Cristina Reding of Aroma Retail: Five Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Launched My Business or Startup
An Interview With Doug Noll
Most of your marketing tactics will be obsolete every 6 months. Whether it’s an algorithm change from Google, or another social media platform coming in or going out of style, whatever you’re doing today is going to be very different in 6 months.
Taking the risk to start a company is a feat few are fully equipped for. Any business owner knows that the first few years in business are anything but glamorous. Building a successful business takes time, lessons learned, and most importantly, enormous growth as a business owner. What works and what doesn’t when one starts a new business? What are the valuable lessons learned from the “University of Adversity”? As part of this interview series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Cristina Reding
Recently named one of Inc. Magazine’s Female Founders 200, Cristina Reding built her Aroma Retail empire from her kitchen in 2017 to generating more than $5 million in annual revenue last year. Reding grew up in Romania and toured the world as a professional ballet dancer before climbing the ranks at Bank of America as vice president and corporate trainer, also holding a Ph.D in special education where she teaches educational methodology courses at University of Nevada Las Vegas. Aroma Retail is one of the fastest-growing fragrance companies and has partnered with resorts along the Las Vegas Strip to destinations across the country to develop their signature environmental scents for visitors to remember and crave after each visit. From developing proprietary products for travel, home and professional use, Cristina has continued to break through barriers and establish herself as a force to be reckoned with.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
I thought it was just going to be a small side gig. I was an executive with a major bank and a part-time teacher at UNLV. My husband is the guy that developed the custom signature scents for many of the resorts here in Las Vegas, and his clients were asking him to get candles and other gifts made using their scent. I figured we could do it on our kitchen counter while watching TV in the evenings. We wrecked all my pots figuring it out, but the business grew immediately as soon as people found out what I was doing.
Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey?
The risk was daunting at first, I am not one of these serial entrepreneurs that is comfortable and ready to go full steam all at once. It took a lot of investment and time to get to the point where we had a solid, quality product. Money is always a concern, but time is a resource you never get back. It took us nearly a full year and a half of hard, constant work to get to a point where we had the right product and a website to sell and market it through. Then, it was at least another year before I could quit my day job and focus fulltime on Aroma Retail. Every phase of that was incredibly scary.
Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?
At first, it was the thrill of creating something out of nothing. My husband is a wonderful motivator, and he’s much more of a risk-taker than I am. The most powerful driver, though, was when I hired my first couple of employees and realized that there are other livelihoods at stake here. Today, my 26 employees keep me very motivated to continue to innovate and grow our organization while staying committed to the core values and quality we are known for.
So, how are things going today? How did grit and resilience lead to your eventual success?
I actually researched grit and resilience in my doctoral dissertation, and studied how these qualities affect young students’ academic success. The same principle applies here. Grit is what gets the tough decisions made and the grueling grind work done. Resilience is what lets you learn and quickly bounce back from failure. Both these amazing traits kept me and my team coming in day after day, ready to tackle anything the day brought in. Without these, my business would not exist. Today, we are a well-oiled machine that lives and breathes the Aroma Retail mission.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Since this is an e-commerce company, my first commercial space was just a warehouse for production and shipping, with no area for having customers come in person — I didn’t think it was necessary. Right after moving in, a customer showed up. I said, “What are you doing here?” He laughed and said he wanted to smell the fragrances. I said, “How did you find out where this is?” My husband walked up and realized it was a customer, and said, “What are you doing here?” We had a good laugh, then we sat on a makeshift bench and smelled fragrances together. The customer then went on the website with his phone, placed an order, and walked out with it. The next week, the same thing happened again, and I cobbled together what I called “The Smelly Bar” for walk-in customers. Today, we do more than $100,000 a month from our 2ft x 5ft Smelly Bar. The lesson here is that you don’t have to have a pretty storefront on Main Street to be able to meet your customers.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
We were the first Environmental Scenting company to make Pure Grade Fragrance Oils available to the public. Pure Grade Fragrance Oils are fragrance oils that can be diffused in public spaces without the public’s consent. This is because there are no synthetic toxins and no volatile organic compounds (VOC’s) like pollen that is found in essential oils, that could cause an allergic reaction. Pure Grade Fragrance Oils are rare and hard to make. Before I launched AromaRetail.com, consumers could only get these types of fragrance oils by signing expensive long-term contracts with an Environmental Scenting Company. I tried to cooperate with the largest Environmental Scenting company in the beginning, but they thought it was a stupid idea to launch a website to sell it online directly to consumers. I’m now their largest competitor.
Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?
The same thing I would say to someone who wants to be a professional fighter or an entertainer — be okay with being punched in the face, get used to rejection and obstacles. Also, make sure you can do the work yourself in the beginning. You don’t want to give away equity, take on more debt than you can handle, or start hiring people before you know that your business has legs. Once you do get to a point where you can hire people, don’t chicken out and do those baloney 1099 contracted relationships with people that you expect to act like full-time employees. Do it right. Be loyal and committed to whoever you bring on, and expect them to be loyal and committed to you, and you will be able to properly delegate to grow your business.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
My husband, Jim. He was quite content developing custom fragrances for resorts and selling scenting as a service for other companies. When I found myself with a business that wanted to grow faster than I had anticipated, I hired him as the CEO to be the visionary that a company with this type of potential needed. I’ve always been more of an integrator than a visionary, so we make the perfect team. We could not be where we are without its creative mind, his infectious optimist, and his unstoppable energy and drive.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
We love our first responders and veterans and employ quite a few. Aroma Retail offers permanent special discounts to first responders, veterans, and active military personnel. We also partner with Vegas Veterans Hockey Foundation to offer discounts and donate 10% off profits to this local organization supporting vets and active-duty military.
We are the first business in Southern Nevada to be certified with the Green Business Engagement National Network as of December 2021. This organization tracks and connects green businesses to provide opportunities for sharing eco-friendly practices and encouraging new opportunities to keep our environment safe. Being ‘Green’ means making every effort possible to conserve our precious natural resources, prevent pollution from harming the environment, and making a positive impact overall. Moreover, this means we use no volatile organic compounds and are careful not to waste plastic, water, paper, nor electricity. We also want to be good for our local community, so we are one of the big supporters of our Three-Square Food Bank community program.
Aroma Retail has always looked toward operations with an eye on being earth friendly, from the time we were just starting out making products on our kitchen counter to the Smelly Van we use for transporting today, the Smelly Bar brick and mortar store you can now visit, and to our new facility that we like to call ‘Our Happy Place’. Recycling is a big part of saving our planet. Because of this, our boxes used for shipping are recyclable, the bottles are made of partly recycled plastic and even the packing peanuts are biodegradable. In addition to ensuring our products are environmentally safe, we also give back to the community and are one of the major donors and supporters of Love the Sea — a charity which cleans the beaches and oceans of garbage.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first launched my business,” and why? Please share a story or example for each.
1 . Most of your marketing tactics will be obsolete every 6 months. Whether it’s an algorithm change from Google, or another social media platform coming in or going out of style, whatever you’re doing today is going to be very different in 6 months.
2 . Selling on Amazon is not as easy as it seems. I highly recommend selling your product on Amazon, but keep in mind that those are Amazon’s customers and Amazon very carefully controls how much you can communicate with them. We quickly learned to sell our uncomplicated products like fragrance oil refills there.
3 . Managing a website is also no picnic. Pick your infrastructure very carefully. If your product is a simple singular item, go with something like Shopify that has everything bundled. If your product is like mine, with lots of variety and optionality, go with something like WooCommerce that allows for full customization.
4 . There is no easy button for sales. Sales takes work and investment. Don’t be fooled by online marketing pitches that want you to wait months and months to see results while paying enormous fees in the meantime. I did that once, and yanked the contract when my daily sales went from thousands to a flat zero with the marketing company asking me to just be patient.
5 . Your product will have to constantly improve. Customer feedback is my lifeline. I do not put products out there unless I think they are perfect, but I have to let that perfection be defined by my customer, and this requires constant improvement.
Can you share a few ideas or stories from your experience about how to successfully ride the emotional highs & lows of being a founder”?
One million dollars divided by 365 days is $2,740. Celebrate when you hit that daily sales average, and enjoy the moment. It gets real after that. To go from one million to five million, you have to let go of the daily minutiae. Once you hit the five-million-dollar mark ($13,700 per day), celebrate that one too, because you guessed it, your world has to change again. To grow from five million, you now have to let go of managerial decision making by building layers of solid leadership and infrastructure. If I had known this in the beginning, I think my emotional peaks and valleys would have been much smoother. My business is my baby, and it’s no different than watching that little bundle of joy turn into a smelly teenager and start adulting.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
As an immigrant myself, I would love to see more messages of hope and optimism based on the unique capabilities of each person regardless of their national origin, race, or other demographics that are irrelevant to business acumen. There are too many messages out there right now that tell people they are disadvantaged for one reason or another, and it can be harmful to people’s motivation and appetite to take risks and realize their full potential. Self-esteem, grit and resilience should guide everyone to achieve. My movement would be the one that tells everyone, “You can be successful if you do the work and make the right decisions for yourself.”
How can our readers further follow your work online?
www.aromaretail.com That’s my company and my passion. I send out a newsletter on the second Tuesday of every month, so be sure to subscribe to that as well.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
About the Interviewer: Douglas E. Noll, JD, MA was born nearly blind, crippled with club feet, partially deaf, and left-handed. He overcame all of these obstacles to become a successful civil trial lawyer. In 2000, he abandoned his law practice to become a peacemaker. His calling is to serve humanity, and he executes his calling at many levels. He is an award-winning author, teacher, and trainer. He is a highly experienced mediator. Doug’s work carries him from international work to helping people resolve deep interpersonal and ideological conflicts. Doug teaches his innovative de-escalation skill that calms any angry person in 90 seconds or less. With Laurel Kaufer, Doug founded Prison of Peace in 2009. The Prison of Peace project trains life and long terms incarcerated people to be powerful peacemakers and mediators. He has been deeply moved by inmates who have learned and applied deep, empathic listening skills, leadership skills, and problem-solving skills to reduce violence in their prison communities. Their dedication to learning, improving, and serving their communities motivates him to expand the principles of Prison of Peace so that every human wanting to learn the skills of peace may do so. Doug’s awards include California Lawyer Magazine Lawyer of the Year, Best Lawyers in America Lawyer of the Year, Purpose Prize Fellow, International Academy of Mediators Syd Leezak Award of Excellence, National Academy of Distinguished Neutrals Neutral of the Year. His four books have won a number of awards and commendations. Doug’s podcast, Listen With Leaders, is now accepting guests. Click on this link to learn more and apply.
