How to Plan for a Product Recall Before You Need One | #634

Most product businesses don't have a recall plan. Not because they've decided against it. Just because the moment hasn't arrived yet.

Melanie Nolan built Naternal Vitamins to eight million dollars in four years without running a paid ad for the first two. She built it on trust. Then in April last year, a manufacturing error created iodine variability across fifteen thousand units of her prenatal supplement. The TGA required a full voluntary recall. She refunded nearly three hundred thousand dollars in a single month. And came out the other side still growing, with 95% of her customers still there.

That outcome is not accidental. In this Playbook episode, Nathan unpacks three things every physical product business should do before a recall arrives, not during one.

Today, we're discussing:

• Why recall infrastructure fails when you build it inside the crisis rather than before it [lesson one]
• The four systems Naternal built after the recall: recalls@ email, Google Drive docs, batch tracking, fillable forms [lesson one]
• Why going first on transparency is the commercial move, not just the ethical one [lesson two]
• How 95% of customers stayed after a $300K refund month because of how Mel communicated [lesson two]
• Why the brands that come through a crisis are the ones that move toward the problem [lesson three]
• The $22,000 recall insurance policy that was worth every cent [lesson one]

Explore Naternal Vitamins | Connect with Melanie Nolan | Hear EP620

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