Making olive oil cool—behind Graza founder’s unorthodox approach

When start-up olive oil brand Graza faced shipping problems and quality lapses about a year ago, founder Andrew Benin addressed the problem head-on, sending an apology email to more than 30,000 customers. While issuing brand mea culpas is not unusual, the way Benin went about it was. He wrote a stream-of-consciousness style note so informal and non-corporate that, when the Wall Street Journal covered it, they noted Benin “didn’t bother proofreading or showing a draft to anyone” before sending the email. The note—which was greeted with positive reviews from consumers used to more formal approaches from brands—is just one example of how Benin’s unorthodox style is helping Graza break through in the highly fragmented olive oil category. He is a founder who flies by the seat of his pants, perhaps moving too fast at times, whose big personality and occasionally combative nature can put Graza in hot water. But his approach has mostly netted positive publicity for a brand that pioneered putting olive oil in squeezable bottles when it debuted in January 2022. Graza’s success has been a silver lining in a recent storm of bad news afflicting other direct-to-consumer brands. As public DTC company stocks including Allbirds and Rent the Runway fell to below $1 per share last year, privately owned Graza’s star continued to rise. Graza recently closed a Series A funding round in September—just a few weeks before a Crunchbase report titled “VCs No Longer do DTC” gained notice. Today, Graza has more than 58,000 Instagram followers and has entered retailers including Whole Foods, Target and, most recently, Walmart. Celebrities such as Chrissy Teigen and Molly Baz are fans. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs “Very few people have enough passion and creativity to make olive oil cool. It’s relatively straightforward to make it pretty, but Andrew’s true brilliance is his ability to tap into the zeitgeist of his customer base and of the DTC industry at large,” John Gross, CEO and founder of Fat Earth, the creative media agency that works with Graza on its performance marketing efforts and more, said in a recent email. “It’s rare that you see such a determined entrepreneur leverage their passions and sincerity to the effect that he has, but I truly think this is the main differentiator in Graza’s success.” While Benin did not disclose the amount Graza raised in its recent Series A, he noted that Brand Foundry—which led the olive oil brand’s previous $2 million seed round—led the latest one, too. It has not made revenue public. “It’s hard to raise money. It’s harder right now than it was a year ago,” Benin said. But he implied that for Graza, at least right now, that’s not necessarily the case. “We were getting terms and we got to pick. We really have our shit together. It’s awesome,” he said, with a hint of surprise in his voice during a recent interview sitting in the backyard of a coffee shop in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood. What’s more, Benin says Graza is profitable—and, as of late September, had been for 11 months in a row. Larger holding companies have also made offers to acquire Graza, although Benin declined to say which ones. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Graza (@getgraza) How it started Graza started to make a name for itself in the social media marketing world months before it even launched, with its social team sending out products to select micro-influencers and small retailers without asking them to promise anything in return. On the day it began making sales online, it sold out its initial batch of products within 24 hours, according to the brand. There were 32,504 units sold, Benin said. “They did extremely well out of the gate,” Mike Duda, managing partner at creative agency and investment firm Bullish, which has invested in DTC brands such as Harry’s and Casper, said in a recent interview. He pointed to Graza’s early Whole Foods entry in summer 2022—just a few months post-launch—as a particularly savvy move. When asked how Graza was able to pull that off, Benin noted that no retailer is going to “take a bet” on a brand that is hot on Instagram without proof that it will make the retailer money. Graza first built its retail reputation at the smaller Foxtrot chain where it gained distribution in in April 2022, three months after launching. “Once you have really strong retail data, doors open,” he said. Benin conceived the brand after holding gigs at several DTC brands, including Warby Parker, Casper, Oura Ring and Magic Spoon. Also read: 5 DTC marketing predictions for 2024 “A few years back, I was living in Spain at my wife’s family’s house … between jobs,” Benin wrote on Graza’s blog. Soon, he decided to explore the surrounding area, and found himself driving from Cordoba to Jaen with “rest stops offering the best home-cooked meals you’ve ever had, and Olive trees everywhere the eye can see. I mean 4 hours of magnificent Olive trees.” “On that trip, I feel like I tasted olive oil for the first time. It was time to head back to my in-laws, with a LOT of olive oil in tow. My family in Spain thought I had totally lost my mind, speaking about olive oil 24/7, but my wheels were cranking,” he wrote. When he returned to New York, he sat down with Gramercy Tavern Executive Chef Mike Anthony. “I wanted him to try all these crazy oils I found,” Benin wrote on the blog. “Here we are, sitting in the dining room of a Michelin star restaurant, tasting olive oils, sitting on top of the world. And that’s when Mike put me in my place. He made it clear that the world didn’t need another purveyor of small batch, super fancy, super EXPENSIVE olive oil from Europe. What would be the point of that? Another super exclusive olive oil that most people cannot afford? A supply chain that can’t scale into mass distribution, so everyone had a place to shop? NOPE,” he continued. So Graza took a more accessible pricing approach. Its 25.3-ounce “Sizzle” cooking oil currently sells on its website for $16 per bottle, whereas its 16.9-ounce “Drizzle” finishing oil costs $21. But its squeezy bottles are what set it apart. Although back kitchen staff had been putting olive oil into squeezy bottles for years, Graza seems to be the first brand that streamlined the process, using the packaging for regular consumers. Graza has maintained its relevance by partnering with similarly buzzy DTC brands such as Fishwife on collabs, and keeping up its casual and conversational brand voice on X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram. Graza partnered with drinks brand Aura Bora on a non-alcoholic olive oil martini in a can this past fall, for instance, though Benin said the partnership had nothing to do with the current non-alcoholic drinks craze. Related: Brands cash in on the non-alcoholic drinks craze View this post on Instagram A post shared by Aura Bora (@drinkaurabora) Drawing headlines Benin’s uninhibited persona is likely no small part of Graza’s strength, at least according to Bullish’s Duda. “Founder magnetism is a top two thing that helps a company go from start to scale,” he said. Benin’s outspoken behavior, after all, has brought Graza out of the CPG aisle and into the larger cultural conversation. “What other excitement has come to the world of olive oil ever?” Duda said. What became perhaps Benin’s most famous controversy happened in April, when the CEO went viral for publicly accusing rival DTC olive oil company Brightland for copying Graza’s signature feature, the squeeze bottle. Brightland introduced a new product, a “Pizza Oil” meant to drizzle on pizza for added flavor, in a similar squeezy bottle to Graza’s. Benin’s LinkedIn post, which accused Brightland and its founder Aiswarya Iyer of “blatant disrespect,” was not only covered by the New York Times, but also analyzed in dozens of TikToks with tens of thousands of views each. @cpglauren i love a little controversy so please share you honest opinion on this BREAKING (lol) olive oil news 🫒🫢 i’m very curious what ya think !!!! #graza #grazaoliveoil #brightland #cpgindustry #consumerpackagedgoods ♬ original sound - lauren “Chefs and home cooks have been using squeeze bottles for oil for nearly 50 years, so putting olive oil in a squeeze bottle is not revolutionary nor is it proprietary,” Iyer wrote in an email to Ad Age last week, commenting on the matter for the first time. “With Brightland’s pizza oil, we were inspired by these chefs, as well as squeezy hot honey bottles, and we decided that the pizza oil should live in a more casual format than heavy glass bottles, to easily drizzle and douse over pizza. Our customers have been thrilled!” Benin’s LinkedIn post ended up landing Graza in The New York Times for the first time, which he said had previously been “very difficult” for the brand to penetrate. The New York Times, he said “for the longest time covered every olive oil except us.” Benin insists that he doesn’t factor brand awareness into his knack for making attention-grabbing public statements. “I just do me,” he said. “One time ‘doing me’ was very beneficial to the brand,” he said, referring to the apology letter sent to customers a year ago for the shipping problems and quality lapses. “The second time ‘doing me’ was very detrimental,” he said of the Brightland post, which garnered some negative reactions on social media. The Wall Street Journal’s coverage of the apology letter was “huge” for Graza, Benin said, adding that it helped Graza garner “the most website traffic” it had seen all year. Plus, it likely broadened the brand’s audience. “Someone who subscribes in print to the Wall Street Journal is not a DTC customer. They are not,” he said, adding that the article gave Graza the opportunity to capture an entirely different type of consumer. “And we captured a lot of them,” Benin said. But despite those positive results, Benin said that the apology letter was not “calculated” ahead of time. “The apology letter was a ‘no’ from so many people involved in Graza,” he said—including its board, investors and even some employees. They argued that he shouldn’t bring attention to the problem, he said. But Graza Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder Allen Dushi told Benin he trusted his judgment. So he sent the letter. “Andrew’s personality IS Graza’s personality,” Dushi recently told Ad Age in an email, adding that “half the time, when we are emailing or texting our customers it is just Andrew having fun and messaging them the same way he messages me to ask what I made for dinner. That has led to us earning a ton of trust for the brand, and has played a huge part in Graza's success!” Just a salesperson in the store with a lot of ambition Benin’s unorthodox business approach is influenced by lessons learned at other DTCs, including Warby Parker, Casper, Oura Ring and Magic Spoon. Benin spent years working at these companies, studying every nook and cranny of the DTC industry, folding up his study guide and sticking it in his back pocket to pull from when he would one day start his own DTC brand. Benin’s first love wasn’t olive oil. It was Warby Parker—he lights up when he recalls the first time he heard about the company from a friend and thought “I’m gonna fucking work here.” And work there, he did: “I found out about Warby Parker and my friend found out about a hotel tech startup, we were both like, we’re gonna be startup people. And we graduated early. We got to the city. I went on Craigslist. I found a job opening at Warby Parker.” At Warby, he learned the value of “pristine employee treatment,” he said, adding that the company really valued continuing education. They had an “internal wiki,” he said, where any employee could find out what, say, the user experience team was working on even if they knew nothing about UX. “I was just a salesperson in the store with a lot of ambition,” Benin said. He spent his time going to all the after-work continuing education events the company offered, networking—and sending founder Neil Blumenthal emails, writing things such as, “I really want to get a full-time staff role here, I think I can do it.” “I never did,” Benin said. But he used the name to get a job with Casper, where he soon became employee number seven. His path there wasn’t exactly conventional, either: He showed up at the brand’s New York office after hearing about “these people starting a mattress company” and ended up spending a long evening drinking with the team. “I walked in there and there were six people just in a room around the tables,” he said. “We got a little tipsy that night.” Lindsay Kaplan, who at the time was Casper’s VP of communications and brand, “offered me a job when it wasn’t her job to offer me a job, because we were having so much fun,” Benin recalled. “Philip [Krim], the CEO was like ‘actually, let’s not do that right now,’” Benin said. But the next day, he got a formal job offer. Benin did it all at Casper: He delivered mattresses by hand all over the city, answered phone calls and desk tickets and managed backend e-commerce platforms. Benin soon became, in his words, Casper Co-Founder Neil Parikh’s “right hand,” which made total immersion in the DTC operations and manufacturing world only natural for him. “The brand side of consumer products is obviously the sex appeal, the fun; but the manufacturing side—it’s actually really beautiful also,” he said. In the four years he worked at Casper, he opened the brand’s first European office—which he says was a mistake, and taught him to keep his “eye on the prize.” “America is fucking huge. If you need to claw away an extra $10 million of top-line revenue just because, that means you haven’t even figured out this market,” he said. Casper, Benin says, is where he got his operational knowledge. “What I learned not to do was to expand too quickly. And keep your eye out for competition and copycats.” Although Benin voiced his frustration when Graza, in his opinion, got the “copycat” treatment with the Brightland matter, he seems to have a crystal-clear understanding of how and why other products get copied. Casper, he said, “got copied by a bajillion different companies because pasting together a sandwich of foam is not difficult,” he said. Graza was discussing getting a patent for its packaging before everything happened with Brightland in April, Benin said at the time. “We have yet to formally submit any patent paperwork, but are keeping our options open, especially with bottle molds that we own and created,” he wrote in an email to Ad Age last week. Despite its rapid retail expansion, Graza has yet to go on a hiring spree. For instance, Benin said that Graza has never actually posted a job opening—their hiring processes have been more organic. “We don't need to be a bloated organization, but there's room for hiring here,” he said. Currently, Graza has 12 full-time employees and one contractor on staff. After Casper, Benin took a few more gigs at various DTC brands including Oura Ring and Magic Spoon, where he readily admits he wasn’t a stellar employee. He describes his Oura Ring consulting gig by saying “I was in Finland working at Oura Ring—I was not a good consultant, but whatever.” Magic Spoon, the TikTok-famous DTC cereal brand, gets a similar treatment: “I don’t think I was a good employee there either—I actually got fired from Magic Spoon,” he admitted, although he noted that he learned the power of growth marketing and working with the right agencies there. “I wasn't drinking the Kool-Aid, and I really wanted to start an olive oil company,” he said. Graza’s goal is to be “the biggest olive oil company in America,” Benin says. But it has a ways to go. While the brand declined to share specific sales data, an olive oil industry source said Graza controls less than 0.5% of the U.S. extra virgin olive oil market when measured by liters sold at retail. Private label brands control 40% of the volume, while the top four selling brands—Pompeian, Bertolli, Filippo Berio and California Olive Ranch—have 70%, according to the olive oil industry source, who shared data on the condition of anonymity. Benin said Graza’s market share is likely closer to 1% and “is the fastest growing brand in the space.” At Graza, Benin prides himself in putting a premium on communication. When he first started the brand, he said, “If I was having a terrible day, my thought would be to empathize with our customer, and start an email off with ‘maybe you're having a shite day.’” “There’s more than enough Harvard Business Review articles about the power of communication being a long-term asset to anyone in their career,” Benin added. Once you can communicate well with people, he said, “you’ve cut through that noise.” “There’s nothing behind the veil,” he said. “I have nothing to hide.” Sign up for Ad Age newsletters From influencer marketing to agencies, get the latest news and analysis delivered to your inbox Click here

Making olive oil cool—behind Graza founder’s unorthodox approach

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