682: From $2M in Debt to a $250M Gum Company | Pur Gum

**Nathan Chan** (0:01)
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He lost $2 million on a gum that nobody wanted. So he sold the leftover stock to a pig feed company for 13 grand and used it to build a quarter of a billion dollar empire. So today's guest is Jay Klein, founder of The Pure Company. This is a bootstrap brand that walked into a $20 billion industry controlled by fewer than 10 giants and competitors. And became the fastest growing gum in North America and the number one seller on Amazon. So guys, if you are building a CPG brand, this is the playbook. Jay really breaks down how he uncovered the insight behind his entire product for free, no budget, no focus group, and why he turned his back on Walmart and Tesco to win thousands of tiny stores instead. And how he survived a 39% tariff that should have buried him from $2 million in the red to beating the giants at their own game. All right, let's jump in.

**Jay Klein** (1:55)
Here are the stories.

**Nathan Chan** (1:56)
So you launched Pure in 2010, you camped outside a Toronto health food store just to watch the first unprompted customer pick it up and play it.
What did that moment of validation feel like? And how did it fundamentally shift your mindset from agency owner to CPG founder? Because you used to have an agency where you helped CPG brands grow.

**Jay Klein** (2:22)
It was an incredible moment of a true win. Having your product on shelf isn't just creating the product and delivering it to the store. It's actually taste testing, packaging design, getting a UPC code, going through the whole process of having your product ready for retail.
When I started in 2010, CPG founder, like that was not cool, there was no such buzz or trend or anything like that. It was just wild, wild west, a crazy guy selling chewing gum to independent health food stores. So I don't even know that I'd give myself that much credit to be a founder in 2010, the same way that founders have to dodge and plan and scale today. But when I saw a stranger pick it up, what it said to me was, someone likes what we created. Through my entrepreneurial journey, when you ask someone who cares about you or who loves you, what do you think of my idea? They usually give you supportive advice, they're encouraging and they tell you to go do it. But when a stranger hears your idea and says, oh, I don't like that or that's a good idea, it's a different type of validation. So seeing that packet picked up by someone meant they were interested in what we had created. And what drove me from that day forward was thinking, if that person is interested in buying a pack of pure gum, there are more people that are interested in buying a pack of pure gum. And that's what pushed me to cut and paste and copy and paste what we did in independent health food stores and go door to door, or as we called at the time, running for mayor, shaking hands, meeting store owners, telling people about the product.
With CPG, when you have a consumable product, you can't just tell people about it. You actually have to get them to taste it. We call it converting curiosity to consumption.
That way, they can experience your product. And the big test that we use is, it's good enough to consume, but is it great enough to buy again? And so many consumer brands today are sold once, people engage in trial, and then they try something else. But at The Pur Company, we love the sticky connection with our customers, and that's introducing our product to them and having them buy it again and again and again until it becomes a daily habit.