Introduce your business and tell us your story: How did you decide on what to sell, and how did you source your products?
We noticed the growing trend of healthy and vegan eating, and also realised that some of the major players in this space online simply weren't doing it as well as we believed we could. We have experience with online businesses in this field and so were very familiar with the space. We felt that products were not being presented or marketed as best as they could be, in a growing space - health foods - that shows no sign of slowing. We create all end products in our production facility (that we have now almost grown out of) and pride ourselves on sourcing the best ingredients available from all over the world.
How did you earn your first sales? Which channels are now generating the most traffic and sales for you?
We launched the brand on key social channels and the response was overwhelming. Word of mouth began to spread and customer feedback was fantastic; we knew were on to something. We knew that we needed to grow our range and fast. Google AdWords has been extremely useful, although it is costly. However, we realised that when we acquire a customer, so many of them return again and again, and become what we call 'Nutri Fans'.
People became enthralled by our mission 'Healthy is not just for the wealthy' and wanted to back us. Our customers appreciate how much further we go than other brands in this space to make them feel special, and part of something. We include a free personalised gift in every 'Nutri Box', which customers have now begun collect a range of. All this helped us to amass a loyal army of advocates that continue to help us grow.
Tell us about the back-end of your business. What tools and apps do you use to run your store? How do you handle shipping and fulfillment?
From the recommendation of the helpful Shopify blog and articles, we use lots of apps that help us in so many ways. We use Emma for email marketing, ReferralCandy for our referrals scheme, Plugin SEO, Reviews.co.uk, Privy for collecting email addresses and AdRoll. We currently handle all shipping in-house at Nutriseed Towers (that's what we call our state of the art production facility), with our superfoodie warehouse team putting all products together with love by hand and a logistics manager overseeing it all.
What are your top recommendations for new store owners?
Nutriseed was built on creating an experience. It stands out not only by our product offering, but by the overall customer journey. From our product and promotional imagery to the copy that we write, we aim to deliver value. Our product descriptions are designed to inform but also make you smile - for example when launching a new product, natural detoxing ingredient, our copy began 'Introducing Chlorella - Spirulina’s badass cousin, AKA King of the Detox!'.
All of our automated emails are specifically designed so that they are not dull or run-of-the-mill, but they in fact make customers' days. We are gaining so many customers (or Nutri Fans, as we like to call them) with so many getting in touch to say how we've made them laugh, and they now respond by using our language style back to us. (We have an in-joke with our customers about finding a unicorn for example, which repeatedly gets lots of attention. Its quirky, but it works!).
Our customer services team have been trained in responding to queries in this language (we have created our in-house book, The Nutri Bible, which details how to handle queries while remaining on-brand). Moreover, customer service needs to be second to none, especially if a brand is not yet fully established. We literally bend over backwards to make sure that our fans are so happy that they have no choice but to return. We don't endeavour to attract customers, we attract advocates. A final recommendation would be to read the Shopify articles as if they are your manual to success. They have aided us in providing value in so many ways, from which apps to use to retaining customers, to new marketing ideas. Read them, and re-read them, and then check again that you haven't missed any.