Iteration Is The Secret Ingredient for This Beverage Company

0:00The products that we have today are so different than what I had that first sale. like the formulation is different, the ingredient sourcing is different. I think of Bloom now more as this like iterative journey, that it's a progression. And we're getting clearer and clearer in who we should be and how we can support customers by listening. Benjamin Gottlieb back with Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and building a business. Okay, here's a question for you. Let's be honest. I like asking them, is done better than perfect? Stick with me here. Some of the most successful entrepreneurs that you look up to, well, the businesses they started look nothing like what exists today.

0:42And a great example is my guest, Karen Danagaya. She started her company, Bloom, about seven or so years ago. It's a beverage brand that's reinventing traditional coffee shop staples by using superfoods, which we're going to get into in a moment. But this is not what the company or the products looked like when she started. it. And Karen is here to tell you how she got to where she is today. It's an inspiring story. And Karen, thank you so much for being here on Shopify Masters. Oh, thanks for having me. What an intro. Love it. Can't wait to get into it. Well, let's get into it. And we're so excited to have you as well.

1:17This idea of launching the perfect product, it can hold up a lot of founders, but that did not happen with you. Take us back to the time crunch you were under to get that first turmeric latte started and what you learned from the pressure of that launch? Well, honestly, in some ways it did, Ben, because really I had always wanted to do something entrepreneurial. I had this journal of ideas that I would keep and I never felt like any idea was good enough. Like I was always in my own way with limiting beliefs and just wondering if I could really be a founder and start my own business. And I was talking about imposter syndrome.

1:58Yeah, well, it's not quite fully navigated yet, but we're getting there. But really, like with the first product, the turmeric latte, the OG bloom blend, it all came super quickly, like from the idea to it being in a first smoothie shop, it was maybe like six weeks. And I was finally just taking that step, taking the leap. And what even that product is today is totally different, but it was just what I needed to start getting going. You weren't always an entrepreneur. You just spoke about how you had this journal where you kept all of your ideas. And I remember you telling our team that used to walk to work every day and you stopped into this same coffee shop.

2:40And that's kind of where this idea maybe kind of went to the next level. Talk me through that experience and why the coffee shop was the place that you decided to become an entrepreneur. Well, you know, I was working in commercial real estate. And so that industry is a ton of coffee meetings, very like corporate nine to five, very relationship building. So I was drinking like five Americanos a day and really feeling the impact of it. And so I'm sorry, did you say five? Yeah, I was on the caffeine. And it just started me out on a health journey, honestly, trying to figure out why it was impacting me a certain way, why my digestion wasn't so great, why I wasn't sleeping well.

3:27And I started just falling in love personally with superfoods. And so there was this smoothie bar cafe on my way to work, Victorious Health. It's still there on Howell Street for people in Vancouver. And I happened to go in there and chat with the owner one day and asked him if he had ever had a turmeric latte or considered having one on the menu. And he was in that moment, you know, actually looking for a product and couldn't find one locally. And I just told him like, I'll do it. Like, I'll make that for you. And it was this kismet, like the world lining up, this sign from the universe that it was time to take a chance on myself and finally take a big girl step into entrepreneurship.

4:14He was our first customer. He's still a customer today. And I think his first order was 30 turmeric latte bags, if I remember. Invoice 0001. Those first sales are so special. and many founders don't forget them. Had you, I'm just curious, did you have any experience creating turmeric lattes at that point? Well, my dad is Indonesian. So I grew up with an elixir called Jamu. It's potent. I would say it's turmeric, ginger, lemongrass, a whole bunch of different things. But the idea is you take it almost more like a shot to make you feel good. and I would say that was like my early introduction to turmeric elixirs and really the turmeric latte like what we sold into Victoria's Health what that first product was was my evolution of that kind of history with my dad the idea was like could you take this thing that's so good for you has this amazing history has anti-inflammatory benefits but modernize it for the North American palette, introduce it to more people and make it accessible.

5:18And that's what that first product was. And a good moment to extract there, if you're listening to draw on your own personal experiences, your family's experiences, sometimes little nuggets of entrepreneurship or opportunity sit there as it sounds like Karina did with this turmeric latte and this Indonesian drink that you're used to seeing from your family. But I'd like to go back to this concept of superfoods. We know that turmeric has a lot of beneficial qualities, anti-inflammatory, for example, but the word superfood, it can be overused. It's becoming almost cliche. When you think about what a superfood is, how do you conceptualize it?

6:00Well, the way we treat it at Bloom is it's a nutrient-dense, natural whole ingredient, something that has a history of use, has real studies supporting that it's antioxidant-rich or has another health property. And we use them and blend them into mixes so that it's not, we would never put out to market like a mushroom tincture or like a chaga elixir. We're making pumpkin spice lattes, salted caramel. Like the whole mission of the company is how do you incorporate these really nutrient dense, healthy ingredients into recipes you already love into these coffee shop staples so that more people can enjoy them and get introduced to them and just add like a nutrient boost to your everyday ritual.

6:46Yeah, exactly. Your ritual. It's not really changing your behavior, just augmenting it and maybe making it a little bit better for you. Yeah, like if you think about, you know, going to a cafe, a typical Serpia latte, they might have 30 grams plus of sugar, no nutritional benefits. They come, you know, auto-sweetened, lots of fillers, artificial ingredients. And so the idea is like, can we recreate that exact drink in terms of flavor, but with nutritional benefits. So you're not compromising and you can actually enjoy it more often. We always say that Bloom sits at the intersection of wellness and treat, where you're not sure which one you're kind of engaging with.

7:26And we love to sit right there. You also in the early days sat between this intersection of idea and really successful business. And let's go back in time if we can to after that first sale, right? So you started to master that first product and you sold it to that wellness shop that you were talking about. And after that, when did you decide you really had something that could be successful? I just got so obsessed with it. If I'm being completely honest, I loved it myself. I was hearing reviews from customers that loved it. It was selling through the stores and I just, every morning I was doing deliveries out of the back of my car.

8:08I was, you know, every evening reaching out to new cafes and other smoothie shops that maybe would want to carry it. And every time I got a yes, it was so rewarding and motivating and all encompassing. And I just, I just got hit by that entrepreneurial bug so hard in those first few months. And so I think it wasn't that I knew that this was going to be an absolute rocket ship and this was going to be my full future. It was more that I just loved what I was working on. I really believed in it myself. Those first early indicators were enough to inspire me to, you know, eventually quit my job and go all in on it.

8:46And so I think for, you know, people thinking about starting their own businesses or entrepreneurs early in their journey, the products that we have today are so different than what I had that first month or the first sale. Like even though we still have the turmeric latte product, like the formulation is different. The ingredient sourcing is different. How we package it is different. And so I think of Bloom now more as this like iterative journey, that it's a progression and we're getting clearer and clearer and who we should be and how we can support customers by listening. And so I don't think that, you know, in those first few months, I felt like I had the perfect idea, the perfect product, which I know holds a lot of people back from starting.

9:30It was more like I had developed the confidence in myself to iterate, to listen, to adapt. And Bloom is a product of that today.

9:47Karen, when you say the product is different, what exactly is different? The packaging is different. The formula is different. I mean, what exactly doesn't resemble what you started with? Well, I think, you know, packaging and how it shows up is really different, like the actual positioning of the products. So despite Bloom being like a health product that would sit in a supplement store, it almost presents like a beauty brand. It's really minimalist. It's really brightly colored. It's super simple packaging. It's something that you're proud to leave out on your countertop and proud to give as a gift.

10:21and you just would not do that with like a magnesium tablet. You would not do that with a traditional probiotic. So the way that Bloom is positioned, it really feels like a lifestyle beauty brand while still having the benefits that are typically reserved to the supplement aisle. And the whole thesis behind that was that, you know, I was just getting into my own wellness journey. I was navigating these supplement stores. I found it really clinical, really confusing, super expensive. And I wasn't a nutritional expert. So I just was like trying to find my way in these really complicated shelves.

10:59And so I wanted Bloom to be more accessible, more easy, and really bring people to a category that felt super stagnant. This program, Shopify Masters, has been around for a while. And we start to hear again and again themes from founders. One of them is that you almost become as the entrepreneur, the target audience. I just heard you talking about looking through those aisles, trying to find like, what sort of supplements should I take? What do I even do? And that is probably what I would imagine a lot of your customers are going through, right? Yeah. I think, um, solving a problem for yourself and being a customer yourself is one of the best ways to approach entrepreneurship.

11:40You just have a deeper understanding of who your customer is, their motivations, what they're looking for on shelf. But at Bloom, we have focus groups, we do interviews, we're constantly running surveys through our online shop. And so I think it's one thing to be a customer, to be in touch with it, to understand what the needs are, but you have to also always be directly seeking that feedback. And that's something we take really seriously at Bloom. If you say, like you just did, that founders can be the ideal customers, We at Shopify like to consider ourselves the ideal partner for entrepreneurs.

12:17You're what we call a re-platformer insofar as that you didn't start on our platform, but in March of 2020, if my dates are correct, in the early days of 2020, you decided to move more into direct-to-consumer sales, D2C, and you joined up with us. Why did you make that call? You could have chosen any number of solutions for your e-commerce business. Yeah, I think for brands that really want to have a significant part of their business on e-com direct to consumer, there really is only one choice, in my opinion. It's the amount of integrations. At that point, it was just me and one other person in the business.

12:53And it needed to be, you know, something we could navigate. We didn't have big budgets. We hadn't raised a bunch of capital. I was self-financing everything. And so it needed to be something that we could edit photos. We could write the copy. We could piece together PDPs. And so Shopify allowed us to do that. Shopify allowed you to do that. And you also didn't have a lot of experience in digital marketing. Am I right? So how did you convince yourself, hey, I can really do this. I can take advantage of the platform. I can win here online without much experience. Something that can hold back a lot of folks again when they're feeling like they can't cut it.

13:32I had zero experience, to be clear. Not a lot, actually zero. I took some digital marketing courses online, like Shopify has a bunch of tutorials. I did that. LinkedIn learning classes for paid ads. I took, you know, an email flow bootcamp, you know, it was really one step at a time. And I would say the things that I created March 2020, or the year of 2020, we've iterated on and improved a bunch of times. Like we're right now on a project to improve all our flows again and improve kind of like our homepage and all that sort of thing. I think in marketing and e-commerce, it's never just done. You have to always be looking at the analytics, iterating forward and using a platform like Shopify, those analytics, even for someone like me with zero experience, like they're kind of, it's at your fingertips.

14:23So as long as you have like a curious personality, I think it is pretty user-friendly and you can go as deep as you want to go. Part of your iterative experience involved customer feedback, and we're going to get to that in a moment. But before we do, I'm going to pause and thank our wonderful audience for tuning in. You know, wherever you get your podcasts, please follow and subscribe to Shopify Masters if you haven't already. Write us a review. Those reviews mean so much to us. We love to hear what you think about our program, what we're doing, and how we can be better. Your support is integral to our success.

14:58And so thank you so much if you've already done so. If you haven't yet, please subscribe to Shopify Masters. Karen, what are some of the social media strategies that help you build community engagement, which is a big part of the success of your brand? Well, we, when we approach social, are really looking to build super fans, what we call them, very important bloomies. And it's not about fall or count. It's not about likes. It's about people who are truly engaged and really care about the behind the scenes, the history of the company. So we put a really big focus on storytelling, sharing the good, the bad, the ugly, trying to be our authentic selves online and also education.

15:40I think to your point, superfoods thrown around a lot. There's no clear definition. And we want to be a trusted place for that. We don't want to be adding to the confusion. We want to be clearing it up. And so we have two really important pillars when we build community. It's like being trusted, saying what we mean, following through, being educated in the things that we say, and then sharing the real story behind a small business and a founder-led brand and all the challenges and the great moments too that come along with it. So I'm hearing authenticity. That's one of your main strategies. Yeah.

16:19Yeah, you know, just being truthful about the highs and the lows and kind of the wave that we're riding day to day on this entrepreneurial journey. Another thing you do really well, if I may say, is listening to your customers and then augmenting the formula of your packages, for example, to kind of fit what makes them happy. And you have, I think you mentioned earlier, there's a community forum, you engage in those where you take feedback from your super fans or just folks who have stopped by and tried out your stuff for the first time. How do you balance what things to listen to, what not to listen to?

16:55I think lots of founders might be struggling with this question. Yeah, that's such a good question because you get advice everywhere, right? Everybody has an opinion. It's really easy to have one. I think, you know, as a founder, you need to be really grounded in the original problem you're looking to solve. You can't change the core values, the core mission of your company, But you can change the path to get there. You can adjust the direction that you take as long as you're being really true to that original journey, that original pain point you set out to solve. So for us, we also prioritize feedback differently.

17:32We prioritize feedback from our customers, number one. So people who are existing Shopify customers are in our D2C ecosystem. If they are sharing flavors that they want, pain points they want to solve, they want things to be zero sugar, they want something with a probiotic. That's how we got to our most recent product launch, Superbelly, was literally our customers asked for it. We were actually going down a completely different path. We did a survey. 80 % of them said that they were having gut issues. And so we really like rethought that solution to make sure it was responding to it. Because don't ask for the feedback if you weren't going to respond to it either.

18:14In terms of, you know, advisors and fellow founders and family and friends, I think it's okay to listen, but you have to develop almost like a thick skin where you can take things in, process them, but be strong in your own gut instinct about what's right for your customer, because that's the magic of a founder and the entrepreneur. Like nobody's going to know that as well as you do. You're the closest to it and you care the most about it. I think you have to be really both confident and yet humble to do what you've just said, which is to have an idea for a product launch, take community feedback and completely go in a different direction, throw that car into reverse and go somewhere else.

18:57I mean, that is an incredible learning. Is that something that you felt comfortable doing during this whole journey or have you developed that muscle, um, you know, over the years? Oh, that's a great question. Honestly, I think it's a muscle that developed some of our worst product launches. Cause we've had bad ones too. were me like muscling through saying like, no, this is genius. I love this. Like this is going to change the future of Bloom. This is going to change people's lives. And then, you know, like predictably six weeks later, we were still sitting on a bunch of inventory and we decide not to continue it.

19:31All of our best product launches are from directly listening to feedback. And so I think the more that happens, the more you understand how to build in systems to your innovation pipeline that really support what your customers actually want and need from you. Back to this big moment, I would imagine it's not necessarily as big, perhaps internally, but externally to see yourself on a big show for entrepreneurs like the Dragon's Den, which is the version of the sharks in Canada. I think sometimes folks can look at that and be like, oh, Karen got lucky. Karen got on that program. And if I could only get on a show like that, I would be killing it.

20:12But really it seems like, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like it was just kind of as a natural process, natural evolution of what you were doing. Are those moments key to success? Like, do you need to get yourself on a program like that or find investors like that? Yeah. You know, that's such an interesting question because, um, I think from the outside, it can look like that's the linchpin. That's the thing that like propels you forward, but I didn't find that to be the truth about Dragon's Den. And it wasn't something that naturally happened. I had auditioned three times for Dragon's Den.

20:44That was my third time trying to get on the show. And so - These are the things people don't see, by the way. Yeah. At first it was virtual. One time it was down in a stadium here in downtown Vancouver, where we were doing an audition. And then the third time I really readjusted my pitch, made it a little bit wild. And it was actually virtual as well. And that was the time that I got on the show. And I think it's all these things added up. It's the summation of all your efforts. There's no one thing that's going to propel you to, you know, a successful brand, a successful business. Of course, being on Dragon's Den did add, you know, a lot of brand awareness.

21:24I had an incredible experience. It was a show that I watched with my dad growing up. I think Dragon's had a lot to do with my entrepreneurial bug that watching those shows, I found a lot of inspiration in. And I do think it was like formative for me. So it was really cool to be on the show and have Arlene and Investor, which was always my favorite dragon. But I don't think that any one moment is kind of like the reason that we're at where we are today. It's like the summation of all these little pieces of effort every day, you know, just trying to make your business a little bit better than the day before.

22:01So speaking about what's coming up or what has just transpired, let's look ahead for what's next for Bloom. You've got your product in some big retailers. I believe Whole Foods, for example, is one spot where you have your product, if I'm not mistaken. So what's next for you guys? And if you were talking to other founders who, you know, were looking to get their products in some of these big retail chains, what advice would you have for them? Yeah, well, a big focus for us right now is Superbelly. We just launched. This is the one that I was telling you about that was kind of the result of surveys.

22:31And it's just been a crazy momentum boost for us as we head into the summer. We're working on gaining distribution. It's launching with Sprouts nationally in the US in a couple of weeks. And yes, we're available in Whole Foods, Loblaws, Real Canadian Superstore, Target. So we're really looking to build an omni-channel brand. Direct to Consumer is always going to be our bread and butter. It's about 50 % of the business today. But we really want Bloom to be very accessible, which means our core products should be available in your local grocery store, your local coffee shop to really make it easy for you to engage in a new kinder ritual.

23:11And so we're continuing to push on that. There's still a lot more to go. Yeah, regardless of who you are. I mean, not everyone at the moment feels comfortable buying something, you know, directly online from a brand. They might want to walk and browse in, like you said, Sprouts or Whole Foods and pick up something in the right aisle. Yeah. It's a great place for people to discover Bloom. And then they might come back to our online store for, you know, seasonal flavors, specialty offerings, subscribing. Like we're really finding it to be a place for loyalists and subscribers as well. So we're trying to figure out how all the different channels interact.

23:45And it obviously changes so much year to year based on what's going on in the world too. So it's really interesting continuously learning. But right now we're really approaching this more like omni-channel presence. The bigger you get though, the more successful your brand becomes. I would imagine it might become more and more difficult to listen to your customers in the way that you've been listening, right? I mean, if you're in Sprouts, if you're in Whole Foods, I mean, you're starting to kind of tap into a larger customer pool and you might not be able to get the same feedback you get from your loyalists, as you mentioned, or your subscribers back in the day.

24:21I'm curious. I would imagine you're thinking about that. So any sort of strategy change as you guys scale? You're right that one of the disadvantages to wholesale is that you're disconnected from your end customer. That was one of the reasons we started direct to consumer too, was you just are way closer to that customer. You have their email. You can ask them a quick question. You can test pricing. You can test front of pack images. You can test messaging. You just don't have that same capability in wholesale and it's a lot slower. So an example is, you know, Whole Foods reviews the category that we're in maybe once or twice a year.

24:57So you miss one, you're waiting another six to eight months before you can get back in there. And so when we approached Whole Foods and Target and, you know, all these retailers, because of the direct to consumer roots, we felt really confident with what we were presenting. We knew the messaging resonated. We knew the pricing was working. We had data to really provide retail buyers. And they looked at it, you know, they care about that kind of proof of concept. In terms of like, if it's getting harder. And so in some ways it is like through the customers that you're getting through the wholesalers, you're definitely more disconnected to.

25:34But you also have more consumers flowing through our direct to consumer in general. And so when you have an indicator of we need a gut health product, we want probiotics, we care, we are managing our alcohol, we're managing our caffeine, whatever the pain point is, you've got even more people indicating that direction. So it's a little A, little B, a classic kind of on the fence answer, but. You're still building for your DTC audience, but you're using some of the customer behavior from the wholesale product. That's right. And I think now we also have a bigger push on in real life events. You know, post-pandemic, people want to connect in person.