Wombi Rose Of Lovepop: 5 Important Business Lessons I Learned While Being On Shark Tank

As a part of our series about the ‘5 Important Business Lessons I Learned While Being On Shark Tank’ I had the pleasure of interviewing Wombi Rose.

Wombi Rose is the co-founder and CEO of Lovepop, a design company on a mission to create one billion magical moments by building the #1 online destination for greeting cards. A ship designer by training, Wombi is passionate about building teams that combine imagination and engineering to create magical customer experiences. Since its Shark Tank debut, Lovepop has become a national brand and one of the show’s top-performing companies.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit more. Can you tell us a bit of the backstory about how you grew up?

I grew up between Berlin, Germany and Pittsburgh, experiencing elementary school in both places. One was very creative, the other very structured. I think that experience led to a fascination with how to best combine art and engineering.

When it came time for college, I was torn between pursuing a degree in journalism or engineering. However, none of the colleges I visited felt right to me, until I followed my intuition and went to visit Webb Institute in Glen Cove, New York. I had received a postcard from them with the picture of an America’s Cup yacht on it and a mysterious sounding degree in naval architecture and marine engineering. On my first visit, I fell in love with the students, the campus (an old Pratt family estate), and its mission: providing full-tuition scholarships to every student for learning the art and engineering of ship design.

Looking back, it makes perfect sense: I spent my childhood building things, and making art as presents for Christmas and birthdays, so of course I ended up dedicating my career to… building even more things, just made out of paper. I’ve always loved creating and design. The medium just got a lot more colorful.

Can you share with us the story of the “aha moment” that gave you the idea to start your company?

The moment hit us in Vietnam. My cofounder John and I stumbled upon this incredible paper art called kirigami — intricate, architectural sculptures that unfolded in your hands. As two naval architects, we saw structure, geometry, and engineering hidden inside what looked like magic. We bought armfuls of samples, hauled them back home, and showed them to friends. Every single person who opened one lit up. That reaction was the spark. We realized we could take our engineering skills and apply them to something unexpected: cards that truly meant something. That reaction told us everything.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?

A couple years ago, I met an incredibly talented MIT math professor who specializes in spatial geometry and paper art Erik Demaine while giving a talk to MIT students together. He later introduced me to his friend Damian Kulash and the band OK Go, who had been experimenting with him on a very cool paper art puzzle for a new album cover. After six months of experimentation and design, beginning with deconstructing sound waves into paper sliceforms, Damian pulled in the magical design duo of Yuri Suzuki and Claudio Ripol. With Damian’s persistence and artistic vision, Claudio & Yuri’s incredible design work, and the Lovepop team’s tireless 3D design and engineering, we ended up creating a double LP vinyl record package that unfolds into a sliceform sphere, reflected on the inner panel for OK Go’s latest album “And the Adjacent Possible.”

Just a few weeks ago we learned that we were all nominated for a Grammy for Best Recording Package. There are a lot of dreams that I’ve turned into goals and worked very hard to accomplish. However, being nominated for a Grammy as a paper engineer — this was completely unexpected and most definitely not on my bingo card.

Learn more at OKGO.net/fyc.

It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

One of the most valuable lessons we learned early on came from a classic false positive. We opened a temporary kiosk in Boston’s South Station in February 2015 and saw incredible sales. It looked like a green light to scale, so we invested our Shark Tank funding in hiring a retail lead and opening four additional locations. We quickly learned that those new kiosks performed at only a fraction of South Station’s volume.

The mistake wasn’t the ambition. It was assuming that one data point could be extrapolated to every retail environment. South Station had 125,000 daily visitors and a Valentine’s Day surge baked into the numbers. It was an outlier, not a model. Once we saw the gap, we adjusted, absorbed the losses, and rebuilt.

After that, we learned to pressure-test every success and ask ourselves if the result is a false positive, a false negative, or something that truly scales. We use that mindset today in how we evaluate retail opportunities, test new formats, and validate demand before investing. It changed how we make decisions, and it’s one of the reasons our future retail strategy is built on small, repeatable experiments rather than assumptions from a single win.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

The most important project we are working on is helping people keep their greeting card stash at home stocked. Our mission is to create one billion magical moments. We firmly believe that we are all happier and healthier if we spend more of our time, money, and energy on other people. Our best customers have taught us that one of the easiest ways to send more cards to the people we love is to make sure we always have the right card on hand at home. If the occasion comes up, it’s much more likely we’ll send it now if we can just go to our stash and write it right away. Based on this insight, we are launching our Stash Pass subscription membership program. In return for a quarterly commitment, we are keeping our customers stocked for ~50% off sticker price for the most magical cards on the market from Lovepop. We hope this helps people keep their stash stocked, and send more magical moments out in the world.

Ok, thank you for all that. Let’s now move to the main part of our interview. Many of us have no idea about the backend process of how to apply and get accepted to be on Shark Tank. Can you tell us the story of how you applied and got accepted? What “hoops” did you have to go through to get there? How did it feel to be accepted?

Having the opportunity to present on Shark Tank is the opportunity of a lifetime for any consumer brand. When we aired in 2015, we had to compete with 40,000 applicants to pitch our business in front of the Sharks and an audience of 7.5m viewers. Our task was clear: build a business with a strong product, strong customer demand, and a unique take on an important industry stuck with a stale product and business model. We decided to invest in our own design, our own production, and our own distribution through Lovepop.com and our own retail stores and kiosks. By the time we pitched on the show, we had been working furiously for a year and a half to build a real business. We also applied every ounce of creativity within our tiny team — making a custom sliceform Shark Tank sculpture for the show, doubling the product line, and making a custom Lovepop card for each Shark on the show.

I’m sure the actual presentation was pretty nerve-wracking. What did you do to calm and steel yourself to do such a great job on the show?

I will never forget standing in front of those massive doors they open at the start of the show. We both had butterflies in our stomach as we walked into the tank. When we got in front of the Sharks, we were surprised at how familiar they felt. We had watched almost every Shark Tank episode in the week before our pitch, so it felt as if we already knew them.

We practiced A LOT. We wrote down every hard question. Who would answer it. How we would answer it. By the time the Sharks started asking us questions, we had rehearsed so much that muscle memory took over. We completely forgot about the cameras and the lights, and were just answering questions about a business that was consuming every waking hour of our existence.

So what was the outcome of your Shark Tank pitch? Were you pleased with the outcome?

We landed a deal with Kevin O’Leary, which became a game-changing relationship. Kevin likes to say his number one objective is to bring customer acquisition costs for his companies down to zero. It’s not quite zero, but Kevin has helped tremendously in getting the word out about Lovepop. He helped us land a long-term relationship with QVC, and has challenged us at every step of the way to keep growing the business. I’m honestly not sure how Kevin manages to find time for the hundreds of companies in his portfolio, but he’s always taken my call.

What are your “5 Important Business Lessons I Learned While Being On The Shark Tank”? (Please share a story or example for each.)

1. Simplicity wins.

When you’re pitching under pressure, every extra word is dead weight. Shark Tank taught me to sharpen the story until it’s undeniable.

2. Preparation destroys fear.

The Sharks can smell uncertainty. Because we rehearsed relentlessly, we were able to answer concisely and confidently.

3. Know your numbers.

If you hesitate on financials, you’re done. Being fluent in the data builds trust instantly.

4. Take critique without taking it personally.

Some feedback stings, but a lot of it is gold. Sharks don’t sugar-coat — and that’s a gift if you can handle the heat.

5. Exposure is rocket fuel, but only if you’re ready.

The show drives enormous demand. Without systems in place, that kind of spike can sink a young company. We enlisted the help of prior Shark Tank contestants to understand what we’d be looking at and make sure our website, customer happiness, and fulfillment operation was ready.

What advice would you give to other leaders to help their team to thrive and avoid burnout?

The most important thing is you have to love what you do. Burnout comes very fast if you’re trying to force yourself to push hard on something you aren’t emotionally invested in. This is true for everyone in the organization. I’m also a big believer in the ebb and flow. Some days and some weeks are going to be super fast-paced and take you for everything you’ve got. But then you’ve got to also recharge. Everyone can figure out something that works for them. As long as everyone’s motivated and invested in the same goal, and working together, I believe teams can come together to figure out the best way to make things work for everyone.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Our mission is to help our customers create one billion magical moments. Small gestures like a card, a note, a moment create outsized impact. In a world obsessed with speed, choosing to slow down and show someone they matter is quietly revolutionary. I would love to see people gathering on a Wednesday morning, or a Sunday afternoon, just spending time to write cards, thank each other, making a real effort to build individual relationships away from the noise of social media.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

The most important quote: “you reap what you sow”. I believe this is true in all areas of life, and especially in business. In business: preparation is key. We build our product line a few quarters in advance. We prepare our ads and emails ahead of the season. Once we are in season, we can’t go back in time and create new products. At that point it’s all systems go. Everything we experience, it’s the result of decisions we made earlier. That time lag between the decision, the action, the hard work, and the ultimate outcome — it’s one of the hardest things to fully comprehend. It makes it really hard to put energy and effort into the most important things, which have delayed rewards. It makes it really tempting to keep course correcting, and zig zagging, when you just need to stay focused.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)

If you’re reading this and you send more than 30 cards a year and want to work with Lovepop to design a solution for the way you like to send cards, please reach out to me on LinkedIn. If you run a company or a team and want to use Lovepop to create magical moments for your customers, employees, or partners, please reach out! And if Kris Rudeegraap, you are reading this, let’s meet up. Curious if we can make some magical moments together.

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!