https://www.wsj.com/articles/sorry-graza-olive-oil-apology-11673476845?

What Happened When the Olive-Oil Startup Apologized

The CEO told 35,544 customers he was sorry. It worked.

KELSEY MCCLELLAN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

By Ben CohenFollow

Jan. 12, 2023 5:30 am ET

Andrew Benin wrote the email in a few hours and didn’t bother proofreading or showing a draft to anyone before he sent it to 35,544 people. 

He was unusually eager to say the most dreaded word in business: sorry. 

Mr. Benin is the chief executive of Graza, a startup that has turned squeezable bottles of extra-virgin olive oil into hot kitchen staples, delighting people who never knew they could have strong feelings about healthy liquid fat. But some of those customers were disappointed when their holiday gifts arrived late and badly packaged, and Mr. Benin felt that he should apologize. To all of them. 

So he contacted everyone who had ordered Graza’s olive oils in the previous 60 days to ask for a second chance.

Graza CEO Andrew Beninsent this 866-word apology to 35,544 customers last month.PHOTO: GRAZA

The mea culpa from a one-year-old company with the subject line “Learning from our mistakes” was just about the opposite of a typical corporate response. It explained in plain English and candid detail what went wrong and why. It took accountability for those errors and offered a discount on future orders. It was raw, transparent about uncertainty and messy with typos and misspellings. It was also oddly entertaining and strangely charming. 

Mr. Benin watched the replies come back within minutes. First one, then another, then 866 more. 

“Thanks for your honesty,” wrote one. “I wish more businesses did the same.” 

“I won’t be using the discount,” wrote another, “but I will be reordering.” 

“These messages go a long way,” wrote someone else. 

Mr. Benin believes in communicating like a person, not “as a business, with a business tone,” which became obvious to anyone who opened his apology email. And there were many. The average open rate of Graza’s regular marketing emails was already exceptionally high at 58%. This one reached 78%.  

“All you need to do is dig deep, reflect on all the things in marketing and brand communication that piss you off, and do the exact opposite,” Mr. Benin said.  

Corporate statements about falling short and vowing to do better are so formulaic that most of these apologies could be written by ChatGPT. In fact, when I asked the AI tool for a response from a company under fire, the results were uncanny. The robots have already mastered the language of crisis PR. 

“Dear valued customers,” read ChatGPT’s statement for [Company Name]. “We understand that our mistakes have likely caused frustration and disappointment for you, and for that we deeply apologize.” 

Graza’s refreshing apology was clearly the work of actual human beings who have never run their business like [Company Name]. 

An example of a corporate apology generated by the AI tool ChatGPTPHOTO: CHATGPT

Mr. Benin, 30 years old, spent his 20s working for direct-to-consumer brands like Warby Parker and Casper while apprenticing in Michelin-starred New York City restaurant kitchens. That professional experience prepared him for a job that he never imagined until he was living with his wife’s family in Spain during the pandemic and became obsessed with olive oil. 

The last thing the world needed was another snobby olive oil, and it took a year to find the sweet spot between flavor and affordability, but Mr. Benin feels that Graza’s two oils for everyday use “stack up against any of the world’s ‘gold medal blah blah blah olive oils,’” as he puts it. They’re not cheap, but they’re not too expensive, with 750 milliliters of its cooking oil, Sizzle, going for $15 and 500 ml of its finishing oil, Drizzle, selling for $20. And even the bottles have distinctive branding: They’re squeezable. 

Mr. Benin and co-founder Allen Dushi, the company’s 35-year-old chief operating officer, flipped the switch on Graza’s site last January. Whole Foods called by the end of that first week. Soon the heating and eating oils were in Bon Appétit, Food & Wine and all over Instagram. Now the squirt bottles can be found in stores across the country, and sales are split down the middle between online and brick-and-mortar.

Mr. Benin spends eight months of the year in Spain, where Graza’s products are farmed, picked, pressed and bottled, and the rest of his time operating from the company’s three rented desks in Brooklyn. A venture-backed olive-oil startup in a co-working space might sound like a millennial parody, but he says Graza has been successful for the same basic reasons as any small business: “We have the right quality at the right price with the right supply chain, the right packaging and the right machinery investments with the right market.”

Graza’s Sizzle olive oil is for cooking. Its Drizzle finishing oil is for salads and the like.PHOTO: KELSEY MCCLELLAN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Until things went wrong. 

The company felt the growing pains of a startup when it struggled to keep up with the demand of its first holiday season. Orders came faster than expected after the olive oils were featured in hundreds of gift guides. Customers felt deceived when they ordered three sets, expecting they would get three separate packages of Sizzle and Drizzle, only to receive a single box of six loose bottles. Some came dented. Others came with a peeling logo. Stragglers came late after a blizzard and bomb cyclone delayed shipments. It wasn’t exactly a crisis, but Mr. Benin wasn’t proud of Graza’s performance, and he took responsibility. 

“Hello very important Graza person,” he wrote on Dec. 29. “I’ll try to keep things brief as we all have better things to do than read long emails from your favorite olive oil company.” 

By the time he was done, his brief email was 835 words. Mr. Benin outlined the most frequent complaints, explained the ones he could and said he was sorry for all of them. It didn’t matter that many satisfied customers would be perplexed by his email or that he was disclosing problems most of them hadn’t noticed. This was the closest he could get to sending 35,544 handwritten notes of apology.

“All that I thought was that I need to make myself available,” Mr. Benin said. “It felt like the right thing to do.”

At a company with five employees, he could simply do it himself. It’s harder and riskier at larger organizations where the mistakes are bigger than olive oil. Southwest Airlines canceling thousands of flights over Christmas was a fiasco that required several apologies, including one acknowledging that “no amount of apologies can undo your experience.” But too much contrition can backfire. Economists have found that apologizing repeatedly is actually worse for business than not apologizing. 

So what makes a good apology? Marjorie Ingall, the co-author of the new book “Sorry, Sorry, Sorry,” has written about apologies for a decade on the blog SorryWatch and says the rules are the same for adults, children, airlines and olive-oil startups:

1. Say you’re sorry.
2. For what you did.
3. Show you understand why it was bad.
4. Only explain if you need to; don’t make excuses. 
5. Say why it won’t happen again.
6. Offer to make up for it.

Mr. Benin did that in his apology but heard from the company’s marketing platform about something he didn’t do: include a link to Graza’s website. That was intentional. “This was not meant to drive traffic,” he said. “This was an apology.” 

The most effective apologies come with a financial cost, says Ben Ho, a Vassar College economics professor. In one experiment studying customer behavior after millions of late Uber arrivals, he found that riders preferred $5 coupons without apologies to apologies without compensation. Money helped buy their forgiveness. 

There was something unconventional about the most conventional part of Graza’s apology. Instead of rounding up to $5, the company provided anyone who ordered bottles in the past two months with a promo code for $4.43, which Mr. Benin said was the most it could afford. That weirdly specific number suggested it really was. In other words, giving less earned more trust with customers. 

I was one of them. I liked cooking with Sizzle and slathering food in Drizzle enough to order holiday presents from Graza, but I was disheartened when some bottles leaked in transit and the rest weren’t packaged as gifts. And then I read Mr. Benin’s email. 

It didn’t just win me back. It made me more likely to buy more Graza. As it turns out, the next time I spotted one of its recognizable squeeze bottles in the grocery store, I came home with olive oil. 

The curious thing about a memorable apology is that it can leave a company in a better position than before it had any reason to apologize. 

Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com