Advice Line with Mei Xu of Chesapeake Bay Candle and Blueme

Intro

Guy Raz brings Mei Xu back to the Advice Line, this time to take calls rather than pitch. The Chesapeake Bay Candle founder and former diplomat answers questions from three founders who have built real businesses but hit walls at the next level. Sasha Millstein needs an operator for her frozen pot pie company, Tara Parkinson is weighing D2C against wholesale for her towel-dress brand, and Lindsay Gallas wants to crack school district sales with her math curriculum platform.

Caller 1: Sasha Millstein & Aunt Ethel's Pot Pies

Sasha launched into over 100 Wegmans locations and sold out of 8,000 units in six minutes on QVC. She wants a co-founder to close the operational gap, but Mei and Guy push back on the premise immediately. Mei, who ran Chesapeake Bay Candle with her then-husband, warns that partnering through marriage nearly broke both the business and the relationship. The better path is a senior operator — a COO or operations lead with equity, not equal partnership. That person brings manufacturing expertise without demanding a shared vision. Mei also suggests tapping Sasha's investor network to recruit talent rather than searching on matchmaking platforms.

Caller 2: Tara Parkinson & Dry Dolly

Tara's towel-dress has split its audience: in the UK, customers treat it as a holiday cover-up, while in Dubai it is a year-round functional garment. She wants to know whether to focus on D2C or chase wholesale. Mei's answer is that 2025 does not reward single-channel thinking — customers live across social, retail, hotels, and direct channels at the same time. Her specific advice: hit trade shows in the UK and Arab markets to find wholesale partners, protect the design with a patent, and test QVC UK since demonstrable products perform well on live TV. The hotel angle deserves attention too — resort properties could brand Dry Dolly for guests to take home.

Caller 3: Lindsay Gallas & Math Medic

Math Medic serves 100,000 teachers with free lesson plans and generates $2.1 million from supplemental subscriptions. The business is profitable and lean, run by seven people. The constraint is structural: school districts buy textbooks through an RFP process built for physical books, and Math Medic replaces the textbook rather than fitting that category. That mismatch makes district sales nearly impossible. Mei suggests looking at private schools and progressive public districts, and raises advertising on the platform itself as an option — the 100,000-teacher audience draws interest from companies selling to schools.

Final Thought

Each caller has succeeded at building a product and finding traction, but scaling demands a different kind of thinking. Sasha needs to stop hunting for a co-founder and start identifying the specific operator skills she is missing. Tara needs to stop choosing one channel and think about where her customers already live. Lindsay needs to stop trying to fit a digital product into a textbook sales system and find the buyers who are ready to change.