How Laurence and Marlena bootstrapped a multi-million dollar company selling gummy bears
Laurence and Marlena founded Bears with Benefits in 2018 in Munich, Germany. Various ingredients such as hemp oil, biotin, and collagen in the gummy bears are intended to improve users’ hair structure, fingernails, and skin, as well as their immune system and energy levels. Bears with Benefits offers more than 20 different nutritional supplements at a price of around 20 to 35 euros.
Their focus was to not only create a direct-to-consumer brand for supplements but to build a love brand which generated the majority of their sales by recurring customers who love their products.
In Germany, 3 of 4 adults take supplements on a regular basis. However, most of the supplement products you could buy in the year 2018 were in the form of pills or powders. Marlena and Laurence saw this huge opportunity and developed a more appealing way to consume nutritional supplements – in the form of gummy bears.
Nowadays, their vitamin gummy bears are available in all major European markets, i.e. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, Spain & the Netherlands generating an 8-figure revenue per year – all without the help of external capital.
In the year 2022 Bears with Benefits was sold to the Havea Group for a mid-double-digit million range (Business Insider 2022).
We will show you the most important lessons both founders have learned during their journey to becoming one of the leading supplement brands in Europe.
The 5 key learnings
1. Packaging first, Brand second
When Marlena and Laurence founded their company, they wanted to create a packaging concept which fits to the channel they are mainly selling to. They knew that, especially in the beginning, the main sales channels would be their own online store and Amazon (Direct-to-consumer). So they developed the packaging based on a DTC experience rather than a retail experience:
- High contrasts. Big letters and easy-to-read
- As small and efficient as possible in order to save space and therefore shipping costs
- The brand “Bears with Benefits” was not the focus. They focused on special keywords and buzz words, i.e. Hair, Biotin, Collagen to rank higher on Amazon and Google Search
2. Multichannel is King
When they initially started, Amazon was the most important platform to gain traction and also get to know the needs and habits of their target group. Eventually, they used this knowledge to develop or kill products, move more and more customers to their webshop, and scale to the big retail chains.
More specifically, they took a close look at the following:
- How price sensitive are the customers for which product or product category?
- Which images drive more sales?
- Which products are bought together with other products?
3. Trust is everything
A new brand usually does not enjoy a high level of trust. The customer asks the following questions:
- Is this a legit brand?
- Will my package arrive on time if I order?
- Does the product work as promised?
So how can you build trust if you are just new to the market?
Bears with Benefits uses trust amplifiers within the content and shopping experience:
- The mandatory trust elements, i.e. payment providers, logistics providers like DHL, UPS, etc.
- Free Shipping and returns for all orders shown in the header
- 100-day money-back guarantee
- 3rd party reviews from a trusted platform (Trustpilot)
- Testimonials from customers
- Next-Day-Delivery option “Zenrush” powered by their 3PL
Moreover, they used the power of 3rd party and let others speak for them.
For instance:
- Experts, i.e. doctors or nutritionists
- Press from well-known media
- Founders – they show themselves and give a face to the brand
- Creators and Micro-Influencer or user-generated content
4. Find your Marketing Mix
One major decision Marlena and Laurence made was to invest 100% of their Marketing Budget into Performance Marketing – 0% into Brand Marketing. Bootstrapping a start-up means that you have limited resources. So they only invested the budget into marketing campaigns which lead to a positive ROAS.
Therefore, they made it crucial to track all the important marketing KPIs on a daily basis. Trying out different discount codes, landing pages, copies & post-purchase surveys.
As stated in the beginning, the focus of the two founders was to build a lovebrand. In order to do that, one specific metric is of high importance: Customer Lifetime Value. Therefore, the CRM plays a major role in tracking the customer lifecycle. One of their biggest Growth hacks in order to reactivate customers: WhatsApp Remarketing (Revenue per recipient: 10x of email marketing)
Influencer Marketing became the biggest marketing channel for them. Around one-third of the marketing budget is spent on testing, measuring, and learning different influencer campaigns. The founders have set up a specific budget, booked influencers, and analyzed the following data of Instagram stories:
- How many people did the story reach?
- How was the “Swipe-Up” rate?
- How was the conversion rate on the landing page?
- Which story slide was the best performing one?
- Discount amount & their corresponding average order value?
Instead of treating Influencer Marketing as a glass ball and hope that it creates more profit than it costs, they transformed it into their biggest growth hack.
5. Make people an offer they can’t say no to
Opposed to the opinion of some e-commerce experts, discounts still work and often give the relevant trigger to close a sale. For instance, Bears with Benefits figured out that a discount of 25% leads to a bigger average order value than a discount of 20% and therefore amortizes the money you “lose” by providing the discount in the first place – making the higher discount more profitable in total than the lower one.
Conclusion
By questioning the status quo of both the market and ways to market, Laurence and Marlena became one of the most respected leaders in the e-commerce industry within Europe.
The results of the 5 learnings:
- > 200.000 Instagram followers
- > 1 million customers
- > 40% repurchase rate
- 120% growth during the covid crisis in 2022
- Nr. 1 vitamin gummy brand in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy
Nuri Jusupow, Entrepreneur in Residence at Zenfulfillment
With many years of experience working with e-commerce brands and industry-specific logistics knowledge, Nuri offers a holistic perspective on optimizing the entire value chain for growing DTC Brands. As one of the Key Accounts of Bears with Benefits, he worked hand in hand with the founder to optimize their delivery experience.
