Andrea Faulkner Williams: Co-Founder & Head Mama of Tubby Todd

Episode 771

On today’s episode, Kara welcomes Andrea Faulkner Williams, Co-Founder and “Head Mama” of Tubby Todd Bath Co. — the clean, joyful, and fast-growing skincare brand that’s reshaping the baby-care industry.

Andrea’s journey began with a simple but pressing challenge: finding gentle, effective products for sensitive skin when nothing on the shelf truly worked. That personal need sparked a mission that would evolve into Tubby Todd — now the #1 baby skincare brand on Amazon, fueling the majority of growth in a $50B category and outpacing legacy players through community, clarity, and clean ingredients. With a digital audience of more than 600K and a fiercely loyal customer base, Tubby Todd has become a modern case study in consumer trust, storytelling, and bootstrapped innovation.
In this episode, Andrea shares how she went from testing early formulas at home to building a nationally recognized brand, what it takes to scale without celebrity investors or massive ad budgets, and why authenticity still beats everything when it comes to connecting with consumers. From early obstacles to breakout moments, her story is packed with lessons about category disruption, brand voice, product excellence, and building a mission-driven business in a crowded space.

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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 we 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. 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 today, I’m joined by someone who has completely transformed the baby care space. Andrea Faulkner Williams is the co founder and head mama. Love that of Tubby Todd bath co also known as Tubby Todd and the beloved clean skin care brand trusted by millions of families everywhere. Andrea’s story started with a simple but deeply personal mission to find something that would help her four kids sensitive skin. And boy, has she achieved that. So what began as a family experiment in their home has grown into one of the fastest growing brands in the $50 billion baby care industry, and it’s the number one baby skin care brand on Amazon. So what I love about their journey is how authentic and community driven, it is I cannot wait to hear what Andrea has to say about the lessons learned and all of the good stuff that she has learned in building this incredible brand and company with her husband as well as co founder. So Andrea, welcome to the Kara Goldin show. So excited to meet you and to have you here.

Andrea Faulkner Williams 2:08
Thank you so much for having me. I’m really very excited to be here. So thank you

Kara Goldin 2:12
super, super excited. So okay, so for listeners who aren’t familiar with Tubby Todd, how do you define the Tubby Todd product?

Andrea Faulkner Williams 2:23
Yeah, we make body care basics for little ones and for the whole family that address sensitive skin care needs.

Kara Goldin 2:31
And what problem were you setting out to solve when you created it? Can you tell me the backstory of the moment when you said, this needs to be here. Yeah.

Andrea Faulkner Williams 2:42
So we have four little ones. Like you mentioned, when our first little one came along, her skin was perfect. It was easy. We used natural products in our home. We wanted to be great parents. We were surprised by by how green the products were, not in a fun way. They didn’t smell great, they didn’t lather. They didn’t give you any of that, like, beautiful experience you had in your home growing up with the bubbles and the great smells, right? Those were all driven by chemicals. My husband was working in manufacturing at the time, and we were like, Wouldn’t it be awesome to develop a bath product for our little ones that was fun to use and also safe and clean, right? So we had this idea, and we started working on a natural a natural bath wash. And during this process, our second child was born, Walker, Walker Todd. So my husband’s name is Brian Todd. Todd. The nurses called him the moose because he was the biggest baby born in the San Jose hospital. He was 11 pounds. So that is where the name Tubby Todd came from. So when Walker was born, he had eczema. I didn’t even know what eczema was, but over 30% of children have eczema at some point, and like somewhere between 10 to 20% of adults have some type of eczema, you know, throughout their life. So it’s very common. I had never encountered it. So I had this baby with dry, rough skin. Essentially, it’s just dryness, rough patches all over him, and all of the natural washes we were using were just stripping his body of moisture. So on top of wanting to develop this product that we were already working on that would be fun to use, would smell great, but also have a clean ingredient deck, we then had this problem to solve in our home, which was dry skin eczema. So we worked with formulators all over the country. Again, my husband had been working in manufacturing, so that’s how we we had the introduction to these formulators. We spent two years developing a bath wash. It’s the same wash we use today, and it is packed with hydration. I think what made it so different is that the majority, if not all of the brands that you had seen historically were sitting on a shelf, and they were working with MSRP in mind. So they were developing a body wash based on just getting the most cost effective product out there. And they’re thinking, parents are going to want to pay less for a body wash than they’re going to want to pay for themselves. So they were stripping out all of the good ingredients even more. So than what we were putting on ourselves. During this time, we’ve had this whole beauty movement where we’re so cognizant of what we’re putting on ourselves, and that moved to people being really cognizant of what they’re putting on their babies, so what they’re willing to pay for clean, effective skin care really changed. So we developed this wash and knew it would never sell in wholesale, and also, we couldn’t afford to develop enough of the bottles to produce them to send to wholesale, so we just ordered 750 bottles of the product and shipped it to our home. And we were like, Let’s see what we can do from here. Built a Shopify site on our own. We had some really good friends who were selling baby products online at the time, nothing in the beauty space, but influencers didn’t exist. But we did have friends that were mommy bloggers, and we were like, well, people read their stuff, so let’s, let’s send some bathwash to them and see if they’ll talk about it. We can’t pay them because we don’t have any money, but we’ll send, you know, a few 100 of the 750 bottles went out the door to people with some sort of Digital Influence to see, see what they

Kara Goldin 6:05
would say. And so what did they say?

Andrea Faulkner Williams 6:09
So what we found was, again, we didn’t have any money to talk about it. We were trying to pay our bills. I was work from home, part time, mom at the point I worked, you know, in marketing at home, my husband was full time in another career, and I had these two kids, and we sent out hundreds of bottles of soap. And what we found was that Instagram was people were just starting to talk about things on Instagram like, literally over 2014 to 2015 is when this really all started evolving. So it was a great time for us. What we weren’t sure was, were people going to talk about their baby’s skin care? Were they going to post a picture of picture of their baby? Right? Because, you know, in Bath time is very vulnerable. People don’t like posting pictures of their bathrooms as well, because your bathroom is typically not the best looking place in your home. But people loved talking about the review of the product and how when they used this wash that was packed with great ingredients. Their kids’ skin changed, and it was such a impactful transformation that they were raving about it. And slowly these sales started to trickle in. And so we just found more and more people. First it was the people we knew, and then it was the people who knew, people we knew, who had a Digital Influence. And then it just this influencer community became really the bread and butter of our Tepi Todd marketing and what we call our Tabby Todd mama community, they have fueled all of our innovation and all of our marketing since the very beginning, and we owe everything to them. So everything we do is is really for them.

Kara Goldin 7:37
Is there one ingredient in a lot of products that causes the sex eczema, I guess you you have to have skin that is brand new, baby skin, or something that is really allergic or or has some sort of sensitivity towards it. But what was it that you were really trying to remove, I guess, from from the products, yeah. So

Andrea Faulkner Williams 8:03
our products are free of all anything that is not natural, right? So all of our fragrances are made from raw aromatic extracts. They’re gluten, paraben, dairy free, cruelty free. They also are free of all SLS, sl es, folates, any of that, right? So, so any of those clean ingredients that you’re looking for, we go by the whole foods blacklist guide, as well as additional ingredients that we that, you know, we decided we’re not going to use. Okay? So those can be irritants, right? That that are in ingredients or in maybe your detergents or things that are irritating your skin, and also a lot of it is just the moisture barrier that has been damaged. And again, these baby products that even are free of chemicals were not packed with hydration. So just getting that hydration in your skin, baby skin is so delicate. As you know, babies are going to have cradle cap, they’re going to have diaper rash, they’re going to be, I mean, like blankets can irritate them. They’re just so brand new, and their skin barrier can be broken or tampered so easily. So it’s building up that skin barrier through layers of hydration. So that is everything we do is with the goal of not just keeping everything out that could hurt the little one, but also replacing it with things that could protect them from all of the things they’re going to encounter throughout the

Kara Goldin 9:24
day. So when you launch through Shopify and your store you you know you made a decision to launch, but what was the moment when you realized, okay, this is going to be a real business.

Andrea Faulkner Williams 9:41
Hmm, okay, that’s a really great question. So like I said, my husband and I, we launched this business together, and about three years in, kind of got to the point where we realized, what are we at? The point where he could quit his job? And I think that that was the moment that we were like. He could quit his job, we could pay for health care. We had started to hire employees prior to that that were helping me run the business, but he was still supporting our family. We had a third child by that point, so he was still supporting the family through his full time job. When he was able to quit his job, I think we were like, all right, game on. This is really happening, and that was really exciting.

Kara Goldin 10:24
So marketing and storytelling and promotion was there, especially in those early days. How did you get the word out outside of these influencers to tell people that you’re open for business?

Andrea Faulkner Williams 10:39
Yeah, so we it was three years into the brand before we ever ran a paid ad at all. So paid advertising has never been a key component of our strategy, mainly because storytelling and connecting with other women is what I like to do, and I don’t like to sit in the back end of meta, so I was the one doing almost everything. I’m not very good at sitting in the back end of Ed meta. So until we could hire people to do that, none of that was happening because it just feels overwhelming to me. So a lot of what we did was through organic social growth. So I’ll give you some examples of campaigns. Our tubutan newborn campaign to this day is one of my favorite that we would used to run, where moms would post a picture of the day. I’m sure you can remember the moment when you met your children, right? So whether you adopted or you had a surrogate, or you yourself, were able to carry the child that moment when you met your little one, that those are the best moments, right? So inviting people to post those moments, post those stories on their social tagging, Tabitha, and then choosing some of them to give them a giveaway or to win some product. Every year. At the end of the year, we do nominate a family campaign. So we have a charitable giving goal of giving back 1% of our top line sales, and we’ve done that since inception of the brand. And we use some of that, some of that goal, or that funds every year to give to families in our own community who have had a tough year. So we ask our community members to nominate those families, and we get 1000s of nominations of families who have maybe had a child born that year with special needs, had financial hardship, have, you know, struggled with IVF, or have lost a little one, or, you know, even a parent that year, those families are nominated, and then we choose a few 100 of them to gift a year of bath time, right? So a lot of our growth has come through community activation moments that have had nothing to do with paid advertising, but have been built in connection. The other side of it is just the virality of the product. So we call ourselves the internet’s favorite baby skin care because you say the words all over ointment or the acronym ao. And people, if you’re a mom ages 25 to 40 right now, and you have a smartphone, you know what you’re talking about, because they have seen an all over ointment testimonial. Specifically, we have almost 20,000 all over ointment testimonials, with 45,005 star reviews of the brand, and growing every single day. So people are talking about tummy Todd because it works, and we’ve been very slow on our product rollout because we haven’t had retailers pushing us. We haven’t had investors pushing us. It’s been growth that’s come just from our own family, right? And we’ve been able to say, hey, we’re not going to launch a product until it’s a need that we’ve had, we’ve tested, it’s proven, and we really feel like we could give this to our best friend to be a solution in their home. So those two points of products that actually work in a community, that’s where, that’s where the building has come from, and then eventually paid advertising came in, and kind of, you know, supported all of that, as all of us do, but there really had to be, like, legs for it to stand on, for those ads to work, right?

Kara Goldin 13:49
So, so interesting. So you, you touched on this, but the direct to consumer store that you built, that was, you know, the the go to market strategy. Many times people also venture out into retail, especially in the number of years that you’ve been in

Andrea Faulkner Williams 14:12
business. Have you thought about going into retail and and definitely yes. Thank you for asking. And so one of our our company brand values is to be a good friend. So in every and that is the number one thing I say to anyone we interview a new team member at Tubby Todd, I’m like, do not make it. Sell it. Design it, write it, if you would not send it to a friend. Because I think that was what irritated me the most about being a mom is being marketed to in a way that I was like an old, out of touch woman, where I was like, Hey, I was, you know, I was 25 years old when I had my first baby. I was still very young. I wanted cute, fashionable clothing, baby products, natural ingredients, right? Those were all very important to me. And I think that that is, that is the case for families now, right? They long. Is gone that they’re going to just take the recommendation of their pediatricians, and I do hope the pediatricians are still a touch point for them, but there are many other touch points for families on where they’re getting their information for, you know, for their little ones. Okay, so retail. So being a good friend is the most important thing to us. So what does it look like to be a good friend? Being a good friend is doing something right and showing up well. And we knew that we couldn’t do retail well until we were prepared as a brand. We do direct to consumer really well. We’re really fun. We have seasonal fragrances, we have subscriptions, we have swag. We wanted to make our Tubby Todd family’s retail experience amazing. So retail is coming in 2026 Amazon happened in 2024 25 and I think you mentioned earlier, we are 95% of the category’s total growth is Tubby Todd in the premium baby market. And we are on our way to be the best selling baby skincare brand on Amazon, but we want to be that as well, in retail, on shelves, and so we’re going to do it, and we’re going to do it really, really well. We just want to make sure we were ready for it

Kara Goldin 16:07
very, very smart. So what gave you the confidence that you could kind of break into this category? This, this very crowded category too. It’s, I think a lot of people who might be listening, you know, think, Oh, I have this great idea. I don’t, yeah, I don’t know how to launch it online. And when they start to hear so much information about the category that they’re jumping into, they’re like, there’s just no way that we’re going to be able to make it. Not to mention the fact that I’m sure many of your friends, as much as they love you and family, were probably like, what are you guys doing? I mean, and both of you,

Andrea Faulkner Williams 16:57
oh yeah, my right, yeah, yeah, yeah. My dad and my dad, I can say this to Him, because He has been he later came on and sat on our board at Tubby Todd for five years. But in the initial inception, my dad was always an entrepreneur, so I was raised. So what gave me the initial confidence was him. But then when we told him about Tubby Todd, he said, so what you’re telling me is you’re going to take a bottle of soap that is the most expensive thing you could ship, and you’re gonna sell it online for $14 when people could go down the street and buy it for $6 at CVS or target. He’s like, and you’re gonna charge them shipping. He’s like, I don’t know the math isn’t mathing. And so three years later, when he ended up, you know, sitting on the board and also became a very integral part of helping us build the organization of tevi Todd. We love to bring that conversation up. It’s my favorite thing to tell I’m like, remember when you said that? You know, but, um, but, yeah, the confidence I I sincerely I don’t know about confidence. I’m not sure if I’m unhinged or naive that I don’t know about confidence. I won’t answer that, but here’s one thing I will say about being an entrepreneur, the only thing that made it so it still happened in the the fact that I’m still sitting in the building today, is because I love talking to our community. I love selling this product. I believe in it. I believe in family. I believe that connecting with your little one like that is the most important thing I will ever do in my life, is connecting with my children. Not everyone has the gift of being a parent and and it is not for everyone, but I have had that gift. I’ve gotten to have that gift four times. I begged for a fifth, but I got four, and I’m very happy with them. I i I really believe, I believe that connecting with families is the most important thing that I could be doing. I love selling natural bath products, and so that’s how it has worked for me to run this business, right? My husband loves it as well. So if you’re not doing something you love as an entrepreneur, you’re not going to love every part of it, and you’re not gonna love every day. I’ve hated days of being, you know, the founder. I’ve hated days of running Tubby Todd. And if it’s not a mission that you believe in, I think it’s gonna be really tough to have the confidence or the energy or whatever you need to get through running your brand.

Kara Goldin 19:17
Yeah. So it’s so, so true, so product development and innovation you you mentioned that you launched with the wash, what was the point when you ended up adding products? And how do you know when to add more products?

Andrea Faulkner Williams 19:36
Yeah, so we have 25,000 Facebook members in a private Facebook group, we have 600,000 Instagram followers at like a 9% engagement rate, which is like unheard of. We have million million and a half email subscribers. I mean, we are talking to our families literally all day, every day I was alive earlier today with, you know, three to 400 people. A few 15 minutes talking about our holiday line. So there’s the first thing, just talk to your consumers. Talk to your customers again. Be a good friend. What does that look like if you’re not talking to a friend, then you’re losing touch with them. So that would be the first thing. The second thing is, I, myself, am a consumer of the product. So I was having babies. I’m not anymore. So that has been an interesting new role in sitting as the co founder, still, you know, very active in product development. So talking to the moms on the team, to my friends, to my nieces, people I know and love, who are having babies, what does that look like for them? And what are their pain points? Because it’s really interesting how quickly products develop. Manufacturing changes, even clean Beauty and the ingredient knowledge that we’re getting, it changes really quickly, and it has developed. There’s been ingredients that we’ve cut out over the years of Tubby Todd that we once started with. And you know, the reports were saying, and the experts were saying these were the ingredients to use. And then we found out there was a better either surfactant or preservative to use to help, you know, so I, I think that again, just being in touch with your consumer and you yourself, like I’m subscribed to the product I shop on the website as often as I can, constantly, like looking on our site, I don’t look at competitors. I don’t do that. I don’t I don’t walk down the baby aisle when I’m in retail. I don’t want to know what anyone else is doing. I just want to know what we’re doing, because we’re our only competitor. I truly believe that. And what can we do better?

Kara Goldin 21:40
I love it. So if you had to name a hero product within the Tubby Todd line, what would that be?

Andrea Faulkner Williams 21:49
Definitely our all over ointment I mentioned earlier, I think I’m really excited to eventually be on retail shelves, because our three step process is our our wash, our lotion and our all over ointment. So if you’re new to Tubby Todd, hey there. Nice to meet you. Everyone should have the three step. Kara, I’m going to be sending one to you for every bathroom in your home. The wash, the lotion, is the basics of skin care for the whole family. So a hydrating wash, a lotion. I use the on my hands. I use it on my full body. My husband and I use the wash to shave, like we use it for hand washing in every room in our house. And then the ointment is to spot treat. So the ointment is going to be for any of your little ones needs, like cradle cap. I already mentioned. You can use it for diaper rush. You can use it for eczema spots. But I also use it as a hand salve. I use it to smooth fly ways in my hair. I use it as, like a petroleum free option of anything you think of like, sometimes I use out my lips on, you know, chopped cheeks, if we’re going out in the cold, right? So that’s just a, really a skin barrier. So a, oh yes, but when we’re it works best in tandem with our three step process, which is the regulars bundle.

Kara Goldin 22:59
So you’ve scaled without celebrity investors or giant budgets. I know you mentioned community, and your community is just like amazing, and I couldn’t agree more, it’s actually, it’s about speaking with them and making them feel heard, which I think you’ve, you’ve done it in such a brilliant way. But what would you say the the bootstrapping, I guess I call what you’ve done bootstrapping, right? I mean, what? What would you suggest to other founders, like, how do you do that? How do you make that happen?

Andrea Faulkner Williams 23:39
Yeah, I would say staying focused is the most important thing, right? Like, you can only do three to five things every quarter, like real impactful goals as an organization, so we still live by that as a management as an executive team, we have three to five goals every quarter. So let me give you an example. Maybe it’s like revamping our Amazon SKU catalog. Maybe it’s like we’re doing a reboot of our subscription program, you know. And then we have like, two other initiatives. We’re hiring a VP for a new department, and we have like, a seal of approval we’re trying to get for all of our products. Like those are four hard things that are going to take the whole organization. And if we spend three months all of us as a management team making sure our teams under us are getting those things done, we’re going to be far better off in three to four months than we were if we were trying to do 12 things that only all of them got done a quarter of the way. Right? So staying focused is the way to have productive growth with a tiny team. We’re still a team of only 30 to 32 with like a 30% EBITDA, we are very, very focused on profitable growth. We have been from the first bottle that we sold that was important to us. That’s not important to every brand. End, but that was that was important to my husband and I, that was important to later partners that we brought on, and every partner that we’ve considered, it’s it’s worked for us, and it’s also made us be super intentional in where we place our dollars, in our head count, and also really clear with our job descriptions, with our team. So

Kara Goldin 25:19
interesting, what has been the most surprising part of of launching and growing the brand for you, and I guess, for for the company as well. But what’s been maybe it’s something that’s just been incredibly hard, but it or it’s something that has been duh, we should have done this so much sooner.

Andrea Faulkner Williams 25:45
Oh, wait. Well, I’ll say the the the first thing, I’ll say something about the category, and then I’ll say something personally. So we created an entire, entire new industry, which is premium baby skincare. So premium skincare for babies didn’t exist. And, you know, a lot of people always ask, Was it luck, or was it, you know, like, just hard work, or how did you how did this work? Right? Because we know a lot of businesses don’t work. I think it’s all of the things. I think luck has a lot to do with it. And we showed up on the scene with premium baby skincare at a time when parents have never been more intentional about their parenting and about having children. They’re having children later. They’re having less children. They’re more aware of what they’re putting on their skin. We’re so aware of what we’re putting on their skin, and no one was giving these parents a solution to premium, effective baby skin care. Boom, we’re here. We are right. So that has been surprising to me, that we showed up at the very right time in the very right place. The thing about me, personally, that I will say that has been the greatest gift, is I never intended on being a full time working mom. I always thought maybe I would have a side hustle. But my growing up, my mom was primarily home, and so was my husband’s mom, and I thought I was going to stay home as a mom, and I’m not. Obviously, I have a career, and it has been so amazing to have this gift of being able to have a family and have this business. It has taught me so much about myself as a mom, and I just I never thought I would be lucky enough to have both of these dreams come true, dreams I didn’t know I had. You know so well, and how much you’re teaching your kids as well. You know, I don’t know. They’re either really lucky or they’re gonna need a lot of help. They’ve got two unhinged founders for parents so well, bless them all, it’s

Kara Goldin 27:37
it’s it. I wrote a book five years ago now, and I talked about that that my son, who’s now in his 20s, that was, it was probably when he was, like 12 or 13, when he really started to, you know, ask about a lot of different business things. And then I remember he heard Sheryl Sandberg talking about leaning in and was surprised that I being the CEO of the company. I mean, he was like, Oh, wait, that’s just a small percentage of the population. Why is that? Like? No one was talking about that in his circles. So he just thought that was really cool that he had one of the few moms that was out there. So all of these, you know, different things. And he’s got, today, such an entrepreneurial mind where nothing sort of phases him. He’ll walk in the back room at Target and pull cases out of hint and, you know, put him on the shelf. It’s just he’s very Yeah, like he’s grown up. I know he’s, he’s grown up doing that. So he’s just so used to it. So it’s,

Andrea Faulkner Williams 28:50
and I was, I will say, I was raised that way as well. I was raised by a father who started multiple companies, a mother who raised five children, but has also acquired multiple degrees while raising all these children now, has written over 10 books, right? So we, we were taught that sitting around is isn’t what makes you happy. And I don’t really care if my kids grow up to be entrepreneurs, but I do hope that they grow up and have three to five goals every quarter that they’re working on, because I think that really is happiness in life, right? Pushing towards small term goals that lead to something bigger in life. You know,

Kara Goldin 29:24
I love that. So finally, if you could put one message on a billboard for every founder or wannabe founder creator that’s out there, what would it say?

Andrea Faulkner Williams 29:38
Oh, yeah, I love that question. I think you would just say you’ve got this. Like, I always say that to our moms I and I say that to myself all the time, like, you’ve got this. I think founders are typically pretty passionate people, right? And passion is a great thing, but it goes both ways. There’s highs and there’s lows with passion. So I’m. Um, I think you’ve got this, is what I would say, because founders show up like myself a lot of the time, very enthusiastic and energetic, but there’s always something on the other side of that, right? What comes up has to go down. And so, yeah, I we’ve got this, right? I

Kara Goldin 30:17
love it so. Andrea, thank you so much for joining us today, and everybody have a look at top at Tubby Todd.com and definitely check out what they’re doing on social. They’ve done such a great job at Tubby Todd, and also Andrea Faulkner Williams on her social as well. But Andrea, thank you again for joining us and all the lessons and inspiration. Thank you, Kara, thank you again, and thanks everyone for listening and definitely love the head mama to such a great title to have and everything that you’re doing. Good luck with everything. Thank you. 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, best selling 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.