How using customer reviews built a gummy business.

Melissa Snover, Founder and CEO of Get Nourish3d Ltd,  Birmingham, UK

 #GetNourish3d #PersonalizedNutrition #3DPrintedVitamins #InnovativeHealth #StartupJourney #VeganSupplements #SugarFree #DigitalMarketing #ConsumerTrust #HealthTech

Introduction: The Accidental entrepreneur

It never ceases to amaze me how business ideas come to entrepreneurs. Melissa traded America for a life in Birmingham, England. She had a highly successful career in the additive sector of the food industry and travelled over 210 days per year! One day she had a mishap at security in Germany. Fast forward to our interview, and she’s built a company with over 10,000 subscribers to her 3D-printed “personalised” gummy vitamins.

That number will be many more by the time you read this. I included her story because it demonstrates the importance of starting with the first customer and then the next. If you’re reading this book and are getting frustrated with the need for incremental growth, then chew on this gummy story.

About the Company: Pioneering Personalized Nutrition

Get Nourish3d uses innovative 3D-printed technology to create personalised nutrient gummy stacks packed with high-impact ingredients and nutrients to revitalise the mind and body. Each bespoke gummy is sugar-free, vegan, plastic-free and has home-compostable packaging.

Winner of the King’s Award for Enterprise, 2023 Innovation Winners.

Founded 2018

The Opportunity: Addressing a Traveler’s Dilemma

Global Nutritional Supplements Market size was valued at USD 358.8 billion in 2021 and is poised to grow from USD 405.43 billion in 2023 to USD 621.80 billion by 2030, at a CAGR of 6.3% during the forecast period (2023-2030).* In the UK 16.1 million people take vitamins and supplements daily. In France 32% of people surveyed declared they had taken supplements within the last 3 months. As people are busier, health is increasingly important and longevity becomes a mainstream concern, taking food supplements will only continue to grow.

Crossing the Chasm: From Concept to Market Leader

Melissa explains,

“I was in Germany, and I was going through the fast track security line in Düsseldorf Airport. And at the time when I was travelling, I tried to stay on top of my health, and I used to carry around a pretty disgusting Ziploc bag full of different vitamins because it wasn’t convenient to carry around all the different bottles jars of the different supplements and vitamins that I was taking.

“And when I was in that line, I went to open my carry on bag to take out my laptop computer. And  unfortunately that zipper grabbed the Ziploc bag and flung it round and opened it and splattered all of the vitamins and supplements all over the floor.  I spent the next 10 minutes, much to dismay of the travellers behind me, on my hands and knees picking them up.

And I kept thinking to myself, “There’s gotta be a better way to do this.”

And you know, that light bulb moment came to me when I thought, “Oh, I’m developing 3D printing of food. Surely we could do this.” “

“On the way home, on the flight, I literally, drew a nourish stack that you see there on our website today, on back of a napkin. A “Fly B napkin”, and came back to my team who were working on 3D printing of confectionary at the time and said, “Right. I’ve got an idea and we’ve gotta run some tests and see if we can do this.” Thus, the vision and dream for “Nourished” was born. And over the coming months, we created totally new technology. So new printing machines, new software. We developed new formulations, new ingredients, and we launched concept to market in January of 2020.

Overcoming Production Challenges

“Most of the competitor brands in the vitamin and supplement space, and even in just online and D2C [direct to consumer] retail in general, very few of them are making their own product. And so what that means is that they raise money or they have some money from a bank, or they got a grant, or they have savings, or maybe they sold something else. They don’t have to actually invest the CapEx and the ingredients, and raw materials, in humans, that it takes to actually make a product. They usually find another manufacturer that will it for them. They design a beautiful brand, a very pretty website. And then, the majority of the money that have set aside for the business can be spent on getting the brand noticed.

“With our business, when I raised my initial seed funding for this, we built an actual food factory and tons of machines and we had to pre-order and pay upfront for a lot of materials because we are physically making the product, the packaging, the boxes, the flow wrap, which is sustainable and made from wood pulp and very expensive. All had to be paid for upfront.

“We built an actual food factory. We’re creating every gummy on demand.”

“By the time I actually got the product to market and got to turn that website on, we did not have pretty much any money really to do big paid ad campaigns or TV, or any of those kind of traditional launching style channels. And so in the very beginning, I focused on what I knew I could do with hard work and a lot of elbow grease, which was to covet the media. And so we worked really hard on sending media samples out to all the media here in the UK.”

Melissa leveraged media coverage and engaged directly with potential customers through social media platforms and by seeding the product with influencers who resonated authentically with the brand’s unique selling propositions.

 “Our initial strategy hinged on organic growth and word-of-mouth publicity,”

“Nourish3d is vegan and sugar-free. So, on top of being personalized, it has a lot of these call-outs. So my team went and found all of the ”Vegan Influencers” in the UK who were talking authentically about products, and we went and found all the people who were talking about KETO diets and avoiding sugar.

Marketing Amidst a Pandemic

“COVID hit. I think it was the 10th week that we were open. And you know, everything changed overnight and the online shopping and people being pushed to buy things online that never would really have done that.

“And so by SEO, really well-written blogs and search. We were able get a lot of customers to the website and our traffic increased massively. Then we were able to start that flywheel and retain some revenue and started putting that into tons and tons of brand awareness style campaigns on digital media platforms like social ads and paid for search.”

Building Consumer Trust and Compliance

A key component of building confidence in Nourish3d was ensuring stringent compliance with food safety and nutrition regulations—a complex and ongoing challenge in product development. Melissa’s prior experience in the food industry provided a foundation to navigate this landscape.

“Our facilities are FSSC 22000* certified, akin to standards met by giants like Unilever.”

“But instead of relying purely on regulatory compliance as a marketing tool, we capitalised on authentic user experiences.

“When you’re brand new and you have no customers, it’s really tricky to get social proof, but it’s also the biggest, I think, needle mover in the way that you can convert new customers.

“We live in a world now where reviews are necessary to win conversion, and that is because of “TripAdvisor” and because of “Trustpilot” and because of Amazon.”

Customer Engagement and Feedback: The Key to Refinement

“So, we went until probably the end of April of the first year of trading, just contacting every person who purchased, getting their really authentic and honest feedback, making adjustments where we could improve, where they were giving us feedback we said, “You know, we could actually modify slightly that, and it would actually really help. I think that would make a lot of people more happy.”

By the end of April and the beginning of May, we had so many five-star reviews that we were actually named the “UK’s Number 1 Customer Rated Vitamin and Nutrition Product.” That kind of changed everything.

“We had people referring us, our direct traffic and organic traffic started to go really high.  I think we have 5,005 star customer reviews across all the different platforms. And they are really authentic. They’re really honest and true, and they are real third party verified customers. And so of course, we utilise their feedback in ways that we can show to other people who maybe have not heard of, or tried our brand before.

“There’s a lot of safety here because all of these other people are loving this product and you probably will too.

“I think that’s really human nature at its very basic root.

“Our customers are lovely, they send us pictures. And one thing I think that’s important to mention, is we have never since the brand started, and I really have a blanket policy on this, ever paid an Influencer to talk about our product. And I won’t really do that, unless something crazy changes that I can’t really imagine right now.

“We’ve provided free product to people, definitely. But we have never paid someone to stand there and go, “I love Nourish3d.” I think it’s totally fake. It bothers me when I see other brands do it. It makes me feel like they think that I’m not smart enough to know that they’re paying that person. I find it condescending. And I think that the consumer in general, the mainstream consumer is also wise to this now.

“I think real customers are such a better ambassador and proponent and spokespeople of our brand.

There were so many happy customers that Melissa formalised the process.

“Anybody who wants to join our Ambassador Program can do so on our website, and they get access to a bunch of content. They get a free box of product to try, and they get a code generator. And then if they recommend our product, then they basically join what is a individualised affiliate program where they get a small amount of compensation for each of the people who buys our product, based on their recommendation.

“When we first started, we actually thought TV would be a great way to raise awareness about the brand. And TV was very expensive, but we thought we could do this one small thing on tv and that at least it would raise awareness. It made no difference, whatsoever. And I think the reason for that was two things. One, you need a ton of money and a very consistent long-term campaign to make a difference on TV. And if nobody knows who you are at all. It’s really too early to do TV.

“When you’re starting something new and certainly when you’re doing something no one has ever done before, you have to make the mistakes because there’s no case study that I can look at. No book, there’s no guidebook. There’s no dummies guide to how to build a 3D printing nutrition business. We are really comfortable with failing and we actually have something in our Friday meetings where we do “Failure Brags” and we celebrate failure.

Closing thought: Focus

“You should really focus on your core thing that you’re the best at. And so the best thing that we are unique in the world in is doing this personalisation.

“We tried a bunch of other pre-formulated products, and none of them have ever represented more than a single digit of our total revenue. It’s always personalized. And we lost energy and focus by diverting our attention towards them. However, we quickly nipped it in the bud.

“And now, you know, we’re back to focusing on number one. 

Sources:*https://www.skyquestt.com/report/nutritional-supplements-market

*FSSC 22000 is a food safety certification scheme based on the existing, internationally recognized standard ISO 22000

https://www.statista.com/statistics/724234/vitamins-cod-liver-oil-and-other-supplement-users-great-britain-uk/