Love+Chew CEO gives growth tips
Founded in 2017, Love+Chew offers a range of gluten-free superfood cookies, including cherry almond, chocolate chia and mocha chip cookies, as well as seasonal flavours like pumpkin.
While working in the technology industry, Chew initially started the brand as a side income, but found demand was high enough to make it a full-time business. Currently, Love+Chew is available in 1,500 stores and will soon launch in Costco stores in Northern California, where it will offer a 16-pack of mini banana bread cookies, Chew said.
“I like having my destiny in my own hands”
Unlike some of her peers, Chew built her company on her own and did not take venture capital funding. Instead, she relies on a line of credit to finance production runs and raw materials. She decided against it after discussing the pros and cons of venture capital funding with her husband – who works in the venture capital industry, Chew noted.
“(My husband) said, ‘If you have a $20 million company and you own 100% of the company, that’s the same as selling the company for $100 million and owning 20% of it. It’s literally the exact same outcome,'” she explained. “Not that I have any intention of selling the company, but that hit me, and I like being in control of my own destiny.”
However, without venture capital, Love+Chew’s business “couldn’t grow as quickly, but rather organically,” and the company had to “be careful about trade spend and spending in general,” Chew noted. Chew also focused her limited resources on making sure her product and packaging resonated well with consumers.
“This business is just a very capital-intensive business and especially in the early stages, it’s really important to understand who your customer is, what kind of packaging suits your product, what the product wording should look like on your packaging, where in the store you should have a presence. There are so many different considerations and we’ve seen this with different brands where they raise a ton of money and then just pour money into things, whether it’s digital ads or selling to 10,000 doors at once, and sometimes that doesn’t always work out so well,” she said.
Use Costco sales as a “poster effect” to increase e-commerce sales
Love+Chew has found that distributing at Costco creates a great “billboard effect” for the brand, driving sales well beyond the retailer’s assortment.
“We’re there for about six to eight weeks and then we disappear, and we don’t necessarily see that as a negative because this is all about the Costco treasure hunt,” Chew said. “People get addicted to your product and then you disappear. And then consumers say, ‘Where can I find you?’ And so we always see an increase in Amazon and e-commerce sales after our Costco rotation.”
Brands that want to sell through Costco must provide the retailer with a unique stock keeping unit (SKU) and adhere to certain packaging specifications. “So there’s some risk because (brands) don’t want to be tied to Costco-specific packaging,” which may not sell at other retailers, Chew noted.
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