How I Built and Sold SALT & STONE
TL;DR
Salt & Stone hit $165 million in revenue while staying profitable from day one — Nema Jalali says he self-funded the brand, launched with 40-50 retail accounts already lined up, and treated outside capital as secondary rather than fuel for growth.
The breakout product wasn’t the first product — Salt & Stone launched with sunscreen because it was faster to formulate, but deodorant became the unlock once Jalali obsessed over making a clean product that actually worked, smelled sophisticated, and didn’t feel like the usual “mint toothpaste” natural deodorant.
Jalali ran the company solo for three years, then with one ops hire for another three — even at roughly $166 million in sales, the team is only 50-55 people, fully remote, with Jalali focused on brand and product while delegating ops, finance, 3PL, and logistics to stronger operators.
His core strategy was to build a brand retailers would come to, not one sales reps had to push — he spent months becoming an “advertising expert,” personally choosing models, photographers, edits, and copy, while benchmarking against Nike and other enduring giants instead of trendy indie beauty brands.
Unlike the usual founder war story, this was mostly ‘up and to the right’ — Jalali says Salt & Stone never had a near-death moment, despite launching in the crowded 2017 DTC boom, and credits relentless founder intensity over VC-backed playbooks or incubator money.
His advice is blunt: forget work-life balance if you want to build a breakout CPG brand — Jalali says founders need to go all in, trust instinct over entrepreneurship content, and stay obsessed because someone else will take the category if you decide to “check out at 5.”
The Breakdown
From Pasadena mountains to pro snowboarder discipline
Nema Jalali opens with a very California origin story: kid from La Cañada/Pasadena area, obsessed with skateboarding, then snowboarding local spots like Mount Waterman and Cracker Ridge during El Niño winters. He spent about 10 years as a pro snowboarder, mostly on the freestyle, film-and-magazine side rather than competitions, and frames that era as “my college” — a crash course in failure, repetition, and trying 20 brutal slams for the one clean trick that makes the final cut.
Why snowboarding felt weirdly similar to entrepreneurship
The hosts latch onto the analogy: a snowboard “part” is basically a five-minute seasonal product launch, except the blooper reel — all the missed attempts and pain — gets edited out. Jalali says that rhythm taught him lessons founders know well: fail constantly, race against time, and keep going until you land the thing that looks effortless in public.
Leaving action sports for a bigger ceiling
Before Salt & Stone, Jalali tried ventures in the surf/skate/snow world, but he knew that industry had a hard cap unless you built something Burton- or Quiksilver-sized. He wanted one shot that was fully his — no partners, no split focus, just an all-in swing where the 2 a.m. emails and total obsession felt justified because it was his company alone.
The first launch: sunscreen, then the deodorant that changed everything
Salt & Stone started with sunscreen, mainly because it came together faster from a chemist and manufacturing standpoint. The business was profitable immediately because Jalali had 40-50 independent retailers ready at launch, but deodorant was the real breakthrough: he waited until the formula nailed every detail — performance, scent, texture, and packaging — because he was tired of “clean” deodorants that didn’t work and smelled like toothpaste.
Building the product for himself — and discovering everyone else wanted it too
Jalali’s product philosophy is dead simple: make the thing he personally wants, then refuse to ship until it’s actually great. He and his wife literally tested deodorant by smelling each other’s underarms, compared samples against every competing product on the shelf, and kept iterating until the product felt luxurious, effective, and worthy of being compared to fragrance, not just hygiene.
A tiny team, relentless execution, and no sales reps
For the first three years, it was just Jalali. Then he hired one operator who took over ops, finance, 3PL, and logistics — freeing him to stay in his zone: brand, product, and anything customer-facing. Even now, with 50-55 people and a fully remote setup, he says Salt & Stone still runs lean, with a very high hiring bar and no traditional sales reps at all.
He built a retailer-pull brand, not a retailer-push brand
Jalali says the goal was never to have salespeople “push something down a retailer’s throat.” Instead, he obsessed over making Salt & Stone the brand retailers felt they needed — becoming an ad creative obsessive for six months, choosing models, photographers, edits, and even dropping copy into Figma himself. His reference points weren’t beauty startups; they were durable icons like Nike, because he wanted a legacy brand, not an influencer brand.
Profitability, private equity, and the next chapter with Advent
One of the strangest parts of the story is what didn’t happen: no near-death moment, no heroic turnaround, just steady growth and a growing bank balance. Jalali says Salt & Stone has always prioritized profitability, used raises mostly for personal liquidity, and chose Advent as a partner because of its international muscle — especially as the brand expands through Sephora Canada, the UK, Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Even after the sale, his tone is the same: this isn’t the end; “we are just getting started.”