Scaling a Family E-Commerce Business: Lucky Vitamin CEO Sam Wolf (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let me ask you a couple of questions in terms of the process of building this company. In this journey, what are some of the most important strategic moves that you’ve made?

Sam Wolf: One of the most important strategic moves is to really understand who our customer is and what’s important to them. We’ve made sure that we’re aligned with what we think and know is important to the consumer. We put a lot of focus into the products that we sell in curating and implementing standards. We’ve got a team of merchants who scour the globe, if you will, to find some of the most unique items that we bring in.

We’ve got a lot of companies that you wouldn’t find anywhere else. Some of them have eventually grown into fairly large businesses starting with us. We spend a lot of time really making sure that we’re bringing in the right items and that they’re going to align with the values that we promote and that our customers believe in.

Sramana Mitra: You’re saying merchandising is one of the key strategic areas where you specialise.

Sam Wolf: Merchandising is a key strategic area. A lot of investment goes into the shopping experience, the technology, and infrastructure – our ability to stock 40,000 items, ship them out the same day, and do it efficiently. A lot of automation has been built into our processes. We’ve a team that is constantly developing and expanding our platform to make it easier for people to shop on the site.

Sramana Mitra: Are you using any of the cutting-edge technology systems for personalized merchandising?

Sam Wolf: We’re using a lot of them. We’ve got a whole roadmap of things that are on the way and that we’ve implemented from how we personalize and communicate to our customers to how we market and communicate to them.

Sramana Mitra: This is a technology entrepreneur community mostly. We are very familiar with some of the more cutting-edge systems in the e-commerce, online merchandising area, and recommendation systems. Do you have specifics to offer on what systems you’re using and what you’re learning from those?

Sam Wolf: Some of it are proprietary. There are certain relationships that I can’t legally disclose. We work with a partner in product recommendation and personalization engine. We build a lot of things on our homegrown platform too. Our platform that we run our technology on is our own platform which allows us to customise the experience.

Sramana Mitra: What scale are you at now and what do yo want to do with the company? It looks like you self-financed this company. You don’t have outside financing, right?

Sam Wolf: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a family business essentially?

Sam Wolf: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Do you want to eventually sell the company, take it public, sell it to private equity, or just keep going with it? What is the family’s desire?

Sam Wolf: The goal is to continue to grow and build the business. The family is heavily involved. We love what we’re doing.

Sramana Mitra: Great! Thanks for your time.

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