How She Pitched Whole Foods & Got a Response in 3 Hours

0:00You know you have the right product line if you get an immediate response within three hours of an email.

0:09Hey everyone, welcome to Shopify Masters. I'm your host Serena Smith and this is your companion for starting and scaling a business. This founder sent one cold email to a Whole Foods buyer and got a response in three hours. Not three days, not three weeks, three hours. You are setting yourself up for more success the more you put yourself in the field. If you're not visible, you can't be bought. Michelle Razavi and Nikki Elliott didn't doubt themselves when they hit send. That email launched her protein dessert company, Alave, into over 50 Whole Foods stores. There's a difference between good and great.

0:40A good business does okay. An exceptional business, they go above and beyond. Today, we'll get right into her pitching strategy, what to do after you get a response, and how you can set yourself up to launch in a nationwide retailer. Michelle, thanks for being here. Thank you so much for having me. Really excited to be here. Oh my God, stoked to have you. As legend has it, and as I just set up in the intro, So you sent one email that landed you in Whole Foods. How does something like this happen? It all happened very quickly that when I say it out loud, it also sounds crazy. But yeah, so I took it upon myself because I'm a huge advocate of closed mouth, don't get fed.

1:16And if you don't advocate for yourself, who will? So I found the email for the global Whole Foods buyer and not expecting anything, crafted a pitch email, pitching ourselves this new protein brownie that we literally just launched a month into market, but I knew it was so innovative I had to put it in front of him. And within a couple hours, he immediately got back to me. It was like, can I try samples? This looks exactly what we're looking for. And the rest is history. To say that that's a rarity is such a vast understatement. To get a response at all, first of all, let alone after a few hours, what do you think it was?

1:58I think it's a combination of two things. One is crafting the perfect pitch. And I'm not saying that all my pitches are always perfect and I 100 % get all the shots I make. But I think something resonated, the timing was right. And then the second piece is, do you have the right product or opportunity or service or whatever you're pitching? And so both of those intersected perfectly. And from a pitch standpoint, what really worked was what I like to call the three C's, which is craft a concise pitch, make it compelling, and have a clear call to action at the end. And my pitch emails, I make sure to hit all three of those things.

2:36And so when I talk about making it concise, I like to use the analogy of the perfect length of a skirt for a woman, right? Short enough to keep it interesting, but long enough to cover the good parts. And I want to make sure that when I'm pitching a retailer or a buyer or investor or whoever, that I'm immediately capturing their attention with a hook, getting to the point right away, keeping it compelling so that there's something of interest for them. And really, how do you make the offer, the ask, the whatever, more focused on what value can provide them versus them helping you out? And I think that's the psychology that a lot of business owners, especially earlier stage, they want to just word vomit their whole story and they send an essay and it's really thinking about who's reading it on the other side.

3:26And so by keeping it concise, by making it all about what you're going to provide them, that shifts the energy of the email and really perks them up because it stands out. And then lastly, have a call to action. The so what? Can I send you samples? Let me know the best address to send you samples. Or let me know if I can X, Y, Z. And make it clear that there's something on the other side for them. That invites them to obviously respond, right? You don't want to just vomit everything onto them and then just leave them with that essay that you just wrote them. And so I think the combination of really thinking about the mechanics and the strategy of the art and the science of that cold pitch.

4:04And then we had a very innovative product. It's the first to market protein brownie that's vegan, gluten-free, no added sugars, sweetened with dates at a time when every protein snack uses sugar alcohols or stevia or just random things that you can't pronounce. And it was coming from a lens of creating protein snacks for women. And when you look at our backgrounds, my co-founder and I have corporate backgrounds, but we also are fitness trainers and we have been for over a decade. And that authority in the wellness space really stands out and provides that layer of legitimacy that most snack brands in our category don't have.

4:40And the fact that we're women too, creating a product to help women get more protein, get more fiber, cut their sugar intake with a lens of helping women in their health journeys, that really stood out to our buyer too of, oh, wow, I know the stats that 80 % of women make purchasing decisions for their households. And there aren't that many products, especially protein products, that are really marketed and designed for them. And we really bridge that gap. And I think our buyers, especially a Whole Foods buyer, is really in tune with the market and where it's going to be. And they saw that potential.

5:13And they immediately jumped at it. You had been pitching local Whole Foods buyers in vain. And then you decided, forget this. Let's go to the big dogs. Did you recalibrate your pitch at all? or was it the same thing essentially that went out? It was a little bit different in terms of I got straight to the point. And I think that's the key thing is it's always great to introduce yourself. It's always great to add a little bit more context about who you are and to show that there's a heart and a soul behind it. But when you think about the inboxes of these buyers, they are inundated and they have two seconds.

5:50And that's with a consumer too on a retail shelf. People have two seconds, people have a short attention span. How do you hook them immediately? So with subject lines, with the first sentence, I'm so, so conscious of that short time that you have. And so I just made it even more impactful, even more concise. And I think it was also the right timing too, right? Can you send it at the right time when they'll most likely be at their inbox, not slam between meetings? So I wouldn't send it on a Monday and I wouldn't send it on a Friday. I would try to find that sweet spot Tuesday through Thursday. I think it's just also every particular buyer is different.

6:25and they each have their own needs. They have their own insights and the global buyer happened to resonate with their product more and immediately fast-tracked us through. Are you going so far as to like doing some digging on the buyers themselves, like trying to get into their psychology when you're crafting these pitches? If possible, yeah. Anything that I can find, I won't hold back. If I can just understand what time zone they're in even so I know when is the best time or if they happen to have an active social media profile that's public, I'll for sure find it. But for the most part, buyers intentionally try to hide a lot of stuff so that you can't look them up.

7:01And so at that point, I always say, why don't you build up your profile, build up your brand authority. And that's what I think also is a part of the picture when you're thinking about pitching is whoever you're pitching, they will go research you, they're going to Google you, they're going to look at your social media, they're going to look at anything they could find online. And so how do you build that strong online profile so that when they do stalk you, you have something so glowing. They're like, I want that. Yeah. You're bringing up something really interesting, which is like, there's something to be said.

7:31I can understand the inclination to want to put everything into the pitch. Oh my God, let me give you the full soup to nuts story. Right. But then they're just, their eyes are going to gloss over it. Let me tell you about my childhood. Let me tell you about my grandma. Then this is her recipe. Right, right, right, right, right. The original Genesis, the idea was when I was four years old. They're not going to read that. Right. And I think there's something really wise that you're saying here about understanding that if their interest is peaked, then they will go and they will do their own research outside of it and understanding that like the narrative will come through if you've done the work to be doing the storytelling on social and in other places.

8:04And hopefully you've gotten some good press and whatever. You guys have a really beautiful and unique approach to social in that you're very warts and all, you know, talk to me about how you develop that and why you decided to share so much of yourselves. Yeah, it happened bit by bit. You know, I'm a hardcore millennial who, you know, grew up in the Instagram Pinterest era. And so when I first started my foreign into social media, everything had to be polished and perfectly curated and edited. And around 2020, you start to see the emergence of TikTok. And that really changed everything for me, for everyone.

8:45And you start to see more of this unfiltered, raw, vulnerable, off-the-cuff type of content. And that for me was a breath of fresh air because I would spend so much time obsessing over the editing, the lighting, making sure my face looked perfect. And I don't have the time for that. Most entrepreneurs don't. And so this new style of just off the cuff format was so easy to churn out content faster. It allowed me to have permission to share our story in a more authentic, raw way. And the numbers were stronger. People resonated more with a more casual, random video versus some very polished, perfect professional photography.

9:29And once I started being very data driven, I'm like, what just works? What moves the needle? It just made so much sense for us. And so I just started getting more empowered by the numbers of seeing the traction and the resonance and the comments and the messages and the conversations we're having and creating online. And that's how we were able to develop a content strategy that is more organic, that's more authentic, and it allows us to storytell behind the scenes. And we learned, oh, people really like that. People resonate with that. And it's not as scary as you think once you do it a couple times.

10:05You got to just jump off the cliff. A hundred percent. And once you do it, then you're like, I survived. I'm alive. And more people end up reaching out to you saying, hey, I really connected with that. That's so beautiful. Like on a personal level. Yeah. And it just like, it validates you that especially entrepreneurship is such a lonely journey and I'm fortunate to have a co-founder, but still it's so hard what you're going through and you don't even have the words half the time to express how you're feeling. And everything moves so crazy fast that your brain can't even process it all. And so to have an outlet like social media where you can share even a small glimmer of what's going on behind the scenes humanizes the brand and allows people to come be a part of something and really just build publicly.

10:51And I think that's the new age of building a consumer brand is building in public. and I think, yeah, people are just ready for that. There's like a mindset shift that it requires around the notion of like, if you're building a business, there's this maybe wrong and antiquated expectation that everything should look intensely professional and that if you show the flaws of what's going on behind the scenes, it's gonna make you look like a less valuable or less trustworthy company, but it sounds like you're saying that almost the opposite is true. Yeah. That the more you let people in, the more it allows you to build loyalty and community.

11:29And I want to break down that fear. It's very common for women, too, to feel like we have to be perfect, to feel like we always have to be presentable. And that's cultural, structural, you know, implications that we just grew up with. And a way to challenge that, I feel, is to show up imperfect, to show up and show the messiness and the vulnerability. And I was so afraid that my investors would judge me because they follow me on social media. But seeing messages of them saying, I love following you on social media. It's so fun. I feel like I'm part of the action. And for the most part, people understand that nothing's going to be perfect.

12:04Their lives aren't perfect. So why should someone online be? And I personally don't like following people who have this perfect curated life. I find it annoying and just unattainable. And I'm like, I can't relate to this. And so when I think about what kind of content would I like to see, I use that as my North Star of something that's empowering, uplifting, but also shows really the messiness that is life. One of my favorite posts of yours is like, it was like the four stages of being a female founder. Do you remember? Yeah. Can you take us through? Because it was so good and like kind of savage, frankly, which I loved.

12:38Yeah. I mean, so the four stages of being a female founder or just being an early stage business is that, you know, you first start to tell people and people are like, oh, don't call yourself an entrepreneur. Don't even say that. You know, there's just this like dismissiveness and shutdown of how dare you even say something like that. And it's coming from a good place, I think, when people are trying to say, hey, don't say that or don't be too big or don't take up too much space because I think they want to protect you from the hardship, the rejection, the insane just intensity of running a business.

13:12And then the next stage is when people are like, oh, cool. It looks like you're picking up. Like, is this like Avon? Is this like, you know, cute little side project you got going on? And again, I don't think that people want to intentionally put entrepreneurs down. I think they just don't understand that this is an idea. This is way more than a project. This is a business you're building. This is your livelihood. But yeah, you do get put down a little bit and people diminish your hard work and call it a cute little side project or they make comments. And then as you start to pick up traction, people are like, wow, look at you go.

13:48Can I get some free product? Can I help some of their fans? Like, you know, this is amazing. Like, look at you go. And you're like, yeah, I've been working really hard at this. And then lastly, it's like, wow, like so cool to see you successful. I've cheered you on the whole time, which, which is like a very exaggerated sassy video that I made, but it really had so many people and so many business owners comment. Yep. That's exactly my experience of this. Like you're starting to kind of come out of your shell and share this idea with people and get excited and there's going to be naysayers and there's going to be haters or just people who don't understand.

14:22And that's okay. And it's your job as an entrepreneur to put your blinders on and take feedback where it's helpful and constructive and tune out everything else and focus on what you're building and continue that precision, that excellence, and that strive to get better and better. And eventually people will understand what you're building, But at the same time, it doesn't matter. You know, you need to be so excited about what you're building and you cannot seek external validation as your why. It's really, you know, the love of the craft of building what you're building that is going to fuel you.

14:59You cannot seek external validation. That's like some lifelong work for most people, you know? Absolutely. Absolutely. That's excellent. That's excellent advice. But it's also a very nuanced thing to try to assess. You know, you mentioned keep your blinders on. don't let too much of the outside noise in, but do let in the advice that, or the criticism or the feedback that is constructive and can be utilized. Yeah. You're building for your community, right? And your product is not going to be for everyone. And the sooner you realize that, the more free you will be to create for your consumer, your community, your target audience.

15:36And you can't be everything to everyone because you'll just end up being nothing. And as soon as you realize that you're not going to create a product for your haters, you're not here to create a product for the naysayers, you're here to create a product that provides a better life product, service, et cetera, for your community. And they're the ones that you should be chatting with, getting their feedback, working together with, not the people who just don't get it. Yeah. Right. Forget them. Yeah. Okay. So you get into Whole Foods. Incredible. Insane. Yeah. Can you take me into that moment when you and Nikki found out?

16:14We were in shock. It was, we couldn't believe it. And at the same time we could, which I know sounds crazy. I'm like, you know, we worked so hard. We got into Whole Foods after four years of pitching and we had pitched different product lines. And you know, you have the right product line if you get an immediate response within three hours of an email. And I think it goes to show you that success isn't linear and that sometimes it takes a little bit of iteration of going out to market, getting feedback, going back to the drawing board. And so it wasn't an overnight success for us because we have been doing this for four, almost five years when we got the guests.

16:52And so it was a culmination of all the insights, all the hustle, all the learnings, and the humility to keep going back again and again and to find the right product, right time to pitch Whole Foods. And so, yes, we were shocked and excited, but it's also this immediate sense of, yeah, we deserve this too. We work so hard to bring this really innovative product to market. And even when we got the yes, the journey to actually get onto shelves was also bumpy and not linear. But that goes to show you that behind the scenes, there's always chaos from this shiny announcement on the outside. But that goes to, again, why we like to share the behind the scenes because it makes it more accessible for more entrepreneurs to see, okay, they went through all that and they still are achieving X, Y, Z.

17:39So can I. Totally. To that end, you get into Whole Foods, but you don't launch for a full year. And as you mentioned, it was not linear and there were some bumps along the way. I mean, this is like the juicy stuff for this show. So can you fill us in on what happened? Yeah. So just for a little bit of context, so Whole Foods and a lot of retailers, they work a year out. So they'll start reviewing brands for a reset in the category for the next season, which is the next year prior. So there's already that time constraint of about six to nine months up to a year for you to get onto shelves. But on top of that, we were delayed unexpectedly because Whole Foods' distribution partner, UNFI, suddenly, randomly, no one could have predicted this, they had a cyber attack the month that we were supposed to launch.

18:28And so if you can imagine, you shipped all of your products there on time. You've been doing all the paperwork, getting all the onboarding across the line, hustling with all these crazy deadlines that they give you. And we're ready to go. And two days before we're supposed to launch, we get an email from our buyers saying, hey, we're going to have to push this back. And it's devastating because we prepared all the PR. We got our website ready, our emails, our social, everything. We were about to announce this really exciting milestone. And we had to immediately go to everyone and like, turn it off, turn it off, like, don't put this, like, and just pull everything back.

19:04And at this point, Nikki and I have gone through so many obstacles that it was upsetting. It was frustrating. But then we were over it after an hour. And that shows the resilience that we've built as operators that things are going to go wrong. Things are not going to go as planned. How you respond to them defines you as a leader. And so we immediately shut off all of our PR, all the marketing, and said, okay, we'll just wait till the next month and we'll launch there. Then we got delayed again. and we just kept our spirits high. We focused on our other retail partners, focused on our website, focused on other parts of the business.

19:41We're very busy. And when it was time, we launched. And I think if you just focus on the negatives, it slows you down, it mentally exhausts you, and it pulls you away from other wins and exciting parts of the business. At that same time, we were rapidly growing in Costco. And so we're like, you know what? This is actually a silver lining. Now we can focus all of our attention to Costco when Whole Foods is ready, we'll come in and jump. And it's really just a reframe and a pivot of how you approach obstacles that I think makes you a stronger, better operator. And what is the mindset through which you look at obstacles?

20:16It depends on what the obstacle is. But at the end of the day, everything works itself out is the way I think about it. And everything happens for a reason, which I know sounds cheesy, but there's always that hindsight bias where you look back and you're like, you know what? I'm really glad we made this decision or I'm really glad we decided not to launch in all Whole Foods locations across the country. Because fun fact, we actually got approved by the global buyer to launch nationally in all stores across the country. And we said no. A lot of people, including our investors, were kind of upset about that.

20:49They're like, why would you say no to national? Why didn't you just go for the big fish? Why are you just wanting to focus on your local region of SoCal? And for some reason, we just had this foresight of, you know, Whole Foods is a big deal. We don't want to mess it up. Let's start in our backyard, nurture it. And then when we're ready, six months, nine months down the line, then we'll do national. Imagine dealing with a cyber attack delay on a national level. It would have been the worst thing in the world. But because it just happened to one region, we're like, eh, we'll wait a couple months, no big deal.

21:21And so everything does work out the way it should. And at the end of the day, you can figure everything out. I think that's always been our North Star is we have the tools, the capacity, the expertise to figure anything out in front of us. And I think every entrepreneur has that mindset, will be able to figure out whatever problem is in front of them. Yeah. It's possible that you come into being an entrepreneur and a founder and you've had enough life experience that that resilience is already built up. Or if not, then there's a bit of this like baptism by fire thing that I think goes on, right?

21:57Where I like, I think there's something interesting on a personal level to be able to have those moments of reflection where you're like, you know what? I would have freaked out for a lot longer about this a year ago, you know? And then that period of time until you're back in a state of being okay and into a solution oriented mindset gets like smaller and smaller and smaller, you know? A perfect example is like going to the gym. Like your first workout, you're going to be sore. You're going to hate it. It's going to feel uncomfortable. You are questioning why you're even doing this. But when you go repeatedly, when you build the muscle, when you build the habit, then going to the gym feels like something you can accomplish every time you go.

22:35And I think it's just flexing that muscle of resiliency and repeating and reminding to yourself that you could handle whatever is in front of you because you historically have, then it allows you to have that lens to keep going. Absolutely. You also have the foresight to not do a nationwide launch, which is pretty antithetical to some of the modes of thinking that like growth over everything, right? That that's the North Star. If that isn't your North Star, then what is? building a world-class brand that is sustainable, that has the ability to truly help our consumers. And when you think about sustainability is when you scale and grow, how do you keep the integrity of the brand, of the product, of the ingredients?

23:19And when you try to adopt a model of build things really fast and break things along the way, when you're dealing with food and when you're dealing with people, you have to be hyper-conscious of that. And for us, we want to do things right. So if that means taking a step back to do something right the first time versus breaking things at all costs and then having to clean up a mess later, we'd rather go the smart approach. Now, we've grown rapidly doing that. It's just making sure you're putting your chess pieces in the right place, thinking through, but also having that lens of let's take a little risk here.

23:54Let's see what happens. Let's push ourselves. But also doing it with that balance of, okay, what makes sense for the business right now versus what is everyone else doing? And I think being true to what feels right for you and your brand and your company is ultimately how we like to run things. As you've grown, are there new systems that you've put into place, essential systems that have allowed you to scale? Yeah. In terms of how we like to keep things moving in a very lean, efficient way, but at the same time grow with scale, we take a huge partner culture to identify what are we strong at and what are we not?