The Strategy Behind Elix’s First $1 Million and 90% Reorder Rate

0:00Part of what makes Chinese medicine so effective is the personalization element. It's all about the right treatment for the right person at the right time and helping you heal at the root. Welcome to Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and building a business. I'm your host, Serena Smith. Women's health is becoming big business, and one founder is leading the charge with both science and culture. After facing her own hormonal health issues, Lulu Ge founded Elix, a wellness brand rooted in traditional Chinese medicine and backed by clinical research. This new system of decoding our bodies, which has been around for almost 5 ,000 years, is what really drew people to the brand.

0:42Launched during the pandemic, Elix quickly took off, hitting a million dollars in sales with a team of three selling products in all 50 states and logging nearly a million in-depth health assessments. It was just such a win for how these herbs are really working on a deeper level. Founder and CEO Lulu Gu is here to share how she's growing Elix through authenticity, community, and a little help from TikTok. Don't we all need it? Welcome to the show, Lulu. Thanks, Serena. It's such a joy to be here. Oh my God, it's such a joy to have you. I'm so excited to have this conversation. I want to go back in time a little bit, back to the beginning, because though you are Chinese by descent, this wasn't the path that you were on for many years of your life.

1:27Tell me where you were both personally and professionally when the genesis of Elix started to take root. Yeah, well, culturally, I came to this country when I was five years old, not speaking a word of English. So for most of my young adulthood, it was really about how can I be as American as possible, learn the language, learn the culture, and really just fit in. So throughout middle school, high school, I was obsessed with being the all-American girl. I was on the leadership team, like class vice president, varsity cheerleading. In college, I was in a sorority, and I just really wanted to pursue what the all-American path of success looked like.

2:09So coming out of college, I went into management consulting and started climbing the corporate ladder. And I got to a place in my late 20s, early 30s, where I just remember feeling awful. Like I would wake up in the mornings exhausted, often with a migraine. I had chronic IBS, bloating, just so many digestive issues. And we now know about the brain-gut connection. But all of this really manifested itself in my period. I remember getting period pain that was so bad. It left me calling it sick to work for the first time in my life. And that was the start of my journey to rediscovering my roots in Chinese medicine.

2:52This period issue is one that is actually incredibly common. And I think for so many women, we have this understanding that that's just kind of the way the cookie crumbles and like the way life has to be. For you, was there some connection already to traditional Chinese medicine that indicated to you like there must be some other path here? Yeah, well, I remember growing up, my family didn't really have ibuprofen or Tylenol or NyQuil, DayQuil in our home. Whenever I wasn't feeling well, my grandparents would make some type of ginseng chicken soup or superfood tonic. But me wanting to fit in and be the all-American girl, I grew embarrassed about bringing this stuff to school.

3:39I didn't want to be the kid with the smelly lunch. And so even fast forward this time in my 20s and 30s when I wasn't feeling well, Chinese medicine wasn't the obvious solution. The obvious solution was, okay, let me go to my gynecologist and see what she could offer me. And really what my gynecologist could offer me was more birth control, which I had been on since I was like 15 years old to regulate my hormones or opioids for the pain, antidepressants for my mood. And I was thinking, wow, is there nothing else that I could try that's less invasive first? And it was really out of desperation, not getting the solutions from standard healthcare and feeling quite honestly dismissed by the doctors I went to.

4:24They were like, oh, your cramps don't sound like they're that bad or, oh, it's only a few days a month. Like, why don't you just take XYZ pills? So it was really out of this desperation. And my mom hearing my story, she was like, why don't you try going back to Chinese medicine? And my grandfather actually ran a hospital in China. So during this time, my mom connected me with a family friend, Dr. Xia Hongsheng, who read Like my tongue felt my pulse. And then he asked me all these questions. I was like, wow, what does he know about me and my symptoms and what I'm feeling just from looking at my tongue?

5:06It blew my mind. And that's kind of what led me back down this path of Chinese medicine, rediscovering it. Okay. So then describe to me the trajectory then from becoming comfortable with reintroducing it into your own life personally. and then the light bulb moment of, you know, maybe this is actually a business and something that I should pursue? Yeah, it's such a great question. Well, so it wasn't apparent at first. At first, it was just like, I couldn't believe how well it worked. And part of what makes Chinese medicine so effective is the personalization element. It's all about the right treatment for the right person at the right time and helping you heal at the root.

5:47And for me, the doctor after having done the intake assessment prescribed me a blend of herbs. He told me to drink it for three months. And that first month I remember feeling so good. Usually I would get migraines and pain a couple of days before my period, but I wasn't feeling any of those symptoms. And I was working in fashion at the time at Saks Fifth Avenue. I remember going to work. It was a spring day. I was wearing like a white house to heritage dress. I went to the bathroom before lunch, I looked down, I was like, oh my gosh, I started bleeding through my dress and I didn't even feel any of the symptoms.

6:24And I was so shocked, Serena, at how good I felt on my period that I started talking to all of my female coworkers about what I was feeling before, the Chinese herbs. And that was the light bulb moment. So many of them started opening up to me about my coworker who couldn't wear jeans once a month because of her bloating or my other coworker who had the coroner office who always had these horrible migraines. She was calling in sick to work, but they were menstrual migraines. They came every month like clockwork with her period. And I thought, wow, there's so many of us just suffering in silence and sucking it up month over month.

7:03This seems like a bigger problem than just what I was dealing with. Oh my God. It's so true. And if you have the privilege of feeling that kind of relief, It feels like such a eureka moment. You're like, this is completely and utterly life-altering, frankly. Okay, so you feel the personal relief. And then, you know, like any good woman, you tell all your friends about it. And they're like, we need this in our lives as well. They're like, can I just have your period herbs? And I'm like, sure, why not? And I go back to Dr. Shah. And I'm like, Dr. Shah, the herbs are amazing. And all my friends want them too.

7:40And he was like, well, you know, what worked for you might not work for them. The reason why they work is because they're personalized. I was like, oh, interesting. And at the time, my role at Saks was all about taking this data that we're collecting and personalizing the shopper journey. And I thought, is there a way that we could build the first platform that personalizes Chinese medicine? Like bring the process of seeing an herbalist or acupuncturist online. And fast forward 18 months, that was essentially what we built and launched Elix. It's really a platform where we have a free online health assessment anyone can take.

8:21You put in your symptoms, you put in your lifestyle, stress, what you're going through. And then we recommend a blend of herbs that supports you based on Chinese medicine pattern diagnosis. And then we've also launched a whole opportunity for people to connect one-on-one with doctors of Chinese medicine because so much of the wisdom of Chinese medicine is about how to eat with the seasons, how to move your body according to what it needs, how to breathe, how to rest, how to really nourish yourself. And a lot of what our doctors do is one-on-one consults that help people come up with a personalized lifestyle plan in addition to the herbs.

9:04I want to talk about that expansion into providing actual doctor-patient care because it's so fascinating. But your initial offering was not that, right? Your initial offering was take an assessment and we will send you some herbs to support your health and your constitution. You spent more than a year prototyping to try to get that process right. What did that entail? And how did you know, because I think that this is such a big thing for so many founders and human beings, how did you know when to move from the research into the execution phase? Yeah, that's a great question. I would say before we even got to prototyping, I spent almost like two years when I was still working my corporate job, really understanding and doing deep customer research on like this challenge within menstrual and hormone health.

10:03What are women going to, what are the alternatives? Where are really the gaps? And then what's the perception of the supplement aisle? Like why are supplements so overwhelming? And then where could Chinese medicine really fill a gap? And would people be willing to take a 50, 60 question online health assessment, give all this personal information? So for me, it was like a lot of time doing the R &D, getting the customer research, looking at, is it even possible to source organic herbs and make these formulas at scale the way that I envision that it's not a pill or powder, but it's really something akin to what my grandma would make at home, boiling down organic herbs into liquid decoctions that your body can actually absorb similarly to food as thy medicine.

10:52And then once it felt like to me, okay, there is a market, people are really curious about Chinese medicine, that they would be open to the health assessment. Then we started prototyping. We prototyped first the online health assessment. What are the questions that we would ask? What are the patterns of imbalance? And then we went on to the formulas. And I remember in the early days, it was literally like we worked out of a commercial kitchen, like mixing and matching like different herbal formulas and then sending them out. And you're like, oh, my God, I am my grandfather. It's happened. Yeah, pretty much like buying these herbs in bulk, you know, like boiling them down and then mailing them out in, you know, mystery brown colored bottles with like people's names handwritten on them.

11:46And then we were like, okay, our friends and friends of friends are using this and they're filling out our survey and they're saying it's working for them. What about strangers from the internet? And during that time, we actually launched a beta under a pseudonym because I was bootstrapping all of this. I didn't have the money to invest in branding, naming, and design. So in our beta, we called it hashtag period pain-free. It's very simple. You knew what it was, but we were just curious running a test, you know, would strangers from the internet actually buy this and try it? And we ran ads on Facebook.

12:23We actually had our first version of our Shopify site set up as like periodpainfree.com. And it was really fascinating to see who was clicking on our ads, who was buying the product. And I remember we had an intern at the time that was like, we need press. And I was like, we're not ready for press. We're like in mystery brown bottles out of a commercial kitchen. And I am so grateful to this intern. Her name is Melinda. she went through and she found all the journalists who had written about endometriosis, like really painful chronic condition that manifests in painful periods. And she just cold emailed like over a hundred journalists.

13:08And one wrote back, Laura Parker, who is a Buzzfeed editor and wrote the book Vagina Problems and said she'd be happy to try it. And I remember us sending Laura our brown, you know, mystery bottle with her name handwritten on it, the herbs that we were literally boiling down our commercial kitchen. And she used it for a couple months and said that nothing's ever helped her like this had. And fast forward to when we were at the point, we had raised a little bit of money and we were ready to formally launch it. Laura just wrote one of the most beautiful articles about the brand. But even before we formally launched, when we were still in beta.

13:50I remember Laura posting about it on her Instagram. And every single time she posts about it, we would have like a couple hundred new followers and like a couple dozen new orders. So it was like a great lesson early on of, you know, don't be afraid to reach out to people and the right people will find it and we'll become great champions of the brand. I do think there's such an important lesson in this about sort of doing something before you feel fully ready and it paid off, you know, and also how gratifying for you to be able to experience somebody else getting the relief that you experienced just from like a meaning perspective in life.

14:32That's a really lovely thing. When you started engaging with potential consumers, when you were in that beta, who were not just your friends and friends of friends, when you were engaging with the larger internet ether, what surprised you about who was clicking and where they were coming from and what their backgrounds were? Was it what you anticipated? You know, I was so surprised, Serena. I kind of had this hypothesis of who our target customer base would be given that this is organic Chinese medicine. I thought, you know, maybe it's a more like liberal urban coastal demographic. But what really surprised me were some of our highest converting areas or rural, non-urban, non-coastal.

15:26I mean, I remember we had an early community member in Kentucky who told us that she had never even tried ginger before a licks. And that all of these herbs and mushrooms, this was so foreign to her. But because after using these herbs for a few months, she felt such a dramatic difference in her pain that it almost inspired her to go on a food journey of like, okay, what vegetables are out there that I've never tried? And like, what other herbs could I be incorporating into my cooking? And it was like this whole like lifestyle transformation. And I loved hearing those stories of how much like once we start feeling better in our bodies by discovering something that we never tried before, how it really opens us up to look further for other ways that we can live more in tune with plants and mushrooms and food as they medicine.

16:25Radiating impacts. That's so nice. you formally launched in what turned out to be the very early days of the pandemic right like March literally like March 2020 right what that was a time obviously we can all remember though maybe some of us would like to not of peak fear and also really complicated sentiment toward Asian populations in this country for a lot of people so what was it like to launch a traditional Chinese medicine company like in that moment? Yeah. In that moment, I think there was just so much uncertainty. We had a real question of what should we lead with as a brand? Should we lead with that we are providing natural relief for menstrual and hormonal balance symptoms?

17:21Should We lead with that we are a clinically proven supplement that's like made in a very clean way. Like we boil down all of our herbs. They're organic or wild harvested in Colorado spring water, no fillers, preservatives. Like it literally is such a clean formula. Or, you know, where does Chinese medicine show up during a time when there's a lot of anti-Chinese sentiment given the conversation at that time. And to be honest, even today, you know, we see that there's a lot of geopolitical uncertainty. And what was interesting was, I think we had started the positioning about being natural period care.

18:05But then when we had done research and talking to our community, like what made you choose Elix, overwhelmingly, our biggest supporter said it was the Chinese medicine element and how Chinese medicine gave them a new perspective on how to understand the root cause of their imbalances. And what I mean by that is, you know, Chinese medicine has a whole system of understanding our body. When you're in pain, depending on if that pain is sharp or dull, it points to a different balance. When we have acne, depending on if it's a whitehead, if it's red and inflamed, or if it's a combination that points to a different type of inflammation, whether it's heat or dampness.

18:51And this new system of decoding our bodies, which has been around for almost 5 ,000 years, is what really drew people to the brand and that they can learn something new, like from looking at their tongue and other things. So we're like, wow, this is really great insight that we should be almost like more confident and proud in our heritage and what we have to offer from an educational perspective. I mean, I will be honest, Serena, it still wasn't easy because we definitely had the internet trolls sometimes replying to our Chinese medicine content with nasty comments. But I would say for one, you know, not kind comment, we would have four to five community members hopping in and spreading love.

19:39So, you know, you kind of learn to just roll with it. You know, it's like that old chestnut that like, there's no such thing as bad press, right? It's like the people come in and troll and then you have these sort of warriors for you that come in and defend you. And it feels like to me that actually maybe helps create some kind of customer loyalty and retention, really? It makes them feel invested in the brand in a different kind of way and in you, Lulu? Like, did you find that to be the case? You know, Serena, I think one of the most humbling learnings for me on this journey has been becoming more visible as a part of the brand.

20:21In the early days, I very much shied away from that. I was definitely not on TikTok. and my team gave me an assignment that's like okay why don't you just create an account and post a video a day for the next 30 days to just learn the platform because content is evolving and TikTok is setting a lot of the trends it's like okay and I remember like the first day I was like I posted something like super awkward and cringe like you know walking down the street whatever the next day try to green screen and then the third day it was like I posted a random video being in nature saying like POV, like plant medicine is all around us or something like that.

21:00And that video went viral. And then a couple of days later, I woke up and I saw some article about like birth control, making you date the wrong guys. And I just like shared my experience of like my twenties dating all the wrong guys until I met my husband, that video went viral. And I, I realized the power of just authenticity and tech talk when you just like hop on and just speak whatever's on your mind and how powerful that platform is. But that was such like a humbling way to just get out of my comfort zone. And I'm really grateful to my team for that assignment. So if there's any founders out there that are, you know, wanting to learn and wanting practice about being visible for their brand, I highly recommend TikTok as a platform because you never know what might happen.

21:44And you would expect like 90, 95 % of videos to fail. And that's just how the algorithm works. Have you been able to discern some connection between the following and the engagement on TikTok and how it's impacting the brand? Yes. We do a lot of surveys of our community and what we see is that some of our most, like our highest lifetime value LTV community members have actually discovered us via organic content on TikTok. And to your point, I think it's because when they come in through TikTok, and we don't really do any brand advertising on TikTok. It's mostly organic and it's mostly just me hopping on and sharing whatever's on my mind for the day.

22:31But I think it's a channel to really get to know me and build a connection. And I try to respond to the comments as well. People ask a lot of questions. And so we see that that connection really translates to higher education and more connectedness. I would imagine that it helps with the credibility piece too, when they see that the founder of the company is not just a face or somebody who saw an opportunity in the market, but that you really are, pun not intended, really steeped in this world and that you're a font of information and education yourself. For me as a consumer, I would see something like that and think like, okay, like she, she really knows what's up, you know, I can trust this.

23:15Yeah. And at the same time, I'm continuously learning. I feel like the beauty of my journey with Alexis, it's been an opportunity for me to dive back into the cultural wisdom. Why my mom always made Tremella mushroom dessert with my grandma in the summer. And that's become a TikTok trend and really understanding, well, what's the science behind Tremella mushroom? Why is that so good for our skin? Why does that moisturize from the inside out? That's been really fun. And I've been sharing a lot of that on TikTok. On a personal level, there's a parallel here, right? Like with our health, we want to feel in alignment and in sort of a flow.

23:54And I think similarly, like you talking about such a typical immigrant story, I'm an immigrant myself. I can relate to it of this feeling of just wanting to be American and just wanting to be white bread and pushing away your cultural heritage. And then you having it mirrored back to you time and again, actually, this is the thing to lean into, right? Has it given you a sense of personal peace or alignment to have those things feel like they've come into one harmonious state? Yeah. I feel like the walls are coming down in terms of the different areas of my life. I very much felt like growing up, there was like, this is who I am with my family.

24:37And then this is who I am with my friends. This is who I am at school. And then when I entered the workplace, it was like, this is who I am with my family, my friends, and this is who I am at work. Like I remember when I started my consulting job, I had to buy a whole new wardrobe and it was mostly like black and blue and gray and just like so drab. And it's like now as like a founder, it's like, I love to wear colors and I love to wear florals. I love to express myself. And I, I feel like I get to be my authentic self in every facet of the word from cultural heritage to my creativity to my personality.

25:16And so much of being a founder is just knowing how much you don't know and then trying to learn or trying to find the people who know more than you who could be helpful or a great partner along the journey. And that's been incredibly humbling. I think there's something so important in this about hiring for your blind spots and hiring for your weak spots. But what's hard about your blind spots is that you're normally blind to them. How do you have any tips in terms of how to build a team? This is something we've been very intentional at Alex, how we build our high performance culture and really a growth mindset.

25:57Because a lot of the work I did in my corporate consulting role was going into like dysfunctional fortune 500 or 1000 companies where people did not understand the strategy they didn't respect the leadership and how do we turn around a toxic environment so in building alexa it's like okay from day one how do we build an environment where everyone it can be the ceo of their own world that's one of our cultural values and i think it starts with as founder knowing my why. And my why is really to help millions of people discover the life-changing potential of living in tune with their bodies through Chinese medicine and this mind-body-spirit healing.

26:40And so in terms of the organization, it's really so much about continuously growing. We have three cultural values. It's to be the CEO of your own world, be the first to share in question and then build the future we're proud of. And so when we hire, when we look at performance reviews, we not only look at business goals, but we look at it through the lens of these cultural values. And I think where a lot of times organizations struggle, starting with hiring, it's like only hiring the people who have the skills to do the job versus looking at it through the cultural lens. And to your question about Blindspot Serena, something we implemented very early on, we actually have an external coach that works with every single full-time member of the team.

27:28So every single full-time member of my team gets one-on-one monthly coaching and they have development goals. And then our coach also works with us on 360 assessments. And so once a year, everyone will fill out a confidential survey about each other, like sharing what are strengths and opportunities and myself included. And I feel like that's been one of the richest sources of feedback is like, okay, how does my team really feel that I'm doing along the areas that I say I want to be a leader and where can I continuously improve? That's what helps to shine the light on the blind spots, but also in a safe, supportive way.

28:12Because if you're only doing the 360, but you don't have coaching or development programs in place, it can feel like, oh my gosh, I'm so exposed. And now I don't know what to do with this information. But when we pair the 360 feedback with the coaching, with ongoing development planning, I think that's what really creates the environment where our team can continuously grow. Like we've had team members grow from like intern to manager. We've had multiple team members get promoted two or three times within a short amount of time that they've been with us. And that's the part that makes me most proud.

28:47Right. You have to both grant people the information and then also give them the tools to be able to grow. And if you're just doing one without the other, it runs the risk of actually being damaging rather than empowering, right? Was this something that you knew to do from jump or Or was there a turning point in the company that indicated to you, okay, maybe we need to make some shifts and incorporate some other practices here? Yeah, it was definitely in the early days. You know, I think we hit our first million in revenue with a full-time team of three. Like everyone worked so hard and we were just so burnt out.