I’m a product manager who interned at Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Now I’m opening up a candy store.
Current product manager Elly Ross’ new candy shop, “lil sweet treat,” will open on September 7th.
I was going on a walk to lunch one day and I passed by the unit that is now “lil sweet treat” — and I immediately knew that this was the spot for the candy shop.
The summer after my freshman year, I interned as a software engineer at Google. In my sophomore year, I did an innovations analyst internship at the Blackstone Group. Then, I interned at Apple and later Microsoft.
I had these offers from Big Tech companies and, being an immigrant myself, we always strive for stability. My mom said to focus on getting money toward putting a down payment on a house, but I’ve always had this entrepreneurial spirit in me.
I decided to take a leap into working with an e-commerce startup as the head of product instead of going down the traditional path of staying in Big Tech, and it’s been an incredible journey.
But, for some reason, walking past this location ignited it all.
I immediately got down into the weeds of looking up what licenses I needed and how imports and customs worked for importing food. All of that just came to fruition.
I’ve always had the idea of a candy shop
I immigrated to the States when I was young, so growing up, my lunchbox was always filled with Korean snacks. During recess, I’d share my Korean snacks with my classmates, and they’d share their American snacks or those from other cultures they were from.
It was such an incredible way to learn about different cultures and see the pure reactions to snacks that you’d grown up with all your life. I’ve always loved those reactions and that pure joy.
Once I started traveling internationally, that feeling grew. I would always be in sweet shops and finding all different types of snacks and candy. I would try every single one.
I’d buy a bunch of the ones I ended up liking to bring to my friends and family. There was just pure excitement and joy in their faces from trying something that they had never tried before.
So I always knew in the back of my head that I wanted to spread that joy and excitement to a much larger community beyond my family. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve had this idea, but I wanted to focus on building up my tech career, so I put it on the back burner.
But especially nowadays, with the Swedish candy craze and people being really excited about candy in general, I realized that people are really interested in trying new flavors, textures, and types of sweets that they’re not normally exposed to.
So that idea came back to the surface. My product management thinking got the wheels turning of, “Hey, there is a market for this. There is a need for this.”
It’s completely bootstrapped, just me and my husband. We have both brick-and-mortar and DTC e-commerce channels as well, and we went through all the financial modeling to see if this is something that we can afford. And, fortunately for us, we’ve both been working since we were young.
But as an immigrant, as someone who grew up without a lot of financial stability, it’s not only scary to take a leap into something where there is a lot of risk, but also to be putting that entire financial risk on ourselves is absolutely scary.
Yet because it’s something that I’m so passionate about, it’s also not as scary. I feel really confident in it.
Product management skills in the candy shop world
A lot of the skills that I cultivated as a PM have been so helpful in building “lil sweet treat.” Even though they’re not related at all, many of the core principles of how do you delight your shopper and community stand true.
That’s the pillar I always return to — how do I make a magnificent experience?
I look internally at the pain points that I currently face and what I can do to resolve them. Are they not solved because there’s no innovation in that area yet, or it’s really costly and doesn’t make sense from a business perspective, or is there just not a good solution out there that you can implement?
One great example that I got really strong positive feedback from my TikTok community was the shopping bags for the actual candy.
There are a couple of different ways that candy bags can be made, and in a lot of them, I felt that they were a bit too tall and vertical — you couldn’t actually access the candy that you wanted to eat at that set time. And often, the bags don’t have any sort of handle.
Also, many places don’t have sealable bags, and when it comes to candy, you tend to buy a couple of days’ worth. When you buy this large amount of candy, you have to transfer that candy from one of the candy store bags into another vessel at home. That just sounded really counterintuitive.
So, I spent a lot of time designing this bag, and it now is a more rectangular bag with a handle and a sealable zip lock.
The candy can be kept fresh as long as possible in that bag and kept at home. And that’s a really great marketing tool. Every time that your shopper reaches for a sweet treat, they see the “lil sweet treat” branding associate that sweet treat with “lil sweet treat.”
There are a lot of parallels that I’ve been able to draw with product management. How do you lay out the page where a user’s eye will immediately go to? How do you direct them to the products that you want them to see? Where on the screen are you highlighting different new announcements that you want the user to be aware of?
The biggest challenge is probably the fact that, because I haven’t done this before, there’s so much that I don’t know. And I don’t know what I don’t know until I’m currently interacting with it.
Like trash laws in New York — there are so many different retail laws, laws for retail businesses about trash — and then thinking about import rules and customs and figuring out how do you get candy from Germany to New York City.
I’ve helped people break into tech, even if they don’t have the exact experience of being a software engineer or PM. There are ways to bring parallels, whether that’s attention to detail or the way you analyze situations.
And now I’m using a similar approach to utilize my tech skills and PM skills and apply them to being a business owner.
