Before Brightland became an eight-figure brand stocked in Whole Foods and praised in Bon Appétit and Food & Wine, Aishwarya Iyer spent months cold-calling 40 California olive farms, most of which wouldn't call her back. Aishwarya wasn’t a chef or a “lemonade-stand kid”—she came from a corporate communications career and a hunch that the olive oil category was broken. So she did the unglamorous work: took a sensory course, cold-called farmers, and ran tastings in her Venice apartment until the right oil rose to the top. Here, Aishwarya breaks down the scrappy playbook she used to source, validate, and launch Brightland in 2017—plus the early press, email, and retail decisions that turned a personal quest into a national brand.
On vetting 40 California farms to find a partner:
I made a list of 40 different California farms. This was back in 2017, and Google was truly my best friend. I started calling and visiting people, and most of them didn’t take my calls. I went to some olive oil festivals. And I took a course at the UC Davis Olive Center to understand the sensory and chemical analysis behind olive oil, so I’d have some kind of education to anchor myself in.
That course did two things at once. It gave me resources and a foundation, and it was how I met people—there were olive farmers coming to those courses just to brush up and revitalize themselves.
It was a pretty long journey, but eventually a family farm decided to take a chance on me. They were kind of like, “Oh, great, you want to sell 1,000 bottles. This is so lovely and sweet.” They were in for a ride, but that’s how we started.
On hosting 50 friends for tastings to pick the oil:
On the taste side, I had 50 friends come to my apartment over the course of two months. I was living in Venice at the time, and they’d come over and we’d do olive oil tastings—the three different farms I was choosing from, plus a couple of grocery store brands.
The oil from the family farm we ended up partnering with kept rising to the top. People would say, “I don’t know how to describe it, I’m not an olive oil expert, but I like this. It just tastes fresh. There’s something different about it.” That’s how I made the call.
On why there’s no avoiding the scrappy:
Anytime somebody is building and they’re already running fancy focus groups or hiring a bunch of people early on, I’m always a little wary—because you cannot escape the brutally gritty hard work the founder has to do. You have to be ready to do that.
But scrappy isn’t about sitting there saying, “I worked 16-hour days,” or “I worked all weekend.” It’s about working on the right things. You need a really clear pulse on what you’re going after, where you can say, “I know the priorities so clearly.”
You have to be the no person at your organization, and that’s really hard for founders. We’re dreamy people; we start with a dream, and a lot of us have shiny object syndrome. But to actually execute and scale, you have to become the arbiter of no. And to be the no person, you first have to understand what the yeses are.
On choosing California when most olive oil comes from Europe:
It was so important to me because I’d met these farmers, and they kept telling me, “I don’t know if people care about high-quality olive oil coming from the United States.” It reminded me of the wine industry in the ’80s—California wine, Napa, Sonoma. I thought, how amazing would it be to champion something that’s American born and has a smaller carbon footprint because it’s locally sourced? I felt this calling to champion it in whatever way I could.
So we’ve always stayed true to our California roots. When we introduced vinegars, our vinegar farmers came from California. When we introduced honey, that came from California too. We’ve really walked the walk. And California has the highest quality standards in the world for extra virgin olive oil—four times the standards. Ours surpass that.
On telling a story journalists actually want to hear:
My career before Brightland was rooted in corporate communications, so wanting people beyond ourselves to talk about us and vouch for us came naturally. But pitching is a bit of a perfect storm; there’s so much noise out there.
If you tell your story authentically and succinctly, with two or three reasons why, that goes a long way. Everybody wants a story. It’s not enough to say, “I went to business school and saw a white space opportunity.” Nobody wants to hear that. Why is this important to you?
I have a friend with a jewelry company—her parents’ house caught fire and their jewelry was robbed, and that’s why she started it. That’s a relatable story, and people remember it. And it’s not only for journalists. If you’re showcasing your brand on social, it’s the same thing. Everybody needs something to be anchored to.
On the launch-day New York Times blurb and packing every box:
The day we launched, we were featured in The New York Times Style section. It was a very small blurb, nothing crazy, but it put us on the map in a really big way.
It felt transformative, and then I had to go pack boxes. I watched the orders come in. We turned the site on, posted about it on Instagram, sent an email to our list. The first few orders were friends and friends of friends.
Then the Times piece came out, and suddenly it was strangers. I was Googling who these people were—somebody in Brooklyn, somebody in Atlanta—like, “Who are these people?” And then the work had to keep going. I was packing every single box and writing handwritten notes. That’s what I was focused on.
On building an email list before launch:
Even before we launched, we’d built our email list to about 1,000 people. Email is an incredibly important part of our marketing strategy. I’ve talked to a lot of founders who over-index on social, and with all the algorithm changes, that audience can be really fickle—they don’t even see your content.
Email is so powerful. I know brands that tell long, romantic, beautiful stories, and others that are just educating, educating, educating. We try to do a mix. I’ll send notes about the change in seasons, or how I’m thinking about the year ahead, and our customers respond to it. It’s the one thing that can’t get taken away from you.
SMS too, but we’re careful with it. I’ve been on the receiving end of brands texting me every other day, and I can’t take it. That’s where you text with your friends and family. You don’t want a brand popping up over and over, so we’re judicious.
On saying no to big retailers until the screws were tight:
We were really slow with retail. From the day we launched, smaller shops were reaching out, and we said yes to all of them—so we’re in thousands of small stores around the country, which is amazing. But when the big national retailers started reaching out, we just kept saying, “No, we’re not ready yet,” super graciously.
I operated from a place of abundance. Time is on your side, and when you say no to someone, they want it even more. I’d heard people say yes too early and regret it, and I knew we would too. If you can already see there’s a hole, why would you fall into it?
So we waited until we were ready operationally—until we felt ready from a supply chain standpoint and all the screws internally were tight enough that it wouldn’t be overwhelming.
On learning retail like the back of your hand:
Even after being that conservative, retail is just such a different beast: distributors, brokers, all of it. I learned it enough to be dangerous, but you have to be lethal. The founder has to go really deep. And even being careful, we made mistakes—we priced a couple of things wrong, worked with the wrong partners in different capacities.
It’s not something you add on by hiring someone smart and saying, “OK, go run with it.” You have to dive in and know it like the back of your hand. It’s complex and, in a lot of ways, antiquated.
I get that it sucks, especially if you’re the kind of founder for whom that level of nitty-gritty saps your soul a little. You’ve already lived in the nitty-gritty of fundraising, of every standard operating procedure (SOP) and process, of the entire direct-to-consume (DTC) side. Then there’s this whole other thing, and you think, “Isn’t there somebody out there who knows this better than I do?” But if it’s going to be a key piece of your business, learn it.
Hear Aishwarya’s full conversation on Shopify Masters for why she walked away from fear-mongering marketing, how she designed a bottle that stands out on the shelf, and the “joint enthusiasm” test she uses to pick brand partners.
