In early 2024, Tal Moore’s company was close to running out of money.
“We had less than two weeks of cash left in the bank,” the Popsmith cofounder told Business Insider.
Moore and his business partner, who launched their stainless-steel stovetop popcorn maker in 2023, couldn’t move enough product to cover the company’s expenses.
“I ended up selling $600,000 worth of my personal stock to keep us afloat,” Moore said. “We were burning $100,000 a month, and so that gave us a six-month runway to really turn the business around.”
Two years later, Popsmith’s popper is on the shelves of retailers including Crate & Barrel and Williams-Sonoma, available on Costco.com, and has been featured on Oprah’s annual “Favorite Things” list.
Moore told Business Insider how he got into the popcorn business, went from nearly losing the company to repeatedly selling out of product, and plans to expand internationally and become a fixture in the popcorn space.
From gumball machines to popcorn poppers
Moore, who describes himself as a serial entrepreneur, started young. At 12, he sold one-inch gumballs to his middle school classmates. As a teenager, he bought spiral gumball machines and built a vending route in the Pacific Northwest.
By his early 20s, he had bought the domain Gumballs.com, his first move into e-commerce. From there, he expanded into other products and categories, including popcorn. His second online store sold movie-theater-style poppers and antique pushcarts.
What drew him to both gumballs and popcorn was their nostalgia factor.
“They’re both things that people have really positive associations with and bring a bit of joy,” Moore said. Over the next two decades, he started and sold a range of e-commerce businesses, but popcorn was the category he kept coming back to.
Finding a niche in high-end poppers
In 2020, Moore and his business partner decided to sell off their other e-commerce businesses and focus entirely on popcorn. They saw an opening for a premium stovetop popper — something that felt less like a novelty item and more like “heirloom-quality” cookware.
“Nobody had developed something like that in popcorn,” Moore said. “Most of the popcorn poppers in the market are very carnival kitch.”
It took about two years and $3.5 million to develop and launch the product, he said, but expenses didn’t ease up once Popsmith had something to sell.
“We were spending about 50% of our revenue on ads, on Meta and on Google,” Moore said. By January 2024, the financial situation was urgent, forcing the co-founders to lay off all of their employees, cut agencies, and strip the business down to its essentials.
Throwing ‘Hail Marys’ and landing on Oprah’s list
Moore and his partner needed to build awareness for Popsmith without spending a ton of money.
“At this point, I had to throw some Hail Marys,” he said.
He started by sending poppers and handwritten notes to the CEOs of Williams-Sonoma and Crate & Barrel, the retailers he had designed the product for in the first place. Within two months, he said, buying teams from both companies had reached out.
Then came Oprah.
Moore had no idea how to get on Oprah’s annual “Favorite Things” list — “it’s just like a total black box,” he said — until he saw an opening on LinkedIn. A junior editor at Oprah Daily had posted about popcorn, so Moore cold-messaged her. She replied, requested a popper, and eventually helped get the product in front of Oprah.
According to the editor Moore spoke with, the team considers about 15,000 products each year before Oprah selects the final list. Popsmith made the cut.
After the list was announced in November 2024, the company sold out of every popper in a matter of weeks. Popsmith went on to sell out three times over the next five months.
“Oprah is the OG influencer,” Moore said. “Whatever Oprah points to, people pay attention.”
Building beyond the popper
Moore said Popsmith is now focused on becoming more than a single-product company. The popper was the flagship product, but he sees a larger opportunity in popcorn kernels, seasonings, and other consumables.
“We really want to own popcorn,” he said.
International expansion is also on the horizon. Moore said the company saw early signs of global demand during its 2023 Kickstarter campaign, when about a quarter of its backers were international. Because the Popsmith popper doesn’t plug in, it avoids some of the complications that come with selling electrical appliances across markets.
“Anybody with a stovetop can cook popcorn in a Popsmith,” he said.
The company is on pace to do $10 million in revenue this year and reach profitability, Moore said, a timeline that’s faster than he expected.
“I’m invested in quite a few DTC brands, and most don’t achieve profitability until year six or year seven, so I would say we’re well ahead of schedule.”
That said, his ambitions are much larger: “We have aspirations to become a $100 million brand and beyond, and I’m highly confident that we’ll get there.”
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