Rachel Solomon: Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Boarderie

Episode 853

What if gifting actually felt thoughtful again?
On today’s episode, we welcome Rachel Solomon, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Boarderie — a company rethinking a category that hasn’t evolved much in decades. Instead of predictable gift baskets, Boarderie delivers fully arranged, premium cheese and charcuterie boards nationwide — designed to feel more like an experience than just another package.
Launched in 2021, the company didn’t just improve the model — it challenged it. And while legacy players are seeing slower growth, Boarderie is scaling quickly, staying profitable, and tapping into what consumers actually want today: something more personal, more elevated, and more memorable.
In this episode, Rachel shares why the category was ready for change, how they’ve been able to scale so quickly without compromising quality, and what’s really driving modern gifting decisions.
If you’re building in a crowded space or thinking about how to differentiate in a legacy category — this one’s worth your time. Tune in now on The Kara Goldin Show.

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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be. You just want to make sure you will get knocked down, but just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control, control, control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. So join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go, let’s go. Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Goldin show. Why does most gifting still feel forgettable when it should feel like an experience? So, today I’m joined by Rachel Solomon, who is the co-founder and co-CEO of an incredible brand that I frankly did not know existed until her team reached out to me. It’s called Boarderie, and it’s a brand completely rethinking what it means to send a gift. And Rachel and her team launched Boarderie in 2021 with a simple but powerful idea: instead of gifting gift baskets, flowers, why not a fully arranged premium cheese or charcuterie board, something that feels elevated and yummy. I was saying to Rachel that I got an incredible ordery board, and I’m really picky about my cheeses. I live in Northern California, and it was so yummy, and the figs were yummy, everything so high, high, high, 10 stars on it. It was, it was so, so good. So one of the fastest growing e-commerce companies in the country. What I love about Rachel’s story is how she tapped into something deeper, not just gifting, but connection and experience, and how people actually want to show up, but also how they want to gift. So, I love, love, love everything about this. So, Rachel, welcome to The Kara Goldin Show. So excited to finally meet you.

Rachel Solomon 2:17
Yes, thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here, and I’m so glad you love the board,

Kara Goldin 2:21
absolutely. Well, okay. So, for listeners, I did a little pitch about Boarderie, but how do you describe the brand and what makes it different?

Rachel Solomon 2:33
So, I would describe Boarderie. We first started as a fully arranged cheese and charcuterie board business, that was what we did. We figured out the first company in the world that figured out how to ship fully arranged gorgeous artisan cheese and charcuterie boards, which were typically a cottage industry. You know, you could get them locally, they weren’t commercially available to everyone, and in the quality that you know you could get it at an artisan shop in New York or in California or something. And so that’s where we started, but really, over the past four years, we’ve evolved into a gourmet edible gifting brand. So, we really recently, in February, launched our dessert boards, which are actually even more ingredients than our cheese and charcuterie boards. Our largest one has 47 different custom-made desserts, and that business is growing even faster than cheese and charcuterie, so the future of bordering is definitely all things edible gifting, but what most people know us for is these elaborate, gorgeous cheese and charcuterie boards, and they ship overnight nationwide, fully arranged, so you don’t have to do anything.

Kara Goldin 3:33
Okay, so let’s go back to the beginning, and when you had this idea, so did you had you come from the e-commerce world, or how did you.. I mean, you have a co-founder. How did this all come together? This business..

Rachel Solomon 3:49
I knew absolutely nothing about direct to consumer. The only thing I knew was that I was a huge consumer, that was it. And so I was working in finance in New York City, and then I decided to go back to school and do a master’s program in blockchain technology, so because I thought that was the future of finance, and then COVID hit, and everything went online, so I moved down to Florida to be with my family, and that’s where I met my co-founder, Aaron, who at the time was running a gourmet catering and special events business in South Florida, he had done this for over 20 years. He had a serious expertise in these elaborate, amazing events for celebrities and athletes, and just like incredible bespoke events. And so his entire business basically was going to go under because Covid had canceled all all of these parties, nobody was doing anything, and so he tried to figure out a way to ship their best-selling product, which was these beautiful cheese and charcuterie boards, and that’s when we met around that time, and everything just kind of started from there. We became partners, I understood the business side of it, I built our direct consumer brand, he really. Understood the product, the operations, the culinary expertise of building out something this complex. We’re able to produce about 20,000 charcuterie boards a day, fresh, and so it was just at the time we weren’t doing that. At the time, we were operating out of a 2000 square foot facility, and just we were excited to get, you know, 3040 orders a day, but yeah, just evolved from there.

Kara Goldin 5:22
So, what was the biggest challenge in making something like this and shipping it nationwide?

Rachel Solomon 5:31
So, when we first started, everybody told us, like, this is not going to work, and the initial iterations of the product were not amazing. So, Aaron actually started test shipping things early on, and sometimes they would arrive looking like a salad, of course. And so we figured out a packaging method, and we evolved the product over the first year and a half to really make it spectacular. So the packaging is individual trays inside a board, everything’s straight crop. There’s very.. we actually patented our packaging because it keeps everything perfectly in place. So, that was about a year and a half process, trial and error of trying to figure it out, and we knew it was possible. We knew that we could get it right, but the initial iterations, I have to say, were not amazing. And now you know it arrives perfectly every time we ship.

Kara Goldin 6:16
You touched on this, but the presentation, it’s clear when it arrived that you’ve thought about this right, and you’ve probably had, you know, many days in your office or kitchen table or whatever, where you’re actually doing these tests and trying to create, right, and

Rachel Solomon 6:39
absolutely,

Kara Goldin 6:40
and I love the, the touch, the high touch, that it’s clear that that you’ve paid so much attention to, plus the quality of the product, so, and I think that so often businesses, I would say that the presentation part is usually kind of the afterthought, they’re like, as long as the consumer gets the product, but I think in order to really be here for a while and scale your business, you have to worry about so many components of the business. Would you agree?

Rachel Solomon 7:14
Absolutely, I think presentation is everything, and that was really, you know, every single item on that board. A lot of people have tried to copy bordering, and it has not worked, because they don’t actually understand what it takes to produce a quality product at scale. And presentation, to me, was always, of course, taste is really important, but there are 10s of 1000s of incredible cheeses. It needs to look beautiful, it needs to have color variety, it needs to have pop, it needs to be able to be visually appealing online, visually appealing when it comes out of the box, you know, there’s it’s a gift 70% of the time, so you want to that person has the wow moment from the second they open the box, and that’s where a lot of the challenge actually came from the beginning. So we started developing the product, sourcing different cheeses, and we had a beautiful product, but a lot of the cheeses that we wanted, the colors we wanted, the variety of the veining of the truffles, we needed to actually go to cheese producers all over the world and custom make cheeses to fit our specifications. We didn’t want cheese waste, because you know, if you get a wheel, we needed to cut it into specific sizes to use it across many boards at scale, and so a lot of this process, and I think a lot of our competitors don’t realize, or people who are trying to copy us don’t realize how much time and effort went into the product development for what we’re selling today, and a lot of people will say to us, you know, we should, you should be able to customize the board with whatever cheeses you want, and I’m like, they have no concept of how much detail and thought went into what it looks like, the cheeses that are on there, and why they’re there to create a variety. We did so many different tests with, you know, focus groups and taste testing and sampling to get a huge variety that would really appeal to the whole country. So it’s it’s definitely been a process, but we’re thrilled with where it is now. And the same thing was with dessert, right? It took us two years to develop that product

Kara Goldin 9:01
that’s wild. What is the number one item that you sell? The

Rachel Solomon 9:07
number one item we sell right now is our small cheese and charcuterie boards, because it’s a fabulous gift. People love getting it as gifts. Our birthday boards for evergreen gifting year-round sell really well, because you can customize them with someone’s age and cheese, so that’s our number one selling product. But I actually believe dessert will be bigger than cheese and charcuterie over the next 12 months.

Kara Goldin 9:29
What’s your favorite dessert skew?

Rachel Solomon 9:32
I think my favorite dessert skew.. well, our big board has 47 different desserts on it, almost all of which were custom made for us custom designed, you know, we have different truffles, and I really love our toffee. It’s from an amazing company that we’re working with to produce it here in the US. It is incredible, and that is in all of our dessert boards. So, I dessert.. I’m a dessert girl. I love cheese and charcuterie, but dessert really.. I have. Every single of the 47 items on that board I could have every day,

Kara Goldin 10:04
so your social is great, and the social sharing, I think your company is a role model for what can happen, and so I think you guys have done a super great job on that. What role do you think social sharing plays in either your growth or a company’s growth out there in today’s world.

Rachel Solomon 10:27
Yeah, absolutely. I think it plays the biggest role. I think you know, I, we are a direct consumer brand online, everything we do is online, right? Very different from being in retail. So we run a massive paid media strategy, and to me, the biggest part of that is creative diversity and volume. We produce 10s of 1000s of ads a year. We do massive creative volume across our paid media channels, and we use almost every paid media channel, and organic is extremely important too. So, using different creators and different influencers to promote the product, and then also boosting that on our end, and then just creating a community on social media, right, on Facebook too, because our demo really spans 35 to 65 plus, and so we have created communities across all the social platforms, TikTok being the one where we’re probably lagging a bit, because it’s a younger demo, but we’re, we’re starting to get there, we’re moving into TikTok, and desserts are doing really well there. So, building that community has been a huge, huge part of our success online. So, what have you learned about building a premium brand in a category that is so commoditized, right?

Kara Goldin 11:38
People know that they have to, you know, order a gift, and typically it’s been flowers. Now you’re converting those people over to something different and unique, and I mean, Who wouldn’t want that for somebody that they care enough about to actually gift to them? But what have you seen, and what have you learned about building a premium brand in kind of a commoditized category.

Rachel Solomon 12:05
I think it’s all about having a unique product, right? I think you said it yourself, right? This is something that is usually people are sending flowers, usually they’re sending a gift basket of, you know, shelf stable cheeses and meats, or something that just says I thought of you, but it doesn’t actually speak to what the customer really wants, and so to me it was about having an amazing product and being able to showcase that product effectively in our advertising, in our social media, and we did that from the early days. We would run videos of the board, the spectacular board coming out of the box, and it sold itself because people immediately understood that this is different from anything I’ve ever sent, anything I’ve ever received, you know, it’s not generic flowers, and it’s not anybody who’s ever received a boring gift basket knows exactly what I’m talking about. So, the edible gifting market is like a $45 billion market in the US. Nobody has done anything interesting in over 100 years, the exact same gifts that people were receiving from I don’t want to name any of our, our competitors, but we’re receiving or buying at a local shop, you know, 30 years ago are the same things that people started selling online in the 90s and selling online in the, you know, early 2000s and nobody was doing anything interesting, and so when we came out with Fort Erie, it immediately kind of spoke for itself. I love it. So, you became an entrepreneur after spending years in finance. Did you always want to be an entrepreneur, or where, where was the moment where you said, “I’m going to go and launch my own company. I, it really just like came to be. I know that’s like not a great answer, but it’s like I met somebody who had a product and an idea, and I, we just jumped in, both feet together, and you know a lot of people said you’re gonna leave your job to sell cheese charcuterie boards, and still to this day, right, people who don’t know Boarderie don’t know that we’re selling, you know, over a million, we’re shipping over a million boards a year, right. We people don’t realize the scale of the business, they think I’m making these in my kitchen myself, you know, and so I think the initial reaction for most of the people that I, that I know, was like this is kind of crazy, but I just like had blinders on. I was not looking, I wasn’t thinking about what anybody else thought. We just built the business day to day. We didn’t have any. We never raised money. We, oh, the only time we ever raised money was when we went on Shark Tank, and in the very early days, but we never did any big funding rounds, no matter how you know seriously, we were growing, and we always just focused on building a profitable business and having an incredible product, like heads down every day, that was the only thing we were thinking about.

Kara Goldin 14:52
So, Shark Tank, you mentioned, and you were on there and had a great experience. Experience, can you talk a bit about it, and what was the learning experience for you, and ultimately what happened?

Rachel Solomon 15:08
Yeah, absolutely. So, Shark Tank was an incredible experience. We went on right after we launched our website in 2022 and so Boarderie.com before that, we were selling through third party channels like drop shipping for other big vendors, and so we didn’t launch our website until late 2022 and we went on Shark Tank a few months later, and that was really the beginning of our massive direct to consumer growth through our through our own website, and we, my partner and I, had applied two years in a row, we got in the second year, and it was really the perfect timing, and we just had a great experience. We got offers from four out of the five sharks on our panel, and we decided to do a deal with Lori, who really just fit the product. She was, she, she understood the customer base, which to me was the most important thing, and she’s really passionate about bordering, and what we do, and loves cheese and charcuterie, and now dessert, and all the new ideas that we’re coming up with, cookies, candy, barcuterie boards for dogs, all the things in the product development pipeline. So she’s been an incredible partner.

Kara Goldin 16:15
People can’t see the behind the scenes, the challenges right that go on in building, and I’ve interviewed so many founders and lots of different industries, but what surprised you most about scaling your business and scaling it quickly too? Because in order to do that, you kind of have to keep up with making sure that you can have the tools, the people, all of those pieces, but what has been kind of the most surprising. I

Rachel Solomon 16:48
think the most surprising has been, I think most founders struggle with this is letting go. You know, the most surprising to me has been being able to hire really incredible people and being able to let go, and it took me probably about three and a half years to figure it out. We had a two person growth team for three years. I mean, we were selling probably 600,000 charcuterie boards a year with a two person paid media team, launching over 3000 ads a quarter, and so it was that looking back is hard to, it’s hard to imagine how we did that. We have a bigger team now, but I had a really hard time letting go, and I think that was what was most surprising to me, was how hard it is to find people to trust, and you know, we’ve, we’ve evolved since then, and we love our team, but I think a lot of founders don’t realize that going into the business, how much of it is your, it really is your baby, and it’s like giving it to someone else, you know.

Kara Goldin 17:47
Yeah, no, definitely. And finding the people, too, that you know what I, what I’ve learned is no one is going to care about your business as much as, no, right? No, and it’s right, you know

Rachel Solomon 17:59
what?

Rachel Solomon 18:00
I don’t think you can expect them to. That’s, I think it’s unrealistic and unfair to expect people to care as much as you do. It’s your baby.

Kara Goldin 18:09
Yeah, it’s so true when you’re growing a business too, and you’re it sounds like this was your situation because you had such a small team, but you really understood every aspect of the business, right? So you could hire people in to those roles, and would you recommend that for other founders to really be able to understand? Because I also think you have empathy for, for all of these different roles, you, you know, can sort of sniff through the bullshit, right, when somebody’s telling you so hard,

Rachel Solomon 18:44
all right? No, it’s like I say all the time, I did every single role in paid media in growth advertising. I’ve done all of it, so when I hire somebody, you know, if they say to me, this is going to take however long, I’m like, I’ve done it, I did it for years, it doesn’t take that long, you know, or, or I’ll have a lot of empathy for somebody, because I understand what it actually takes to get it to the place that it needs to be, and I think it makes you a better manager. I hope that people feel that way, right, about me, and I think it just makes you a better leader. I think if you don’t understand, especially when it comes to paid media, especially, I mean, I’ve been on the production line producing the cheese boards, I’ve been on the packaging line, I have worked in, and I’ve answered the phone for customer service. I mean, I’ve worked in every single vertical of this business, and I know it so inside and out that I think if you’re a founder, it’s really important to be able to do that, because you can’t manage people without deeply understanding what their role is.

Kara Goldin 19:39
Yeah, absolutely, and I think in the end I’ve seen so many stories of companies and founders, and I think that that’s what sets the great companies and founders apart, right. It’s one thing if you people who say, oh, I’m just the creative, right, if. Well, go and learn the other aspects, right, of the company, and you’re going to have a lot more empathy. You’ll be able to lead these people, you’ll be able to support them when they need more resources, whatever it is. But without it, it’s really, really tough to really have, you know, I, and I think it is empathy more than anything for trying to solve their problems,

Rachel Solomon 20:21
yeah. And every, your job as a founder, right? There’s no such thing as that’s not my job, or I don’t understand that, or I don’t know that. Your entire job is to figure it out, and if you don’t know it, no, but you can’t expect anybody else to.

Kara Goldin 20:35
How are you if you are using AI today in your business?

Rachel Solomon 20:40
That’s a great question. So, we are aggressively pursuing agentic commerce. We are focused heavily on geo optimization, so that we’re ranking on every single LLM at the top when someone searches edible gifting, and so that’s been a huge focus for us this year, allowing customers to be able to purchase through if they’re searching for edible gifts on Chat GPT, they can actually purchase very soon through the LLM itself. So it’s that is a really big focus, and we’re actually ranking number one in terms of search share above all of our competitors or anybody in the edible gifting space, which is really exciting.

Kara Goldin 21:18
That’s amazing. How long did it take you to get there.

Rachel Solomon 21:21
We started the second that we could, so when all of the, when any standard came out about how to optimize for geo, we were on it. We have an incredible team who focuses on SEO, and they really very, very early on understood geo and what we needed to optimize for that, although there’s a lot of overlap between SEO and Geo, and so we’ve been doing it from the very beginning.

Kara Goldin 21:45
That’s awesome. What do you think is the best form of new customer acquisition for you? Do you feel I’m guessing it’s word of mouth.

Rachel Solomon 21:53
Well, I think that’s probably the best form. I’d say the most effective form is Meta. You know, there’s no growth engine like Meta, paid media on Meta, especially for, you know, the core eight holidays throughout the year, which is when we really deliver. I mean, there’s no growth engine. People believe that they’re, you know, TikTok, for some brands, for beauty brands, TikTok is as big, but for most, you know, legacy consumer brands with an age demo above 35 There is really no way to grow better than paid media on Meta. If you have the average order value to support it,

Kara Goldin 22:30
what’s a crazy consumer story that you’ve heard from either a request or somebody that was actually received the product?

Rachel Solomon 22:40
The crazy. oh, we had a crew. Okay, the craziest one that I can remember is that someone sent us their Ring camera video of they had this like big Doberman or something, this like really aggressive big dog, and the dog was sniffing the charcuterie board box on their doorstep, and then completely ripped into the box and ate the entire massive charcuterie board, and they had it all on Ring camera, and we thought that was really funny. I love it. Do you have a dog board? So, I probably – I briefly mentioned it, probably for a second. People usually, what is that? What are you talking about? So, we have a product in development called the Barcuterie Board, and it’s going to be a charcuterie board for dogs with tons of different custom dog treats in a package, where you can, you know, open it up and give them this one today or the next one tomorrow, and it’s kind of a fun thing that we, you know, it’s probably not one of our core products, but it’ll definitely be a fun way to engage customers with their pets, because they – everyone loves their pets. I mean, it’s just unbelievable. Anytime we actually launched it, fake launched it for April Fool’s Day, and people really freaked out. So we were like, we definitely have to really do this for real.

Kara Goldin 23:46
You need to do it, and you’ll be surprised at like how much people – I’ll be one of them. So my dogs are like, they have so many treats at, they have too many treats, but I have two last

Rachel Solomon 23:59
founder and I have dogs, Gouda and Bree, so we.. it’s perfect. We already have the in the in-house content team.

Kara Goldin 24:08
Yeah, super, super fun. Well, Rachel, thank you so much for joining today. I absolutely love what you’re doing at Boarderie, and you guys are doing such a great job of not only creating and, and really bringing an experience, a an upscale experience to gifting and to the world of I’ve got to get something for my, my friend, my colleague, my myself, my mom, my dog. Soon, you’ve done, you guys have done such a great, great, great job. So, Rachel Solomon, co-founder and co-CEO of Boarderie, and we’ll have all the info in the show notes as well. Thank you again, Rachel, and thanks everyone for listening.

Rachel Solomon 24:54
Thank you.

Kara Goldin 24:55
Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would please give us a review and. Feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit, and of course, feel free to subscribe, so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms at Kara Goldin. I would love to hear from you too, so feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, Undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building hint we are here every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Thanks for listening, and goodbye for now.

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