Carlos Cashman, CEO of Thrasio, announces company rebrand and site redesign + vision for the future of consumer goods and retail.

Maybe you noticed. We spruced the place up a bit. You may have already taken a tour of our website. It’s got a great new logo, exciting colors, and fun writing. But the site is about way more than what you can see. It’s part of a new chapter in Thrasio’s story – one that’s poised to carry us far into the future.

A brand is really all about defining your mission, knowing your deeper why, and decoding your company DNA. You don’t go launching a new brand without wrestling with your own identity first. And we wrestled. A lot. We wanted to understand what the *it* was, that special sauce that got us here. Because whatever *it* was, we sure as hell didn’t want to lose it in the process of reimagining an entirely new future.

So before I unveil Thrasio’s new mission, let me share a bit about our early days, especially for the employees who have joined Thrasio in the last 12 months. Welcome to the team.

A milk frother, donuts, and an idea: how Thrasio got its start

The first business we bought was Cafe Casa. It had one main product: a milk frother called the Frothy. You might wonder why anyone would need a milk frother, but plenty of people on Amazon did. It’s basically a battery-powered whisk – and it makes the cream in your coffee foamy and light. I still love this thing, and I still use my Frothy almost every day. I’ve even used it to mix gravy.

That was in early 2018. I paid for Cafe Casa from my own pocket. We had no investors, we hadn’t even formed the company. We didn’t know much about the Amazon ecosystem. We were months away from having a website. All we had was one idea: what if we could buy a bunch of small ecommerce companies, put them together, and create more value as an aggregated whole?

Seemed like it had some potential.

Three and a half years later, Thrasio is by any business measure a success. We created the aggregator industry for ecommerce brands. We’ve created over a hundred millionaire entrepreneurs by buying their businesses. We have billions in investment, more than 200 brands, tens of thousands of products and a lot of happy employees.

But when people ask me about this epic ride, I don’t start by rattling off a bunch of numbers. I talk about the story behind them. Thrasio’s first HQ was a tiny room in the same building as a Dunkin’; we even shared the bathroom. The location was chosen so I could have one room for one person (me) to just ideate my next business. And in a way, entrepreneurial fuel = coffee + donuts. The “office” wasn’t meant to fit 10 people sweating over laptops and monitors all day.  It was big enough for maybe an 8-person conference table. It was next to a supply room. It had shitty heat. Outside the window was the dumpster that reeked, especially in summer.

We got lucky. People don’t talk about the role of luck in business enough, but plenty of great ideas go bust. (Ask me how I know.) Crammed into that room together, somehow we found our shared passion. Somehow we created the right atmosphere to unlock the bold ideas. We discovered our penchant for questioning the status quo and challenging the old ways of doing things. We failed plenty, but we kept going. We laughed a lot.

Here’s what I can say with certainty now: Thrasio’s success was, is, and always will be the people we manage to bring to the table. The energy, the synergy, the vision, the creativity of everyone here — that’s Thrasio’s secret sauce.

Bring out people’s best, and they’ll bring their best

That’s exactly why people are the soul of our new brand. We owe them every ounce of gratitude.

• Entrepreneurs for the risk, fortitude, and passion it takes to build the world’s most-loved products. For trusting us with their brands. We’d literally be nothing without you.

• Employees, including engineers, data scientists, brand gurus, supply chain experts, creatives, and strategists who push the boundaries every day. And of course the team that created this new brand.

• Our investors for believing in our vision, now and in the early days, and for sharing in our passion and delivering resources to overcome the many challenges a startup faces.

• But our real why? Our customers. At the end of the day, we want to deliver fantastic products to hundreds of millions of customers, we want to give them a great experience buying and using our products, and we want them to make the most of every moment in their lives, however they choose to live it.

It’s for our customers that today we’re stepping into a new category all on our own. We are a fast-moving, multicategory consumer products company, and we believe we’re redefining the consumer goods industry for the future. So without further ado:

Our new mission puts purpose to everything that we pursue and the decisions we make. Delivering on this mission statement will be the path we forge for the future – both on a large scale and in our day-to-day operations. Let me break it down a little.

Reimagining something means challenging assumptions. Rutted thinking will slow us down. You may even have to break it and rebuild it.

That’s why:

• We insist on a fail-forward culture. If you want bold thinking, you need to reward risk-taking. And to encourage risk-taking, you need to celebrate the bombs as well as the big wins. At Thrasio, there is no such thing as “this is just how we do things.” That’s a sure way to obsolescence.

• We have fun. When work is a drudge, you get drudgery in return. Our purpose is serious, but when you take yourself seriously, the ego takes over. New ideas are blocked. That’s why we have a firm no assholes policy. Life’s too short to work with jerks.

• We embrace reality’s complexity. There is no such thing as one POV – not in business, not in relationships, not in life. We stay open and we remind ourselves every day that there is no such thing as right. Right is probably wrong tomorrow. That spurs all of us to think about problems multidimensionally. And it develops empathy, which is crucial in an organization moving fast and growing in size and complexity.

We want people to love our products. More important than that? We want people to love whatever it is they’re doing in life that might be made easier or better with our products. That’s the real win.

That’s why:

• We scour the globe for the products people already admire. We’re picky about brands we buy. We look at reviews, ratings, and rankings, and we read every word people have had to say – and if there’s room for improvement? That’s our first order of business when a brand comes into our portfolio.

• We have a 100-person Product Launch team that develops new products, extends product lines, and improves existing products – often based on customer feedback. That includes our Tinker Team, engineers who merge product and technology together and test viability.

• And when we’ve lost a little love? We work to earn it back. That’s why we invest in a 200-person Customer Obsession team answering customer calls for our 200-plus brands, 365 days a year, 24-7. We resolve our over 60,000 monthly tickets in an average of 3.4 hours with an astonishing 91.9% customer satisfaction score.

We want more people to have things they love. That’s how we grow our brands. That means we work to make it incredibly easy for people to discover our products, buy them, and use them – no matter how and where they like to shop.

That’s why:

• Our SEO teams are unmatched. Search is the new shelf; understanding algorithms is table stakes. Our optimization teams look at more than 200 individual ranking factors on Amazon and Google, and our products appear in more than 100 million searches each month.

• We know the power of actual shelves, too, which is why you’ll see Angry Orange and other products on store shelves throughout the United States.

• We invest significantly in technology infrastructure and data engineering to grow our brands and better serve our millions of customers around the globe. Global channels and global markets are a web of complexity. We make it our business to know them and link them together.

• Our supply chain team is world-class. Full stop. Over the last 2 years, in the face of massive disruption, they’ve moved mountains to move our products around the globe and make sure our customers have the things they love when they want them. As a result, Thrasio is resilient and ready for whatever the world throws at us next.