Exclusive interview with Jack Benzaquen, founder of Duradry
Everybody's journey's different, for Jack that started in Venezuela at 15 years old. We discuss old-school advertising pre-AI, immigrating to the US, starting a company that helped define a category and even the challenges within the advertising engines.
Some interviews you walk away from and think "man, has it already been an hour? I could've talked to that guy forever." Not even about work or e-commerce, just philosophy, life and whatever else. Obviously this makes it hard to know where to start, always a great problem.
After my wonderful sit-down with Jack, founder at Duradry, it made me think: "why don't we do this more as founders?" How often do people doing the same stuff call others up to just share philosophy, workshop different ideas, bounce challenges and successes off one another? Are we supposed to spend our careers looking through the lens of LinkedIn posts to get our inspiration? Either way, Jack's honesty about his journey at Duradry was beyond refreshing, from his childhood in Venezuela, immigrating to the US, feeling naturally drawn to entrepreneurship and of course starting a family.
Life in Venezuela
"Honestly, everything felt interesting. When you're young and just eager to learn and you're ambitious, everything becomes interesting."
With every interview, a few things really stick with me. That quote broadly just gave me a window into the past, where whatever you're building, you're doing it simply because it's new and exciting. Everything, love or hate, seems like an opportunity. For Jack it sounds like his path into e-commerce didn't start with a Shopify store or a slick pitch deck. It started at 14 years old in Venezuela, building websites for anyone who'd pay him, saving up a little bit of money, and trying a handful of small businesses that didn't really go anywhere. Then one day, his aunt asked him to find her a product she could sell to local drugstores, and Jack did what every resourceful kid with internet access in the early 2000s eventually figures out how to do: he sourced a pregnancy test from China. Neither of them really knew anything about packaging or branding or how any of this actually worked, "but it sold," he said. Before long, he was sourcing ovulation tests, diagnostic kits, body wash, shaving gel, cotton swabs and a long tail of other private-label products, all from Chinese turnkey manufacturers, all driven by a kid who just wanted to learn.
What he genuinely fell in love with during those years wasn't the deal-making, it was the product itself. "I fell in love with developing products. Physical products take a longer time than digital ones, and there's a little bit more of art to them. The process is beautiful, you know, how the product is received by the market, the feedback, seeing it on the shelves. It's a beautiful world." It's worth pausing on the context here, because this was all happening pre-AI, pre-Notion, pre-Reddit threads explaining exactly how to source a product from Yiwu in 48 hours. "It took a lot of time, especially back in the early 2000s," Jack said. "We didn't have the information we have today. The amount of content people have today is ridiculous compared to how much we had back then. Every part of the process, the cost structure, the landed cost, the packaging compatibility, the regulatory compliance, the fragrance choices, the stability testing, had to be figured out from first principles, person by person, mistake by mistake."
The move to Miami, and the Duradry idea
The Duradry idea, fittingly, came out of Jack's own life. Like a lot of young dudes (myself included), underarm sweat can be a problem, the kind of thing that quietly ruins shirts, dictates what colour you can wear to a meeting, etc. So, doing what came most naturally to him, he reached out to a couple of American deodorant brands and asked to exclusively represent them in Venezuela. He was 22 or 23, asking US companies to take a flyer on him (literally, a flyer). Predictably, nobody wrote back. "Like, who cares, right?" he laughed. "Little did they know that with time, I'd become their competitor here in the US."
So he did what any competitive CPG founder does when the existing market won't help: he started developing his own formulas. The catch was geography. Building a US deodorant brand from Venezuela, with no social security number, no US bank account and no obvious path in, isn't exactly the kind of plan a business school would sign off on. Jack eventually made the move to the US, settling in Miami, and spent close to a decade working through the immigration system before becoming an American citizen. "It took me 10 years to be an American citizen," he told me.
The "oh shit" moment for Jack
I asked Jack, the same way I asked Marnie (ironically also a sweat-related product-solution), did you ever have an "oh shit" moment when the business started to feel real? The answer was one of the most honest of the whole call.
"To be honest, not yet," he said. "It's cool when you receive reviews and when you see things working out, but the reality is that I don't think you have something if you're not at least a 10 million dollar revenue business and EBITDA positive." He went further. In CPG, he explained, the brand has almost no value until you're sitting at around a $20M run rate and roughly $3M EBITDA. Anything below that, in his view, is a story you're telling yourself.
I quickly realised, having worked with Jack over the past year, that his pragmatism and disciplined approach to goals is very clear and very specific. He's the first to compliment good work and to express gratitude for it, but he's also acutely aware that success is relative, and has to be enjoyed in small enough doses that it doesn't pull you off the real goal at hand. "I just try to not use those as distractions," he said. "As a cheap way of feeling successful." He frames the business as a road, and for some (himself included), striving for continued growth brings to light the opportunity of an exit. I also think some founders shy away from declaring "I'd like an exit someday" at the risk of people thinking they're trying to make a buck. Jack's narration of the journey is far different, and honestly refreshing. He says:
"I'm so focused on the exit. Not necessarily for the money, although that's a very important part of it, but the exit in the sense of the end of the road. I don't care where I am. I just care where I need to go."
He frames it in a way that the exit isn't the prize, it's the proof. Proof that the product worked, that the brand earned its place, that ten years of formulating, sourcing, packaging, regulating, advertising and quietly grinding actually added up to something that someone else wants to keep building. For Jack, the destination is what gives the daily work its shape, and the daily work is what makes the destination possible. The two aren't in conflict, they're part of the same road.
What happens when you hit a channel block?
This sheds light on one of the more painful discussions an e-commerce founder has to have, the "what happens if X doesn't work?" question. As an agency owner, I can confirm: some businesses, no matter how strong the product, website, science, CRO, creative or influencer mix, just don't find favourable auctions. Meta doesn't know your unit economics. It doesn't know your LTV. It bulks you into an auction and, assuming you've got reasonably strong creative and a decent post-click experience, you'll feel pretty quickly whether the channel makes sense or not. Google and Amazon, by contrast, do a much better job on auction transparency. I can see what it'll cost to compete on a given keyword before I bid, because the CPCs and auctions reveal themselves. Duradry's a good example of a brand that's built a force on Amazon, and has admittedly had trouble justifying the unit economics on Meta.
Although, Jack speaks to a very helpful point founders should consider when looking at the actual role and goal behind each channel:
"It depends on the product, AOV, LTV, and margins, because every product category is different," he said. Not every channel is going to do the same job, and not every channel is going to look the same in the spreadsheet. Amazon will likely give you a lower CAC but a lower LTV. Meta will cost more to acquire but might bring in a customer with a longer repeat cycle. YouTube and YouTube Shorts skew male, Instagram skews female, TikTok skews younger, Snapchat younger still. Each one of those differences quietly reshapes the unit economics of the channel before you've even uploaded a creative.
Jack and I discussed the importance of running lift tests, even for brands with longer consideration cycles where possible, and measuring impact outside the norm, layering in MMM where you can, and obsessing less over the CAC of any single channel and more over the CAC-to-LTV ratio across the full mix. The brands that win, in his telling, are the ones who resist the urge to declare a channel "broken" too early and instead figure out what role it's actually playing in the funnel.
The other side of the auction, and the inevitability of competition
When I asked Jack how he thinks about competing against a much better-funded rival in the same category (and there is one, seemingly copying their work), his framing was less about going head to head and more about geometry. "The way I look at competition is, okay, they're going this way and the market is this way, where is my white space?" he said. "If these competitors are bigger than me, meaning they'll outpower me head to head, I need to find the new gap. I keep looking for product-market fit and the white space the competitors are leaving."
When I pushed him on how to actually do it, he ran through what was effectively a five-point list. One, look for the white space. Two, make sure your product is up to standard, "because if not, you're going to lose before you start." Three, remember the market is dynamic and your competitors also make mistakes, so tracking their listings and amendments obsessively is important. Four, listen to your customer. Five, build value, "and value in the eyes of the consumer is not only how good your product is, but how beautiful, how great it smells, how fast it arrives, the cost. Everything builds back."
The closer he came to a single answer, though, was brand. We both agreed this is undoubtedly one of the most enjoyable parts of the process, and doing this for DC has been one of mine. He explains: "Brand is not only stamping a logo on the product. Brand is everything you build around it, how good your customer service is, how good the product is, how beautiful the ads are, the music you use, everything is related to branding." It's a useful reframing for founders who think the white space is a product gap. Sometimes it is. More often it's a brand gap, and that's the one that compounds.
Work-life balance
The last bit of our call drifted away from auctions and unit economics and into something quieter. Family.
Jack has three kids, and he's been building Duradry the whole way through, which means my question about work-life balance was never really a conversation about balance. "I started working when I was 14 or 15," he told me. "I've never worked for anybody. I became like a little animal in the jungle that needs to survive." That posture, the daily wrestle with whether he's taking too many meetings, hiring too slowly, reading the wrong newsletters, paying attention to the wrong signals, doesn't ever fully switch off.
What makes the equation work, in his own words, is the partnership at home: his wife taking on the kids and the household while he focuses on the business. He's quick to point out that this isn't a model that works for everyone, that plenty of families need both parents working, and that he doesn't want to dress his setup up as advice. But the picture he paints is one a lot of founders with young families will recognise immediately. A partner pulling just as hard in their own lane, a decade of grinding to even earn the right to compete, and three kids growing up watching their dad build something from scratch.