In this episode of the Harvest Growth Podcast, Jon LaClare interviews Harriet Obinyan, the founder of yu-mn, a line of smart fitness products designed to make exercise accessible to everyone. Harriet is a savvy entrepreneur who recognized a need in her own life and created a solution.
Harriet shares her journey from being a flight attendant who struggled to maintain a fitness routine while traveling, to launching her own business and quickly growing her sales. She discusses how she used platforms like Amazon and RangeMe to get her products in front of major retailers like QVC, Best Buy, and Walmart and offers advice for small businesses looking to grow their presence in the market.
Throughout the interview, Harriet emphasizes the importance of believing in your product, making the most of free or inexpensive opportunities as an entrepreneur, and staying focused on your goals. She encourages aspiring entrepreneurs to start where they are and seek out partnerships like podcasts, mentorships, and accelerator programs to help share their story and grow their brand. You won’t want to miss this interview.
In today’s episode of the Harvest Growth Podcast, we’ll cover:
Making the most of your resources as a low-budget entrepreneur.
Tips for launching your new product in a competitive market.
Tips for getting your product into large retailers and wholesalers.Â
The importance of a compelling brand story for early-stage businesses.
And so much more!
You can listen to the full interview on your desktop or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Or, click to watch the full video interview here!
Get smart with your fitness routine and discover how to stay in shape using Yu-mn’s exciting and socially connected smart fitness tools.
To be a guest on our next podcast, contact us today!
Do you have a brand that you’d like to launch or grow? Do you want help from a partner that has successfully launched hundreds of brands that now total over $2 billion in revenues? Set up a free consultation with us today!
Prefer reading instead of listening? Read the full transcript here!
Jon LaClare [00:00:00]:
Today's guest launched an entire line of smart fitness products on her own and quickly grew her sales. One of the tools she used helped her to get onto QVC, Best Buy and Walmart. And she shares advice on how you can grow your business with major retailers even when you might be a small business.
Announcer [00:00:17]:
Are you looking for new ways to make your sales grow? You've tried other podcasts, but they don't seem to know harvest the growth potential of your product or service as we share stories and strategies that'll make your competitors nervous. Now here's the host of the Harvest Growth podcast, Jon LaClare.
Jon LaClare [00:00:37]:
Welcome back to the show today. I'm really excited to have on our show Harriet Obinyan. Now, she is the founder of yu-mn. It's Yu-Mn.com. If you want to check out the website, of course, it's in our show notes as always, great name, but it's a really cool line of products that she has developed and we're gonna hear her story about really what she's done so far, how she's learned. And I think you're going to learn a lot in this interview as well. Well, first of all though, Harriet, welcome to the show.
Harriet Obinyan [00:01:04]:
Thank you so much, John. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Jon LaClare [00:01:09]:
Absolutely. So tell us about yu-mn. Tell us about your line of products.
Harriet Obinyan [00:01:15]:
I think yu-mn is a line of product that was born out of a need. For almost a decade, I was a flight attendant flying around the world, around the globe, and I needed to constantly be, you know, be in shape workout, and it just wasn't happening. So I created my own like, workout kit, basic jump rope, basic foldable mat and 1 kg weight set that I traveled with all the time. Because sometimes the gyms are always closed in the hotel. You get to Australia, it's a different time zone and the gym is closed in the hotel. So I started coming up with that to make workout easy for me. And that's where I got my tagline for when I was going to start my business, taking the ambiguity out of fitness. You know, I wanted, when I decided to stop flying, I wanted to make fitness accessible to everybody.
Harriet Obinyan [00:02:12]:
You know, there was just this ambiguity around fitness where everyone had to go to a gym or register at a gym. I did register at a gym. I was living in Dubai at the time. I registered at a gym for about $1,000 plus. And I probably went six times because I was always out of town. So this is how I came up with this idea. And I figured when I started to talk to people when I moved to North America that people had the same issues. They work so hard, they don't even have time to work out because they can't get to the gym they paid for.
Harriet Obinyan [00:02:41]:
So I started thinking, okay, this is the line I want to go into. And I wanted to come up with products that were extraordinary, were extra, that could do much more. And so I decided to add smart to the whole idea. And so that's why you find out that with jimin product, it's more. It's tending towards the smart aspect, where you can use your phone to keep track of what you're doing. And we kind of kept improving on that, and that's where yu-mn is at now. We're still pushing to get it smarter so people can stay in their house or in their offices. You work from home, you take a break within your work, do your jump rope, get back to work.
Harriet Obinyan [00:03:22]:
So you are mobile, you know, you're putting some fitness exercise in between your work. Even if you had to work the whole day and you were working from home, so you can do it from home, you can do it if you're working from home. And like, I've been in Canada for a while, when it snows, it snows. You can't go out to the gym. This is where yu-mn comes in. So it's been well accepted in Canada because of the weather. Kind of seven months of the year, it's cold. You're not very motivated to go out.
Harriet Obinyan [00:03:57]:
You can walk out from home and you can keep track of everything and even compete with people with the app that we use. So that's just a little history and kind of bring you forward to where we are right now.
Jon LaClare [00:04:09]:
And I personally use a few of your products I can share with our audience. You've got some compression socks, which are really comfortable compression socks and not as. I don't know, some are hard to put on and become uncomfortable, but they're really well designed and extremely soft. But the two smart products that I personally use on a regular basis are a smart jump rope. And I love that it comes with both options. You can quickly change between a real jump rope and then one with probably a better way to say this, but the ball, you know, the little balls that are like a six inch ending and they go around so you're not actually hitting the floor. Or when I like to work out of my room sometimes in the morning or evening after getting up or before bed or whatever, I could jump rope or hit the ceiling or stuff around you. But the little balls on the side obviously don't.
Jon LaClare [00:04:53]:
Right. It makes it much easier to do anywhere when I travel in a hotel room. Super simple, and it keeps track of how long you go, how many jumps you've done, etcetera. And then the other one that I love is the smart yoga mat. So it's a super premium. I'm not a big yoga person personally, but it's a yoga mat. But it has other exercises built into it, planks and pushups and setups that are basically tracked very easily. Just you move a little device to the little icon and, okay, now it's push ups, now it's planks.
Jon LaClare [00:05:22]:
And I think the similarity between the two, for one, very high quality. Like, it's. I've used a lot of yoga mats over the years for various exercises, and it's, to be honest, the best quality, thickness, softness, mat that I've really ever used. But I love, personally, that these products are smart, but simple. A lot of smart products. When you connect, you're like, I don't want to do fitness, where I've got to connect this complex app. And it takes a bunch of steps and processes in order to get it done. But yours is really easy.
Jon LaClare [00:05:53]:
Fire up the app, boom, you go, you're ready. It's smart, but also simple, and it's a great combination. I do, again, encourage our audience. You can learn more about the products at the website. Why you hyphen Mn.com pronounced yu-mn. Like yu-mn. Let's talk more about the business now. So you started small.
Jon LaClare [00:06:12]:
You talked about how you generated the ideas originally, but you also moved very quickly to get these products to market. And they're not simple products you can just make out of your garage or your back room. There's a lot of work that goes into designing, packaging that's beautiful and the products themselves that are so functional and so much to them. How did you get all this done so quickly?
Harriet Obinyan [00:06:34]:
I think I started just before COVID and Covid validated the idea. So I was locked in throughout Covid, nothing to do. So I had. I threw myself into building. But that being said, you could build and not put it out there. You could build and continue to build and continue to build and not put it out there. One of the advantages I had is that I had a little bit of a background in logistics, so I knew how to, you know, find my way around having samples made for the ideas that I had. Then I.
Harriet Obinyan [00:07:13]:
I started to look for opportunities, and I wasn't looking for. I wasn't looking for everything. To get perfect before I put it out there. So when I built and I created the first set of samples and they were up to standard, I knew I had not reached, I had not reached where I was going, but I knew it was good enough for the market. I judged that it was good enough for the market. I checked with people who tried the products out for me and they felt it was good enough for the market. And I went to the market, I had more ideas, but I didn't have the resources to take it to that level. So, you know, one thing I also noticed is that a lot of times you listen to a lot of motivational talks, you listen to a lot of entrepreneurs, and there's a huge list of what needs to be done to bring a product.
Harriet Obinyan [00:08:06]:
But then again, you have to personalize your own experience. You have to take what you need and get to market as quickly as possible. So I looked for opportunities that showcased what I had at the very barest minimum price or for free. And so that brings me to how I got into Amazon. I really did my research. I asked questions. I figured, where would you buy something if you wanted to buy something right now? And every question, every person was answering Amazon and it was the lockdown. People were at home.
Harriet Obinyan [00:08:44]:
So I figured, I think that's where I need to be first because nobody knows me. I'm a new brand.
Jon LaClare [00:08:50]:
It's a great way to start. Obviously, during the pandemic, Amazon, it's been big for a while, but it exploded and really has continued and it continues to be and really has been for years a great place to launch, depending on the type of product you have. But certainly a channel to be on. But it's important to not be the only channel. As you've learned through this, you can't have all your eggs in one basket or be controlled by one marketing channel. And since then, you've had great success in getting into other various marketing channels. And I think you mentioned to me it all started, or some of it at least started with your connection to rangeme. So maybe could you explain a little bit about that and especially for our audience that may not be familiar with what Rangeme is.
Harriet Obinyan [00:09:31]:
Absolutely. So after Amazon, I moved to Rangeme when, you know, I always, like, I advise, like a few times when I talk to fellow entrepreneurs, like, take it bit by bit. You cannot do, you're too small to do everything. At the same time, you cannot afford it. You are just one person. You're going to burn out. So I started off with Amazon, tried to outsource what I could and do what I could do by myself. And after I felt like I had a presence in Amazon.
Harriet Obinyan [00:10:02]:
When you Google yu-mn, you could see that the product is on Amazon. I went into Rangeme. Rangeme is a wholesale platform where you could list your product. There are few, there's a free option and there's a paid option. And I did get a discount at the point, so I was able to go into the premium. And when I got on the premium of range me, I got even more, I got more visibility. So that's how I got like the big companies like Walmart and Best Buy and QVC, they have kind of like an open call for product. So you put yourself in like, okay, I've got this product.
Harriet Obinyan [00:10:48]:
You list the product you want to showcase with them, depending on the kind of products they're calling for. It's a wholesale platform and wholesalers come there to look for products. And trust me, these brands are looking for products all the time. They're looking for something fresh to put on their shelves. They're looking for a small brand to bring to light for various reasons. Some of them are just to, you know, to be responsible to support small brands and some of the reasons are just to put fresh products on their, on their shelves. So if you put yourself out there, they'll find you. And they did pick me.
Harriet Obinyan [00:11:23]:
And I had the opportunity to pitch, to range me to QVC, HSN, to best buy. And on all occasions I was, I was, I don't like to use the word lucky, but again, because lucky is being prepared and meeting with the right opportunity. So I'll just use the, I can use the word lucky now that I've explained how I see it. So I was lucky to get picked on all three occasions as well. And then there are other smaller brands, smaller wholesalers that would reach out to you that you do small deals with. It might not be as big as, you know, what the big brands would do, but they do have their own, they have their own audiences as well. And the more visibility you have, the better for you. Don't underestimate any visibility.
Harriet Obinyan [00:12:10]:
You'll be surprised whose hands your product will get into.
Jon LaClare [00:12:14]:
Yeah, you mentioned luck and it's, you know, a lot of inventors maybe out there that have great products, and if you sit on your hands and just hope people are going to find you, it never does. Right. So luck comes through hard work and being in the right place and also developing a great product or line of products that when you are found now, you can get these retailers, whether they're online or brick and mortar, something that they're going to love, right. That their customers will love and care about. So it does take a lot of work, but some of that, it just becomes, hey, you got to be out there in a lot of different places. And rangeme is one good one to be found on. So that's fantastic.
Harriet Obinyan [00:12:50]:
Yeah.
Jon LaClare [00:12:51]:
And what's next for your business at this point?
Harriet Obinyan [00:12:55]:
I think we, we're really working hard at creating our own fitness app. We do have, like, a layout of how we want it to be already, and we're also looking at the clothing line just to keep it simple. Those are the two areas that we're focused on right now. They have sourcing funds for these two major projects. Other than that, I think we've mastered what we're doing right now. We just need to take it a step further.
Jon LaClare [00:13:22]:
Makes sense. And for our listeners, do you have any resources that you would recommend that have been helpful to you in your journey?
Harriet Obinyan [00:13:31]:
Yes, absolutely. I always advise, like, put yourself as an entrepreneur, as an aspiring entrepreneur, because some people have great ideas, but they've just been, they've just not pushed themselves or they've just not believed in themselves enough to start. If you never try, you never know. I'd always say, like, put yourself or make the best of opportunities that are free or inexpensive as an entrepreneur, don't you? You know, there's that famous questions like, who are your competitors in the market when gyms, when, you know, big brands are saying, who are your competitors? They know themselves, but you are just coming. They are competitors, yes, but they are kind of like on a higher scale than you are. So they are kind of competitive mentors. You want to be like them, but it's not going to be overnight. They compete in what you have, but it's not an overnight achievement.
Harriet Obinyan [00:14:32]:
So you cannot afford to wait until your product is as perfect as you have a wide variety of products, like they do before you start. Start where you are and look for partnerships like podcasts. Look for partnership like mentorship and accelerator programs where people can hear your story because there's. There's power to the story behind your brand. There is so much power to the story behind your brand, your why? Why. And you have to be convinced about what you're doing before you can sell it to other people.
Jon LaClare [00:15:06]:
Absolutely. Well, Harry, this has been a great interview. Is there anything I didn't ask that you think would be helpful for our audience?
Harriet Obinyan [00:15:12]:
Stay focused on what you're doing and believe in the products that you have created and put it out there.
Jon LaClare [00:15:20]:
That's great advice, and I do want to encourage our audience. Please check out yu-mn.com dot. It's spelled yumn.com dot. As always, it's in our show notes. If you're driving, just check it out. You can go to harvestgrowthpodcast.com or whatever platform you're listening or watching this on. I also want to say, did you know you can meet with a member of my team absolutely free for a 30 minutes strategy consultation? We've launched and grown hundreds of products since 2007 and learned some of our strategies while growing Oxiclean back in the Billy Mays days. We're here to help, so please go to harvestgrowth.com and set up a call if you'd like to discuss further.
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