Create something that a stranger would buy. If they don't talk to you, if they have no idea who you are, are they buying that thing? That will help you know if you’re solving a big enough problem that's not been solved yet.”
What is the most important quality you look for in new hires? “Independence. With a small team, we just need A players that are ready to dive in and handle business so a huge part is just somebody that I don't have to babysit.”
What is the No. 1 tool that you couldn't live without? “Obviously, Shopify is massive. It's pretty simple to use and great in a lot of ways, but I've been using ChatGPT just to brainstorm mostly. I'll just talk into it for a while and ask it to organize my thoughts, and it provides a synopsis I can use to talk to my team.”
As a customer or a client, what would you say is your favorite communication channel for customer support is? “As a customer, chat.”
What was the last book you read that you found really interesting and you'd love to share with the world? ““People Over Profit” talks about like the life cycle of a business. You start out with good intentions, but then greed creeps in over time and then you start slashing quality, start slashing wages. People are so important to us from our manufacturers all the way to our employees, to our customers, to even where the plastic goes with our product. We don't use any single use plastic. So everything that's shipped, we ship in like a cassava starch that's biodegradable. So just being people and world over profit is really where we try and live.”
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