On this episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Stephanie Moyal. She is the co-founder of Troop, a wellness brand crafting functional mushroom gummies designed to make brain and body support both approachable and enjoyable. With a background that spans multiple career paths and a turning point sparked by a book on mushrooms, Stephanie turned personal curiosity into a fast-growing DTC business. We talk about turning personal curiosity into a company, focusing efforts instead of chasing channels, growing stronger through personal challenges, and so much more!
Stephanie Moyal is the co-founder of Troop, a functional mushroom brand transforming wellness routines through approachable, science-backed gummies. Built at the intersection of personal healing and product innovation, Troop is helping redefine how consumers experience the benefits of mushrooms, one gummy at a time.
After exploring multiple career paths and feeling unfulfilled, Stephanie came across a book on mushrooms that sparked a complete shift in direction. What started as a personal fascination with neuroplasticity and brain health quickly evolved into a product mission grounded in education, quality, and access. At Troop, Stephanie leads everything from product development to brand storytelling, helping bridge the gap between skepticism and belief in a growing wellness category.
Though she entered CPG without a traditional background, Stephanie brings a founder’s resilience and clarity to each challenge, navigating go-to-market tradeoffs, scaling digital alongside strategic wholesale, and building emotional alignment with customers and cofounders alike.
Whether discussing how Troop approached product sampling and what didn’t work, why the mushroom industry is just getting started, or how therapy strengthened her cofounder partnership, Stephanie offers a candid and insightful perspective on building a brand with both purpose and endurance.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
Resources:
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Stephanie Moyal
Definitely listen and be inspired by what other people are doing. But also stay the course. Stay your path and trust your own path.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Chase Clymer
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today, I'm welcoming to show Stephanie Moyle. She is the co-founder of Troop. Stephanie, welcome to the show.
Stephanie Moyal
Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here.
Chase Clymer
It's going to be a great conversation. So for those that are, you know, not in the know. Could you tell us a bit more about the types of products you bring into the market over at Troop?
Stephanie Moyal
Yes, definitely. Here at Troop, we do functional mushroom gummies. We have 3 products so far. We have a Lion's Mane, a Reishi, and a 6 mushroom blend that includes Lion's Mane, Reishi, and 4 other mushrooms. So Chaga, Cordyceps, Maitake, and Turkey Tail.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Well, I guess, take me back in time. Where did the idea for this business come from?
Stephanie Moyal
Yeah, so it actually started during COVID. So right when the lockdown happened, I was working in hotels and I lost my job. And my cousin had just gone into a ski accident, broke his leg and had to move in with his family. And so we were very close. And I said, I can move in with you and your family and help take care of your legs. I'm such a great cousin. And so I moved in with them. And after like a few weeks of, you know, the normal watching of Tiger King and all those stupid COVID things, I got really bored and I started pursuing passions and I came across this book that was randomly sitting on the counter and it said how to change your mind. And I said, okay, I'm gonna read this. I had no idea what it was. And it changed my life. I didn't know that mushrooms could be neuroplastic and help heal your brain and help heal your body. And I felt like I had discovered this secret that no one was talking about.
So I asked my cousin Jake if he wanted to start growing mushrooms with me and he said yes. So we started growing mushrooms in the closet and it just kind of, it wormed whole into this whole new world that we just didn't know anything about. And as we're learning and just loving it more and more, we wanted to share these benefits with our community. And when we looked at what was on the market, everything was in powders and capsules and tinctures.
And when we would buy these products, we just wouldn't want to take them ourselves, even though we knew how good they were for us. Just that form factor was so not motivating to take. And so we were like, let's make gummies. No one was doing gummies. So we took the mushrooms that we grew and we turned them into gummies and it was in the kitchen. And it was just a very organic process. And I remember I was at my friend's house telling him and his dad about what we were doing.
And I was like, yeah, we're just taking it slow, seeing what happens. And he looked at me and said, you need to run. Like this is an amazing idea, an amazing opportunity. You're at the forefront. You need to create a company and start running. So I called my cousin after that meeting and I was like, holy shit, like we need to turn this into a company. Are you down? And he was like, yeah, okay, I'm down. So we just started putting together a business. And here we are three years later.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing. Now, where was the aha moment of like, wait, let's just make a gummy out of it? How did that come to you?
Stephanie Moyal
So the gummy was actually Jake's idea. We were just sitting in the kitchen. And we were like, we need to figure out a way to share this with people. How do we share this with people in a way that we would want to do?
And I actually wanted to make chocolates or peanut butter cups, make it a different form of a sweet delicious treat. And Jake was like, no, so many people are allergic to peanut butter and I don't really care for chocolate. He's like, let's make gummies. And so we're like, okay, let's make gummies.
Chase Clymer
I mean, that's amazing. It's definitely a hole in the market. And you came in and did it. You're messing around the kitchen and you're trying to build these gummies yourself and figure all that science out to where now you're dealing with manufacturers and getting it done at a little bit of a bigger scale.
Stephanie Moyal
Yeah. So it took about a year of iterating. I had looked on LinkedIn for a gummy scientist or a gummy guy, basically, because we had no idea how to make gummies. And we tried it ourselves and we failed miserably. So we needed to have some professional help. So I found a gummy scientist who had been in the industry for about 40 years.
And he helped us put together a viable product because we didn't even know if what we wanted was possible. So he helped us put together a viable product. And then we had to basically take our custom-made formula and go to different manufacturers and make it a formula that you could scale because what you make in your kitchen for pretty much any product is not going to be how they make it for a shelf stable, scalable product.
And so finding manufacturers was a horrific journey. So, so bad. It took us about 2 years to find good people, good partners. And it almost crippled us. There was a time there where I really thought it was the end of us because we had found this company actually sought us out, made us all these promises, and was so deceitful and lied so much.
And we ended up not having a product for over a month. We lost out on a month of subscription revenue, which when you first launch is not good. And we didn't have any products to sell. And we didn't even know if it was going to end up being made. And it was a nightmare. And then finally, we found our people. But yeah, manufacturing was definitely no easy feat.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, I think that I've had a bunch of different founders on the show. And when we start talking about manufacturing and MQLs, like minimum orders and whatnot. There are good partners and there are bad partners. And you really need to go out there and talk to a bunch of different people and make sure that they pass that vibe check.
Stephanie Moyal
Yeah. The interesting thing was that this company in particular, so they sought us out. And he seemed really cool. He seems great. Everything was awesome. He was saying all of the right things. We actually went to the facility, checked it out. It seems really great.
And just all of a sudden took this turn that we could have never predicted. He basically, they had signed on a larger competitor of ours and put us to the side. And we were even skeptical that they shared our formula because our formula is proprietary to us. It's custom and we spent a lot of time working on that. They basically put us on the back burner and then I went to the facility to check in on what was going on because it had been so long of a run around.
And he was saying that I was inside of the manufacturing plant yelling at people. And I was just sitting in the waiting room waiting for someone to come talk to me. He was lying about what I was doing to my business partner. It was the craziest thing ever. And luckily, I got a hold of a private gummy manufacturer to make us 5,000 bottles just to tie us over as we found someone new. But it was the craziest situation. And sometimes these things are just unforeseen.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, that's really unfortunate. Now let's pivot to the go-to-market and launch this. What was that strategy all about? How did you get people to learn about your gummies and potentially buy them beyond your friends and family?
Stephanie Moyal
Yeah. So luckily, we do have very supportive friends and family. So big shout out to them. But yeah, when Jake and I launched this company, we actually had no idea what we were doing. We thought that it was going to be the Warby Parker days of $6 CPMs and all that stuff.
Actually, we didn't even really know about CPMs when we first launched. So we actually thought that people would need to try the product. And because we had been told mushroom gummies, that sounds really gross. And we really pride ourselves on being a delicious, high quality product. And so we thought people are going to need to try this.
So we invested so much into sampling, IRL, all of that kind of stuff. Huge failure because A, it's not measurable. B, you really do need a ton of time and money to dedicate to that. And it's not very scalable. You really should scale the company first and then invest in community and tasting and all of that stuff from what we've seen for our company. Yeah, we quickly learned that that did not work for us.
And then we pivoted to ads and Amazon and online presence. So Troop has definitely been failing fast but failing forward as well when we first launched.
Chase Clymer
Gotcha. So these days, you exist not only on your own.com, which I am just going to venture to guess is on Shopify.
Stephanie Moyal
Yes.
Chase Clymer
And then you also exist on Amazon and then you're still doing the wholesale play?
Stephanie Moyal
Yes. So, we exactly as you said, have our website, trytroop.com. And then we are on Amazon and we are doing very well on Amazon. And we also have some strategic Southern California retailers, which is where we're located. We decided to start dipping our toes into the retail arena because we had heard such horror stories about companies off the bat getting these gigantic POs and these really amazing stores, and then it absolutely cripples them not being able to free fill the stores, support it with demos, having high enough velocity to stay there.
So when we heard those stories, we said, okay, let's make sure that when we go into our dream stores like Target and regional, or sorry, national Whole Foods, that we are really prepared for this.
So we brought on a local broker for Southern California and our first partner was Erewhon, which is, for those who don't know, one of the most premier grocery stores in the country. And they're located solely for that moment in California. And so that was a huge testament to our company, to our products.
And it's a stamp of validation because they're such small stores that they have about 10 right now, I think. It's not moving the needle as much as let's say like if I got into a regional Whole Foods or something like that. But it is a huge stamp of validation and they've been great to work with. So we've done the strategic wholesale in California and then digital online presence.
Chase Clymer
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Can you talk to me a bit? Not to me, but more to the listeners out there. It's like from a founder's mouth, just like, what is the difference between launching on Amazon versus launching on your own.com?
Stephanie Moyal
Amazon is its own beast. Truly. It really is. It is super technical. Always changing. You have to be in it. It's not just something that, Oh, I'm going to be on Amazon. You have to be changing the keywords you're bidding on constantly and just always, always iterating your designs and A-B testing your images and your brand story.
And it's basically, as you would think of your dot com business with Meta and Instagram and all of that, it's exactly the same caliber. So I like to look at things as different engines of the car or of the machine. And you have all in the same line. You have wholesale, and then you have your website, and then you have Amazon. And these are all huge functions of your business that will then umbrella out into other components.
So what we learned launching our business is not to spread yourself so thin. Do one thing and do it well. So if you don't have the team to do Amazon, and you're just doing it yourself and you're already super busy, I would honestly say it might not be super worth it. I may get your stuff on there and hope for some organic. But do one thing and do it really well. And we had to do Amazon well, we had to hire an agency.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Yeah, I think that a lot of small businesses just hear about things that are working for other brands who may not be at the same size or scale as you. And it's also obviously not the same offer, not the same product, whatever. I think this shotgun approach to trying to grow a business and not focusing on one thing is where people are.
They make expensive mistakes. And not only just are they expensive, but it's just time consuming. It's like if you just put all your energy into one channel and figured it out that would just set the momentum to grow other channels.
Stephanie Moyal
100%. And also there is something to be said about starting with Amazon and then going to your website. And I know that's not really the traditional approach. But Amazon now has a fulfillment for not only FBA. So not only their prime customers and the people who shop on Amazon, but you can fulfill your website through Amazon as well. And so you can delegate everything to them.
And while they do take a pretty decent percentage. Sometimes it is easier than managing your own fulfillment center or things like that. So there are different approaches to this. And I also resonate with what you just said about hearing what other founders are doing and what works well for them and then thinking it's going to work well for you.
And a lot of times that's just not the case. And it's really about just kind of like you got to keep your head down. Definitely listen and be inspired by what other people are doing. But also stay the course. Stay your path and trust your own path. And that was something that we didn't do at the beginning. And we came back in a really big loop back to our original plan. And I think that just goes to show that you do know, ultimately, what's best for your business and not to let the noise impact what you're doing.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. I think that it is noise. And we got an ebook that I wrote and that's old that I need to add to and update it here for 2025. But there was something in there that me and Krista, who helped me with a lot of the copy in there, we called it the Ecommerce Advice Tornado. It's just like you're hearing so much stuff out there. Really, you got to keep your blinders on and stay focused.
And then another thing is we're at our agency, we run our own version of EOS and that's found in that book Traction. But there, one of the best things it talks about is just how to write down your ideas and then see if they're important later. And it's not jumping around to the next shiny object, but staying the course on like, we know this needs to be gone. Let's get it done. Then we'll move on to the next thing if it actually matters later.
And the whole concept of the issues list from that book Traction is funny to me because it sets you up in a way to where things will be on your issues list one week and the next week, it just solves itself because it isn't a real problem.
I think that entrepreneurs suffer from shiny object syndrome and they want to do everything. And it's just like, you got to start keeping the main thing the main thing. And then when you have time, try everything else instead of doing the newest, next, dispensing first, and then you don't have enough time to do the right thing.
Stephanie Moyal
For sure. And also, I think just being really strategic about your time to your point, you know, there's things that you need to set up initially that could take a long time. But then once they're set up, they're essentially running themselves or you just have to do check ins on them. So just utilizing your time doing that and then letting that run and then bringing in the other things as well. But yeah, I mean, I totally mean, my co-founder especially suffers from that. He has a lot of ADHD tendencies.
And so I have to kind of reel him in sometimes. And then sometimes he reels me and he's like, no, I actually think this is a really good idea. So there is definitely a balance, but I think a lot of times it's easier sometimes to get distracted by this new shiny thing that looks like it's gonna do really well for you. What I've seen is like, going away when you're about 10% done, does not serve you.
Just even energetically. I don't know. I think it's really worth just finishing your task and then moving on. And that's why my calendar is totally time chunked for everything that I do. It's crazy. But then I actually get the things done and then I can move on.
Chase Clymer
Oh, no, no, no. That makes complete sense to me. Now, the name of the show obviously is Honest Ecommerce. So looking back, are there other than maybe signing with the wrong manufacturer?
Like any other mistakes that come to mind that are just standing out right now or you just want to let our audience know, like, hey, don't do this.
Stephanie Moyal
There are so many. I would say that it's really beneficial to bring on experts. And a lot of times that can seem really expensive, but it's so worth it in the end. There's this expression that we heard when we were first launching our business called first class is always cheaper.
And it took me so long to actually understand what that meant. And what it means is that I can pay for the cheaper way and pay for the lesser ads agency or something. I'm still paying for them, but they're not doing a good job. Ultimately, they're costing me time and money.
Rather, if I had just paid a little bit more or maybe even a lot more, but for a company that is going to deliver, then I'm shortening my time. I'm actually going to make more money. So it's actually worth the investment of that.
And I would definitely say that bringing on an expert, whether it's marketing or operations, consulting with someone or seeking someone's advice, I would say that is a huge, huge tip on how to get ahead.
Chase Clymer
Oh, absolutely. And obviously, I love that advice because it means maybe someone out there will hire Electric Eye to do something cool for them. Awesome. Now, is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think would resonate with our audience today?
Stephanie Moyal
Whenever people ask me this question, I always go back to the personal journey of running a business and how I did not expect at all what was going to be laid before me.
It's not easy running your own business. Everything is a lot easier when you're doing well, but when you're not doing as well as you want to be doing, it's very, very challenging. It's hard on your business relationship. It's hard on yourself. It's very stressful. And it's really, really, really hard. And I think that most people have to go through this process and then hopefully ultimately see success.
Those people who are going through it. I totally feel them because it was a very challenging journey for us and one that resulted in a lot of therapy, co-founder therapy, like couples therapy, individual therapy. utilize because we're in the mushroom industry, we love mushrooms, we utilized mushrooms as therapy. And just so many different things that helped us grow ultimately as people but also as business partners as well.
And I think that a lot of relationships, especially co-founder relationships can be really, really challenging because when you're not doing well, as I said, it's a lot harder. So having come through the other side of that, just letting people know that as bad as you think it is, it can get better. You really just have to work on yourself and put the work into the relationship.
But I've seen so many businesses fall apart from co-founder relationships and we just did not have that option because we're family. So yeah, just telling people, I feel you and it can get better.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, it definitely is. Entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart. And whoever said it's easy was lying, be frank. It's fun sometimes. It's difficult a lot of the time. But I wouldn't trade it for the world.
Now, you obviously have so much passion about mushrooms and then about your product that you spent a lot of time ideating on and building out. Now, if I'm listening to this and I want to go try these mushroom gummies, where do I go? What do you do?
Stephanie Moyal
Absolutely. Yeah. So we created a discount code for all of your listeners. Honest20. They'll get 20% off. And it's on our website, www.trytroop.com. T-R-Y-T-R-O-O-P.com. Yeah, we always love when people order from our website and yeah, it's an amazing product. You're going to love it. And we are so, so passionate about the healing power of mushrooms for everyone in this world.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Stephanie, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Stephanie Moyal
Yeah, thank you for having me. It was really great chatting with you.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
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Until next time!