Scaling a Family E-Commerce Business: Lucky Vitamin CEO Sam Wolf (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Help me understand what kind of ramp you saw from the point where things started finding their stride. What kind of growth have you seen?

Sam Wolf: The business has been through an evolution. We’re now 10 years old and our 11th anniversary is coming up. There’s over 200 people involved in the business, but we still have a lot of ties to our family roots that we grew out of. For the first couple of years, we were growing really fast and we were trying to put in the systems and technology to support it.

We are totally self-funded. We were funding everything out of cash flow. It eclipsed the size of the brick-and-mortar business that we were doing. We were pulling resources from my father’s side of the business saying, “Can I get somebody to come over here and help me because we have orders to ship out?” I would say that the first five years of the business was growing so quickly that we were putting out a lot of fires, building the infrastructure, building the foundation of the business, making mistakes, and learning. That was the beginning.

The second five years has been about growth and a lot more focus on driving the bottomline. In more recent times, we’re in a space where the business is much more mature. We’ve built a team now that can support me on a lot of initiatives. We’ve got a lot of great talent within the organisation. We really defined our mission. We know who our customers are.

Sramana Mitra: Who is your customer? What is the precise definition of the customer who shops at your store?

Sam Wolf: Our core customer is a health purist—somebody who lives a holistic lifestyle. Lucky Vitamin can be deceiving. While vitamins and nutrition are the core of our business, we’re much more than that. We’ve got customers who are interested in everything from the nutritional products that they consume to the foods that they’re eating, to the skincare products they use.

We sell everything from beauty and skincare to natural and green home products, grocery products, snacks, baby products, teas, and homeopathic remedies. While not every customer is at that level in their health journey, we have a lot of customers who really live that lifestyle. They also realize that it’s expensive. Buying natural and organic products which are better for you and better for your family costs a lot of money. To buy them at grocery outlets that feature these products, you’re going to have make a big investment.

They’re looking for a way to live this lifestyle but also do it affordably. That is where we’re able to help. They’re going to save up to 75%, in some cases, off suggested retail prices. The average shopper can save anywhere from 30% to 40% just from what they might pay in a standard retail outlet. We’ve got over 40,000 SKUs now. We ship the products same day. We have free shipping. There’s also a lot of value in that these customers that shop with us are very passionate about their health.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Scaling a Family E-Commerce Business: Lucky Vitamin CEO Sam Wolf
1 2 3 4