A pepper jack protein bar + the case for hair anti-aging
The trends, reads, and one founder story worth your lunch break.
As a reintroduction — hi, I’m Samantha Rose! I founded, grew, sold and scaled businesses like GIR (your favorite silicone spatula) and Mvnifest (your favorite 3PL and design partner to all your favorite home and kitchenware brands). I’ve written before about how I did it, what I’ve learned, and advice I have for aspiring founders.
I still work closely with current founders, wearing a few different hats. Okay, it’s a lot of hats. (Seriously— my team will tell you that I will pick up the phone to help a founder I just met figure out freight forwarding in the middle of our team meeting, much to their chagrin!)
My co-founder and husband Brian and I have been building businesses together since we were in college. After selling GIR and Mvnifest, we founded Hologram Capital, a small PE fund that invests in “special situations” - often distressed consumer brands where Hologram can help them find a new life and a path forward.
Our life’s work is Endless Commerce, the anti-ERP. We are obsessed with sharing the tool that helped us scale our brand, our agency, and our investment portfolio: a supply chain and commerce ops platform that helps big brands manage their chaotic back offices. Agents, battle-tested automations, and a whole bunch of business logic lay the foundation for the modern answer to a traditional tool like an ERP or a messy, distributed tech stack.
Whether you’re a founder or a big brand operator, count us in for helping to solve complex problems with a wink and a smile. We love playing on the giant chessboard.
There are a few more faces behind the scenes who make this Substack and my podcast, Commerce is Chaos, happen. You’ve met Zoe before, but meet Jess — our new producer and Head of Content! Fun, random fact: both Zoe and Jess worked at Food52 back in the day, though they didn’t know each other.
We love writing about the messy, thorny ops problems that snag so many of my founder and operator friends, but there’s so much going on to keep up with in the brand universe that we thought we’d start sharing a more bite-sized newsletter. Think of it as your lunch reading, hopefully a little inspiration, and at the very least a few links that you can drop into the Slack channel that will make you look very in-the-know.
The latest trend R&D and marketing teams at beauty brands are focusing on? Longevity. L’Oreal just introduced the concept of “Follicle Biological Age” at the 14th World Congress for Hair Research in Seoul, and apparently made some connections between caring for your hair and anti-aging and mental health… what do you think? Crock of baloney, or does it have legs?
Protein, but make it savory? This new cheese-forward protein bar brand, Takeaways, boasts 12g of protein and 120 calories with flavors like White Cheddar, Cheese Pizza and Pepper Jack. It’ll be interesting to see if this takes off the way “meat sticks” really have.
Our buddy Pete Sena wrote a great piece on how to actually gauge AI effectiveness and assess AI spend for your team. This one’s a must-read before you encourage everyone to get AI literate and hand them the keys without much context or training.
Is Gutter Capital resuscitating the VC accelerator? Because Elbow Grease looks pretty awesome. (Great name, btw.)
Have tariffs contributed to brands’ growing sustainability fatigue when it comes to packaging? An interesting read on the future of packaging technology.
DEUX founder Sabeena Ladha’s 3 tools for getting out of a funk are bookmark-worthy for all founders, especially Tool #1!
Running a few ventures at once isn’t for the faint of heart. This week it looks like a 4 a.m. start time so I can wrap up meetings early enough to spend time with my family on a trip to see our cousins in Hawaii… maybe not a picture-perfect family vacay, but sometimes the in-between of work and play is as close as we can get! -Sam
Aaron Menitoff and his wife Julie spent over 20 years catering high-end events in South Florida — think Prince Harry and Bruce Springsteen — before the pandemic canceled everything overnight. So they did what any reasonable couple would do, bet the farm and built something entirely new.
The idea was simple: ship fully assembled, catering-quality cheese and charcuterie boards overnight, anywhere in the country. No assembly required. Just open the box.
In their first year, Boarderie shipped 10,000 boards and did $1.7 million in sales. Year two: $65 million. They’ve since landed on Oprah’s Favorite Things list and set a Guinness World Record for the largest charcuterie board ever assembled at 20 by 14 feet and 769 pounds.
In this episode, Aaron pulls back the curtain on how all of it actually works: the assembly line that produces up to 30,000 hand-assembled boards a day, the decision to keep production fully in-house, how they’ve managed explosive growth in a perishable food business, and the employment program that’s become a core part of how they operate.
If you love a great snack board, you’re going to love this one. I think it’s one of the best episodes ever!
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