Jordan built Caraway by sequentially stacking channels rather than launching everything at once: a cross-brand giveaway waitlist pre-launch, a coordinated 100-200 influencer blitz at launch, then one new paid channel every 3-6 months. He deliberately avoided food influencers and targeted home/design/lifestyle creators where cookware competitors weren't present, and only launched Amazon in March 2022 after discovering 40,000 monthly brand searches, treating it as demand capture with higher contribution margins than DTC.

“I believe within the first launch week we had about 100 or 200 influencers post and it created this really nice halo effect paired with really strong PR talking about the brand”

“we took a really methodical approach of launching basically one channel every 3 to six months scaling it making sure we saw the impact before adding on a new channel”

“we specially avoided um food influencers for the first couple years we focus more on home design lifestyle um influencers who are really into materials parents um we're now just kind of making our way into the food World um but we really found our Niche by focusing on audiences that some of the other brands were ignoring”

“we found out that about 40 I think it was 40,000 people a month were searching for carway...Amazon actually had better margins for us than our D Toc business particularly because you don't have to spend the same amount of AD spend and contribution margin um would be higher at the end of the day”

Jordan Nathan built Caraway through a grind of ~1,000 angel pitches to fund early R&D, then pre-sold the retail channel by bringing buyers into the design process before the product existed. He positioned the brand around three gaps he spotted by watching competitors fail — safety, ease, and high design — and rolled out retail deliberately small (10% of store count first) to protect the brand while he scaled.

“We started talking with retailers actually before we even had the product designed... we brought them along the journey of the design of the brand and so by the time we launched they felt like they were kind of a part of the story and the building.”

“We never ask for the full store count. We're typically saying, 'All right, let's go into 10% of stores. Let's test the assortment. Let's make sure this goes successfully for both partners.' And we can always scale up.”

“It was always really important to us to be an omni channel brand. So while we started direct to consumer and then launched Amazon I think two years after launch, retail was always a big piece of the strategy — if the goal is to really create an alternative in the market for PAS, we literally need to go replace those items on shelves.”

“There were maybe six to eight other brands that had actually entered the market before us... watching that and seeing who was successful and who wasn't, we were able to really craft the brand around safety and ease and high design, which we felt like were kind of the missing components within the market.”

Jordan Nathan built Caraway by treating design as a marketing vehicle to arbitrage ad spend, launching one channel at a time to actually measure what was driving growth, and negotiating favorable payment terms with factories from the very first email so inventory cash converted 2-3x before payment was due. He front-loaded launch with a 150k waitlist built through cross-brand giveaways, 20-30 press placements, and 100 influencers on day one, then maintained momentum through a 24-month marketing calendar anchored on constant newness (collabs, color drops, new products). Profitability on the first purchase — enforced by a hard ROAS floor — was the financial discipline that let everything else compound.

“We've been very thoughtful with only launching one ad channel at a time. What that's enabled us to do is really one, make sure when we launch a channel, it's successful and then two, measure what that channel's actually doing to the business.”

“I credit a lot of our growth to our payment terms with our factories. What that's enabled us to really do is really have an unlimited amount of cash to put into marketing where maybe we're turning it two or three times before we have to pay for the inventory.”

“The best way to do it is when you're kicking off a project, you have to ask for it at the very start in like your first email discussion with a factory. If you get further along in R&D, they've got the leverage.”

“We always ensured we had something new happening to bring awareness to the brand, whether it was a collaboration, color drop, new product, just constant newness has really brought just consistent eyeballs to the brand.”

Jordan Nathan identified a gap where ceramic cookware had existed for a decade but no brand was marketing the non-toxic angle, only the eco-friendly one. Caraway's core GTM move was leading with aesthetic design as the 'marketing vehicle' to sell non-toxic, making the product something people wanted to leave out and talk about. He built distribution across DTC, Amazon, and retail (Target, Crate & Barrel, Container Store) while riding consumer education through podcasts and the broader wellness wave.

“I always come back to like I am the caraway consumer and like what would I want”

“if you create something that people want to leave out and buy for the aesthetic and it happens to also be safe to use, we saw that as a big gap in the market”

“we really wanted to pair it back and put that extra cost into improving the materials that you're cooking with”

“you want to focus on putting out the best product and you know I think starting fresh is a great place where you can develop your brand and really educate the consumer on why the price is what it is”