Ep 016: Sparking Deeper Conversations with Hella Awkward

Today on The Heart-led Brand Podcast, we’re chatting with Brittane Rowe of Hella Awkward!

Britt is the Co-Founder of Hella Awkward, the card game for the awkward conversations you’ve been meaning to have. She is also a theatre artist and beauty influencer based in NYC, on a mission to help you enjoy deeper connections. Hella Awkward has been featured in Essence, Buzzfeed and Health Magazine. Available now on Target, Walmart, Amazon & Urban Outfitters!

Episode Highlights:

On starting Hella Awkward while in quarantine during the pandemic:

“So I had been living in New York for about 10 years. At that time I was in an acting group, working downtown, doing a bunch of different plays. And then as most actors do in New York, I was also working at a restaurant part-time as well. Then the pandemic hit and that ended both of those industries completely. So I just was home as everyone was in New York. I was luckily able to get on unemployment really quickly and I basically was just trying to figure out what I was gonna do next. Thank goodness this really just organically came to be.

So Hella Awkward is started by myself, my brother Brandon and his partner Jane, they had just moved into Brooklyn together, starting their relationship and decided to quarantine together. Very bold of them. And I was up in Harlem. And so we would FaceTime every couple days or so and just like check in and talk about whatever we were watching and that sort of thing. And we started our conversations being about TV shows and whatever's going on with the world, and it then became us discussing deeper topics, really like our childhoods and diving into things that happened and things that we went through when we were kids.

And we realized during those conversations that, me and my brother being African-American and Jane being a Malaysian immigrant, there was a lot of crossover, which was very fascinating to find out. And so I think people of color often have families where there are a lot of things that are taboo, that are not spoken, that you just, you don't ask questions, you don't get to say why to your parents. It just is what it is, and you have to find your way to navigate through that. And so we, we wanted to come up with a way to help people like us. Kind of dive into those topics, have these sort of conversations, learn to be vulnerable, deepen their relationships of all sorts.

But we wanted it to be fun 'cause it was also quarantine. It was a wild time! So we just came up with a crazy list of hundreds and hundreds of questions and sent them out to a bunch of our friends and we were like, ‘Hey, is this fun? Use these in your conversations with your family, your friends.’

And people said that they loved it and it was super fun and they kept asking for more! And so we thought, okay, I think we have something that we should really hone into. And thankfully, because I had so much time 'cause I was unemployed, I decided to really dive into it and figure out what this could be.”

On some of the challenges they faced while launching:

“We started working on this in June of 2020 and we were so ambitious. We thought we were going to launch before Black Friday so we can take hold of the holiday sales. Which now we can laugh about because there was no chance that was ever gonna happen. We ended up getting our product the following May. And we opened up our website to take pre-orders thinking that we were gonna hopefully be able to be open. And so we started taking pre-orders and we had no product because the shipping and the logistics was wild.

I don't know if you guys remember, but like the Suez Canal was backed up. The Panama Canal was shut down for a period of time. It was just ridiculous. And we had no reference point for any of this. And so we thought, ‘Great. It usually takes a month to ship. That's what we've seen, so we're good to go.’

Absolutely not. It took months and months and months. And then we have these early adopting customers who are like, ‘Hey, I've ordered this. Where is it?’ And so having to be like super transparent, reaching out to everyone, letting them know what's going on, hoping that they can stay patient with us and just being nervous that this is the first impression.

Thankfully, I think because we were so transparent in reaching out to people individually, we had people who were there to support us and a lot of our early customers were people from our network or friends of friends and friends of family.

But if I could do it over again, I think I would have waited to open the pre-order until we knew that even the product was state-side, because sometimes getting through customs can take a little while.”

On getting their products in retailers like Target:

“We started off D2C and then we started building our Amazon storefront. Then we started just doing like smaller wholesale. So like mom and pop stores, little boutiques, gift shops, things of that nature. I would just like find them on Instagram and DM them and say, ‘Hey! Do you want five units, 10 units?'

So we started just really, really small, getting a few of our products and a few shops around like New York or like L.A. And then the craziest thing happened and someone from someone who bought our product shared it on their Instagram story, and their friend happened to be a buyer at Macy's and Macy's said, ‘Hey, we're doing this like cool pilot program where we're doing giftable items and we want to have you in a few of our stores and online.’

So we were able to get into a few Macy's stores and that opened the door for us to get in front of Target. The buyer at Macy's reached out to their former colleague who's a buyer at Target and said, ‘Hey, we just got this new game. You should take a look.’ And unbeknownst to us, she was checking us out and and finally reached out and so we were able to meet with her. She told us all the things that we weren't ready for and how to get ready for those things. So that was great because Macy's was kind of like a smaller pilot program. I literally shipped all of our product to the Macy's distribution centers myself out of my brother's studio apartment. Target was like, ‘Yeah, that's not gonna work. We need you to work with someone who like knows what they're doing.’

So she gave us a list which was:

We needed to work with a distribution center.
We needed to have our manufacturing down. We had to be able to commit to these huge quantities of units to support all of these stores.
We had to lower our price point to be more of what Target’s customer would expect.
We had to be shelf ready, meaning our packaging needed to be a little tighter.
And we also needed to be certified by the minority federal council because we were hopefully gonna be launching during Black History Month. In order for Target to say this is a Black-owned product, you have to show that you were actually certified federally or through the state.

We would basically spend an entire year going through making sure we had those things checked off and we would always update her. She was rooting for us. So she really was excited to see all of our changes.

And once we were ready, we thankfully were able to pitch to our category specific buyer. We did a great pitch and just told our story. And because we had all those things ready to go and had that other relationship, it was sort of an easy yes!”

We hope that you enjoy this conversation and make sure to check out and support all that Hella Awkward is doing! You can follow them on Instagram and TikTok or go shop their products on hellawkward.com!