Susan Griffin-Black says EO Products went from a $30,000 packaging account to owing $2 million after COVID sanitizer whiplash

The scary part of a boom is that it looks like proof. For Susan Griffin-Black, the COVID-era hand sanitizer rush at EO Products came with the kind of purchase orders that make founders feel chosen by the market, right up until the market sobers up and leaves them holding a warehouse full of plastic.

A packaging company that we did maybe $30,000 worth of business prior to COVID. We were on the hook for $2 million.

That is the episode’s useful little horror movie. Not the calls about wine, eczema products, or Caribbean coffee, though those have their own founder-school charm. The line that sticks is Griffin-Black saying EO went from a roughly $30,000 packaging relationship to a $2 million obligation after the sanitizer spike. It is the cleanest possible illustration of how demand can lie to you. Growth arrives wearing a cape. Then it asks where you’re going to store five times too much inventory.

On How I Built This, founder stories often have a soft-focus inevitability to them. The garage. The farmer’s market. The first Whole Foods meeting. The heroic sleepless nights. Griffin-Black’s return had less founding myth and more invoice panic. Guy Raz reminds listeners that sanitizer demand surged during COVID, then fell hard. Griffin-Black fills in the less Instagrammable consequence: suppliers, inventory, and layoffs.

just three times as much, five times as much inventory as we should have. And then also layoffs for the first time

The verdict is that Griffin-Black’s claim is credible, and more interesting than the usual bootstrap sermon. It is self-serving in the mildest possible way, because of course a founder wants to present crisis management as character. But the story also has the ring of operational truth. A brand built on natural personal care suddenly becomes a public-health-adjacent sanitizer supplier, orders packaging like the new reality is permanent, then learns the old retail lesson: a spike is not a baseline.

The promissory note is the business lesson

The most revealing detail is not that EO owed the money. It is how Griffin-Black says the company survived the obligation. She did not describe some clever financing trick or founder hustle montage. She called the CEO.

I had to link in with the CEO and just explain our story and see if he would give us a promissory note for the next two years and work our way out of that, which they did.

This is why her advice to callers kept sounding unfashionably local. To Dr. Ruchi Gupta, the pediatrician-founder behind a probiotic skin and scalp line, Griffin-Black liked professional channels and local credibility more than pure direct-to-consumer bravado. To Peter Andrews, importing premium South African wine, she heard relationships and regional trust as the actual distribution engine. To Dominic Wyndham Gittens of Cane Dog Coffee in Barbados, she agreed with Raz that the brand has to carry the island experience into bigger markets, not just ship beans into the void.

The modern founder internet has trained people to talk like every business is one ad account away from destiny. Griffin-Black’s advice is less glamorous. Start close. Sell to people who can look you in the eye. Make the first circle strong before pretending the whole country is waiting for your product.

This idea of starting locally and really, really engaging with people that you know, and you take that first hundred miles and you really go hard and strong and see what you learn and who you learn from

National dreams, local bruises

The irony is that Griffin-Black runs a brand that did become national. That makes the advice land better, not worse. She is not anti-scale. She is anti-delusion. EO’s COVID whiplash is a reminder that scale magnifies everything, including mistakes you could survive at a smaller size. A packaging bill that would be annoying at $30,000 becomes existential at $2 million.

So the episode’s real advice is not a channel strategy. It is a temperament. Don’t confuse temporary demand with permanent product-market fit. Don’t confuse getting into more places with building a business. And maybe don’t let a once-in-a-century sanitizer panic convince you that the next two years of packaging should be ordered like history just handed you a purchase order.

relationships rule the day.