How GoodKind’s COO Builds Trust Before Building Inventory

There is a version of business growth that looks good on paper and hollows out everything that made the business worth building. Amy Kavanaugh, COO of GoodKind, has thought a lot about that version, and she has made a series of deliberate decisions to avoid it.

GoodKind creates tangible resources that help families cultivate spiritual habits and holiday celebrations throughout the year. Their product line includes Advent Blocks, Easter Blocks, a Sabbath Box, Sticky Prayers, and the GrataCube, a dodecahedron (yes, they looked up the name) that you roll at the dinner table to prompt gratitude toward God and the people around you. Five primary SKUs and a handful of supporting devotionals. That is it. And that restraint is entirely on purpose.

In Episode #44 of the Entrepreneurs Blueprint, Courtney sat down with Amy for a wide-ranging conversation about what it actually looks like to run a lean, mission-driven, seasonal product business without losing your mind or your values along the way.

How It Started: 500 Blocks and a Church Parking Lot

Amy did not set out to be a COO. She was working happily at her local church in communications, digital strategy, and creative development when two pastor friends approached her with what she describes as an unexpected question: “What are you doing with random wood scraps in the trunk of your car in the church parking lot?”

The answer was Advent Blocks. A 25-day countdown to Christmas built around a family devotional guide, wooden blocks, and a simple daily ritual. The founders had accidentally sold 500 of them the prior Christmas and were now sitting on 5,000 units with a manufacturer lined up and a very open question of what happens next.

Amy agreed to help with customer service. What followed was, in her words, “crazy and chaotic, but actually also really fun.” It was 2020. Blocks arrived late. Books were misprinted. Distribution had to be reworked mid-season. And Amy was hooked. She transitioned into a full-time role managing day-to-day operations, new product development, and logistics, and has grown alongside GoodKind ever since.

The Three-Part Product Test

People ask GoodKind to make more stuff constantly. Amy says they get that feedback all the time. And GoodKind’s answer is almost always: not yet.

Before any product goes to mass production, it has to pass what amounts to a three-part internal test. First, it has to have what Amy calls a “click.” Something that is a little bit satisfying, a physical proof that you have done the thing for today. There was a start and a finish. Second, it has to be beautiful enough to live on display in a home, on a kitchen table, up on the mantle, on a bedside table. If it is going to get put in a cabinet, it is not going to become a habit. Third, and most important, it has to be something families will come back to over and over again. GoodKind has made a deliberate choice not to make single-use products. Their goal is to create things that get pulled out every Advent, every Easter, every evening at the dinner table, for years.

Amy walked the shelves of Hobby Lobby trying to prototype what would eventually become the GrataCube. The team tested it with their own friends and family, with older kids, with younger kids, with Sunday school classes of adults. Only after all of that did they ask the financial and logistical questions. The thing has to work first.

When Values Said No

The clearest example of GoodKind’s values operating as an actual business filter came when Amy described two products the team chose not to ship: Prayer Chips and the Cardachism, a call-and-response catechism designed to be used in the car on the way to school, soccer practice, or dance class.

Both products had strong content behind them. Both had demand. The production system was ready to go. The team genuinely wanted them in their own lives. And they walked away from both.

“We did not feel like there were resources that people would come back to,” Amy said. “We felt like they were really leaning more toward a single-use thing.” When they came back to the core question, will this do what we promise it will do?, the answer was not confident enough to proceed.

“Being able to just kind of lean into our values to say no, or to say not right now, has been really difficult, but also really rewarding, to know that when we say these things, we mean them.”

As Courtney noted in the conversation, it is one thing to say your values guide your decisions. It is another thing entirely to sit in a meeting with production ready to go, revenue on the table, and a product your team loves, and say not yet.

The Church Program: Ministry and Channel Strategy at the Same Time

One of the most operationally interesting parts of GoodKind’s business is their church partnership program. It is not exactly wholesale, but it functions similarly, and it was built with a very specific understanding of how churches actually operate.

Church budgets for individual family resources look different than what a family will spend on their own. GoodKind addressed that directly by creating smaller versions of the Advent and Easter Blocks at a lower price point, with the same content and function, and bundling them with a robust set of free supporting resources for church leaders. We’re talking a Sunday morning kids curriculum, a sermon series guide, daily coloring pages, and a worship song with motion graphics. All of it designed so that a church leader can say yes once and have everything they need to run a season-long program for their families.

Amy describes it as wanting to be “like VBS for Christmas.” And because GoodKind’s founders came out of ministry and one of them leads a church planting network, the program was part of the vision almost from day one.

The operational challenge of running it on a lean team is real. Forecasting for a wholesale-adjacent channel is a completely different problem than forecasting DTC. But Amy describes their process with honesty: “It’s a lot of guess and check, to be quite honest with you.” They use historical data, make reasonable assumptions about advertising, and adjust as they go. Tariffs, lead time changes, and global supply chain factors have thrown curveballs. When inventory sells out, they praise God. When they have product left over, they also praise God and figure out a plan.

The Strategic Question They Are Living With Right Now

The most candid part of the conversation was Amy’s description of where GoodKind is right now on the DTC versus trade question. They are in the middle of it, without a clear answer yet, and she did not pretend otherwise.

The church program is not a true wholesale program. It works because of the relational foundation and the mission alignment. Taking products to retail trade is a different proposition entirely, with different margin math, different forecasting complexity, and different risks to the quality and accessibility that GoodKind has built its reputation on.

“We’ve had a lot of success with our guess-and-check methods,” Amy said. “But a wholesale strategy is something that we want to get right if we’re going to do it. We don’t want to sacrifice the quality of our products. We don’t want to sacrifice our margins too much. We need to keep this thing going.”

They are pursuing conversations with potential partners who already have the channel to market, trying to find a way to mitigate the risk of going it alone. But the posture Amy described is one of moving slowly and deliberately, making sure that when they make the play, they are confident in the direction.

Content as a Year-Round Relationship

GoodKind’s products are inherently seasonal. Advent Blocks in December, Easter Blocks in Holy Week, GrataCube year-round. The challenge is staying in relationship with customers in the months in between, especially families who came in through a holiday product and might otherwise go dormant until the next season.

Their answer is a content arm that includes a podcast and blog built around the same principles behind the products: lower the bar for spiritual practice, make it repeatable, and help families build habits they can sustain not just at Christmas but all year long.

“What we really want,” Amy said, “is to keep them engaged, whether they buy that product initially or not.” The content exists to nurture people toward having more spiritual habits in their family life, and to reverse-engineer why the products work so that families can apply those principles even without a product in hand.

It is being built scrappily. The team records in a church studio borrowed from Amy’s former employer. Four people, a borrowed room, and conversations they were already having before they decided to put a microphone in front of them.

A Small Tool That Changed Big Conversations

One practical operational insight Amy shared was almost a throwaway moment in the conversation, but it stuck. Out of curiosity, she started using a simple, free time tracking tool to see where her hours were actually going.

“It’s been fascinating to see how much time some tasks actually take,” she said. “Being able to stack the actual time up against our goals has led to some really interesting conversations and reassessments of what matters.”

For a team of four people wearing multiple hats across product development, operations, content, and customer experience, knowing how time is actually being spent versus how you think it is being spent is not a small thing. It is the difference between prioritizing what feels urgent and prioritizing what actually moves the mission forward.

What Amy Wants You To Walk Away With

Near the end of the conversation, Amy came back to the thread that ran through everything she shared: values are not decoration. They are the system.

“Creating values and holding onto them throughout different states of your growth is critical in ensuring not just success on paper, but creating something that you’re proud to be a part of. People tend to understand that alignment is critical in the workplace, but it’s also vital in your own relationship to your work and your goals.”

That is the thing GoodKind is actually building. Not just blocks and cubes and devotional guides, but a company where the decisions, even the hard ones, even the ones that leave revenue on the table, make sense when you hold them up against what they said they were about.

That is worth paying attention to.

Find Amy and GoodKind at www.goodkind.shop and on Instagram at @goodkind.co. You can find Amy personally at @amyekav. For more from Courtney and Monarch COO, visit www.monarchcoo.com or find her on Instagram at @monarchcoo.