SWT Farhana M.

Hussain
11 - BDM July 31, 2019
OM Mr. C-Christian Delos Santos

Four Years After Shark Tank, 23-Year-Old, Her Best Friend

And Her Dad Build A $7M Nut Butter Company
-Amy FeldmanForbes Staff

Back in 2011, Keeley Tillotson and Erika Welsh were college roommates at the University of
Oregon who loved peanut butter. So they started making their own in their tiny apartment that mixed
in new flavors, like cinnamon raisin, and chocolate coconut, without the high sugar content typical
of such snack foods. One thing led to another, and before beginning junior year of college they
ended up on Shark Tank, and suddenly realized: Either they needed to drop out of college or let the
business go.

They dropped out.

Fast forward four years from the Shark Tank airing, in May 2012, and Tillotson, now 23, and Welsh,
25, are running Portland-based Wild Friends, a nut butter company with sales expected to reach $7
million this year and distribution in Whole Foods, Costco, Kroger and a number of other
supermarkets. At a time when funding has gotten tighter for many startups, the duo recently raised
$1.4 million from investors on CircleUp, including a $100,000 investment from John Foraker,
president of Annie’s, the prominent natural and organic foods company that is now part of General
Mills, who they consider a mentor. Oh yes: Tillotson’s dad, Bruce Tillotson, 54, who previously
worked for Honest Tea, is their chief salesperson, responsible for flying around the country to get
the brand into stores.

“I always joke that I’m going to write a book about how to work with your dad and your best
friend,” says Keeley Tillotson, Wild Friends’ chief executive.

In the beginning, Tillotson and Welsh, both college athletes, simply mixed up their own peanut
butters with unusual ingredients and less sugar than the products they saw on the shelves. “It was
exciting and fun, and so we started selling at farmer’s markets and street fairs,” Tillotson says.
“We set up an online account so that our friends could pay us. We would make it all night long,
and do deliveries during the day. It got to the point where the company was taking over our lives,
and we were hardly going to school.”

Neither of them really understood the business side of things – Tillotson was studying Spanish and
journalism, while Welsh was an environmental studies major – and at first the business just grew
haphazardly. Even their original name, Wild Squirrel, turned out to be a problem when they were
sued by Squirrel Brand, a longtime peanut butter maker, for copyright infringement.
(The girls changed the name of their business to Wild Friends in 2013.)

Then they got on Shark Tank, filming the show in the fall of 2011 for an episode that aired the
following May. At the time, they’d made just $14,000 selling peanut butter on their website. “The
idea that the company could be worth more than the cash we had in the bank, which was a couple
hundred dollars, was a mind warp for us,” Tillotson says.

When the Shark Tank episode aired, they got a lot of acclaim and a lot of press. They also got an
offer from one of the sharks, Barbara Corcoran, founder of the New York real estate firm Corcoran
Group. Tillotson and Welsh had asked for $50,000 for a 10% stake, but what Corcoran offered –
and stuck with after negotiation – was $50,000 for a 40% stake, an amount that valued their startup
at just $125,000. Despite the on-air commitment, the deal ultimately fizzled. “On their end, they
decided not to invest, and we were glad because we were not ready,” Tillotson says.

Instead, between the taping and the airing, they turned to Kickstarter, the crowdfunding site where
entrepreneurs can give their backers “rewards.” The $10 backers got a two ounce packet of nut
butter, a handwritten thank you note and company stickers, while the $100 ones received a five-
pack of nut butter jars and a Wild Squirrels t-shirt. They raised a total of $10,687. “That allowed
us to produce 10,000 jars of nut butter, which we brought back to my parents’ garage and sold all
over Oregon,” Tillotson says.

While there are a lot of nut butter companies, something about their healthy but offbeat flavors like
chocolate coconut and cinnamon raisin clicked with consumers. It’s not cheap, at $10-to-13 for a
16-ounce jar on Amazon, versus $3 for basic Jif, but as an indulgence it’s not particularly
expensive either. Ben Lee, CircleUp’s director of business development, calls it “a more
craveable, indulgent version of a standard product.”

consignment to test it out. “You set up camp, and listen to your customers,” Tillotson says.

Even in the early days, Tillotson says, they got a lot of advice from her dad, Bruce Tillotson, who
had been a salesman for Honest Tea. After Coca-Cola acquired Honest Tea in 2011, he joined his
daughter’s startup full-time as chief of sales, helping them sort through the thorny issues of pricing
as well as getting the product on the shelves. At the end of 2011, Wild Friends was available in just
30 outlets; today it sells in 12,000. “My dad and I have a call every single morning to make sure
we are on the same page. Because he is such a sales guy, I feel like I wouldn’t have known him
fully without working with him,” Tillotson says.

In 2013, Wild Friends raised $450,000 on CircleUp, an investor platform that’s helped 183
companies raise more than $240 million. Then, with revenues of nearly $4 million last year, it went
back for more financing this year. This time, it raised $1.4 million in a convertible debt offering.
Annie’s Foraker was among the investors. Other prominent investors who joined the round
through CircleUp’s Growth Fund include Walmart’s former vice chairman Eduardo Castro-
Wright and Duncan Niederauer, former chief executive of the New York Stock Exchange. Tillotson
and Welsh remain the company’s majority owners, though they won’t disclose the exact
ownership breakdown.

“I had tried their product once, and I thought it was really great, and then I was actually watching
TV one day and I saw their piece on Shark Tank in reruns,” Foraker says. “I was like, ‘Oh,
that’s really cool, I know that product.’” When Foraker tweeted to them, Tillotson recalls, “we
freaked out. What are we going to do? We tweeted back, and asked him if
he’d be willing to talk on the phone.”

He was, and ultimately became a mentor, advising them as he does with a dozen food companies
he’s taken under his wing. He helped them think about the brand, and what it stands for, as well
as some of the practical aspects of running a business, like contract manufacturing and capital-
raising. “They are classic entrepreneurs,” Foraker says. “They are young and hungry and full of
passion for their product, and they have grown their business really fast without losing a lot of
money, which is really hard to do.”

Still, there are limits to the crowded nut butter category, and with 11 flavors of peanut butter, almond
butter and sunflower butter, plus seasonal offerings like gingerbread peanut butter and sugar cookie
peanut butter, Wild Friends may be approaching them. The company had hoped to reach $9.2 million
in sales this year, but expectations slipped as the hiring of additional salespeople got pushed back
to the second quarter from the first. Tillotson says they’re looking to launch new snacks (though
she won’t say more) where, as with the nut butters, they can make an indulgence that people love
with less sugar and more healthy ingredients.

As a Millennial, Tillotson wants to create products that appeal to others of her generation – and as
an entrepreneur she’s dreaming big. “There is such an opportunity in the Millennial generation.
We all eat healthier and buy healthy foods. We spend more than our parents’ generation on healthy
foods, and we want to have brands we can connect with,” she says. “I think the opportunity is to
build this generation’s Annie’s.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2016/07/07/four-years-after-shark-tank-23-year-old-
her-best-friend-and-her-dad-build-a-7m-nut-butter-company/#37f390aa1d95