Brand Architects: Beau Schmitt of Sunday Scaries

It started with a golf course and a stressed-out bar owner.

The year was 2016, and Beau Schmitt was running a full-service bar in San Diego with his buddy Mike Sill. Fifty employees, seven-day workweeks, and 16-hour days were taking their toll. In an industry where stress relief often comes in problematic forms, they were looking for a better way to cope.

Join Bora Celik as he chats with Beau Schmitt, the Co-founder of Sunday Scaries.

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"There's a lot of other vices available to you in the hospitality industry from alcohol to drugs," Beau recalls. "And we didn't want that."

That's when a friend offered them CBD on a golf course. They loved it. But something was missing – they couldn't find a brand that spoke to them. So they did what entrepreneurs do: they created their own.

What started as a "little side project" sourcing and creating their own gummies would eventually become Sunday Scaries, a company focused on helping people manage stress, anxiety, and sleep issues.

The early days were exactly what you'd expect from a startup – messy, manual, and magical all at once. Picture this: Three stories up in their bar, before opening hours, Beau and his team would don masks and gloves, carefully counting out gummies by hand.

"We're buying them in bulk from manufacturers, driving, picking them up in the back of a parking lot, bringing them to the bar in sealed bags, filling the bottles manually," Beau says. "All those Instagram videos you see of people starting in their garage and that first big move into a warehouse? That's real."

Quality was non-negotiable from day one. They sourced their hemp from family-owned farms in Greeley, Colorado, making sure to use only U.S.-grown hemp. Why? As Beau explains, "Hemp is really strong at absorbing mitotoxins, microbials, pesticides, heavy metals. In other countries, they actually plant hemp between crop cycles to remove toxins from the soil. We didn't want that in our products."

The real test came with getting feedback. Their first product? A bottle of 20 gummies, each containing 10 milligrams of full-spectrum CBD with vitamins D3 and B12. They leveraged their hospitality connections, distributing samples to bar owners, managers, bottle service girls, bartenders, and servers.

"Flavor and effectiveness drive everything," Beau says. They noticed most CBD gummies on the market had a bitter, hempy taste – "almost like an IPA-style bitterness." They went the opposite direction, focusing on making their gummies sweet and enjoyable.

Then came the marketing challenges. In 2017, they caught the early wave of influencer marketing. "We had influencers with 10 to 100,000 followers willing to post for $5 a bottle as a kickback," Beau remembers. "Now those costs are $50 to $150, and flat fees are thousands of dollars."

The journey hasn't been without its hurdles. CBD brands face restrictions everywhere – they can't advertise on Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube, Amazon, or TikTok. They can't even use standard payment processors like Stripe or PayPal.

But seven years later, was it worth it? For Beau, the answer is clear: "To date, we've helped over a quarter million people with their stress, anxiety, and sleep issues."

Now, Sunday Scaries is evolving. They're launching their first non-cannabis product – functional mushroom gummies for focus and energy. They're also rebranding, maturing alongside their millennial and Gen Z customer base.

Looking back, would Beau do anything differently? "I don't think so," he says. "It's been like a seven-year master's degree on how every platform operates, what's wrong with every platform."

Sometimes the best business lessons come from the most challenging products. For Beau and Sunday Scaries, those challenges have turned into opportunities to help people feel less alone in their daily battles with stress and anxiety – one gummy at a time.

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