3D printing your way to a more nourished business and convert leads; with Melissa Snover

Welcome to The UnNoticed Entrepreneur. This show will tell you how to get the recognition you and your business deserve. Our guests share their practical insights and tools, which you can use straight away. Your host is International Entrepreneur, Podcast Host, and Author, Jim James. Hello, and welcome to this episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, which I think you're gonna love. You're gonna find it really nourishing at the risk of using that term. And we're gonna meet Melissa Snover, who is the Founder and CEO of a company called "Nourished". Melissa, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. Well, it's great to have you on the show, although, originally, you were from New York. You're living now in Birmingham, in the Midlands of the UK, and you've built a company which builds or makes, I should say, "3D printing of nutritional gummies". And you've managed to get over 10,000 monthly subscribers to your products, and I've seen the reviews are amazing and you've got lots of patents. You're an award-winning Entrepreneur in your own right, but you're gonna tell to us today about how you managed to build and "Nourished". Melissa, tell us about "Nourished" the brand's story. It's amazing. Absolutely. So "Nourished" is really the world's first authentically manufactured personalized nutrition product. And the way it came to be born or come life in my mind was on a business trip. I was actually working on "additive manufacturing" or "3D printing as it's more commonly called for confectionary. And this was something that was up and running, was going well, people were loving it around the world. But, I was also having to travel all over the world. We had the previous concept in Dubai, in Singapore, and all across the United States and Hong Kong. And so I was constantly on a plane. I was traveling about 210 days a year. And on one occasion I was in Germany, and I was going through the, you know, fast track security line in Düsseldorf Airport. And at the time when I was traveling, I try to stay on top of my health, and I used to carry around a pretty disgusting Ziploc bag full of different vitamins because it wasn't convenient to carry around all the different bottles jars of the different supplements and vitamins that I was taking. And when I was in that line, I went to open my carry on bag to take out my laptop computer. And on this one occasion, unfortunately that zipper grabbed the Ziploc bag and flung it round and opened it and splattered all of the vitamins and supplements all over the floor. Like, one haul over even I found one, and I spent like the next 10 minutes, much to dismay of the travelers behind me, on my hands and knees picking them up. And I kept thinking to myself, "There's gotta be a better way to do this." And you know, that light bulb moment came to me when I thought, "Oh, I'm developing 3D printing of food. Surely we could do this." And on the way home, on the flight, I literally, drew a nourish stack that you see there on our website today, on back of a napkin. A "Fly B napkin", and came back to my team who were working on 3D printing of confectionary at the time and said, "Right. I've got an idea and we've gotta run some tests and see if we can do this." Thus, the vision and dream for "Nourished" was born. And over the coming months, we created totally new technology. So new printing machines, new software. We developed new formulations, new ingredients, and we launched concept to market in January of 2020 Well, and so you were really launching directly into COVID as well, where people also were very health conscious. And just looking at your website and these 3D printed gummies, it's amazing because, you know, these look like sort of delicacies, they look like sort of thing one would get in a cage. I can imagine my daughters, who are 13 and 15 kind of wanting to take these. What an amazing story. And I can really see the practical applications as well, because we've all been there with those little packets of tablets that the security guards give us a dirty look for taking through promising just vitamins. So Melissa, you've explained the origin, which is amazing. And that you've made it sound a little bit easier than I'm sure it was, to get it to go. "Ta-da, here we are." Do you wanna just take us through, in terms of the process of starting to build the brand, because there are other management challenges, but this show is really about the getting noticed part. What were, if you like, the first challenges that you started to face when it came to introducing these "3D printed gummies"? Well, yeah, that's a great question. I think you know, most of the competitor brands in the vitamin and supplement space, and even in just online and D2C retail in general, very few of them are making their own product. And so what that means is that they raise money or they have some money from a bank, or they got a grant, or they have savings, or maybe they sold something else. They don't have to actually invest the CapEx and the ingredients, and raw materials, in humans, that it takes to actually make a product. They usually find another manufacturer that will it for them. They design a beautiful brand, a very pretty website. And then, the majority of the money that have set aside for the business can be spent on, just as you rightly said, getting the brand noticed and, you know, that obviously would hopefully lead to conversions, and sales, and revenue, and then eventually profit. With our business, when I raised my initial seed funding for this, we built an actual food factory and tons of machines and we had to pre-order and pay upfront for a lot of materials because we are physically making the product, the packaging, the boxes, the flow wrap, which is sustainable and made from wood pulp and very expensive. All had to be paid for upfront. So by the time I actually got the product to market and got to turn that website on, we did not have pretty much any money really to do big paid ad campaigns or TV, or any of those kind of traditional launching style channels. And so in the very beginning, I focused on what I knew I could do with hard work and a lot of elbow grease, which was to covet the media. And so we worked really hard on sending media samples out to all the media here in the UK. I used my own social media, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram at the time. Those were the ones that we focused on. And we started seeding people who we thought would really like the product. And were not of the imagination, what you would call an "Influencer" today. But had very engaged small followings, and we thought would be turned on by some of the USPs of the product. And so, for example, our products is free from allergens. It's vegan. It's sugar-free. So, on top of being personalized it has a lot of these call outs. So my team went and found all of the "Vegan Influencers" in the UK that were talking authentically about products, and we went and found all the people who were talking about KETO diets and avoiding sugar. And so that was the first step in getting people to even notice that we had even launched because we did not have any big marketing budget for that. Shortly after as you mentioned, COVID hit. I think it was the 10th week that we were open. And you know, everything changed overnight and the online shopping and people being pushed to buy things online that never would really have done that. I think, previously, increased the amount of consumers online looking for our type of product. And so by SEO, really well-written blogs and search. We were able get a lot of customers to the website and our traffic increased massively. Then we were able to start that flywheel and retain some revenue and started putting that into tons and tons of brand awareness style campaigns on digital media platforms like social ads and paid for search. Melissa, I love that you started there, as you say, by going to not even necessarily Influencers but just people who are genuinely within a sort of an era of interest as you mentioned, for example, vegan and so on. Can we just talk a little bit about compliance? Because, you know, food, I'm, you know, a father of two. I bought gummy bears for my daughters, the little teddy bear ones. Which they, you know, now feel like they've grown out of eating, by the way. So what did you do in terms of compliance? Because as a parent or as an adult, you want to buy things that you know have passed regulatory standards. How have you addressed that side of the business and then communicated that aspect of the nutrition products? Yeah, it's a really good point and it's something that I think is really not shouted about enough, and I think a lot of consumers are unaware of it. But basically in my earlier career, I developed a vegan gummy candy line which I made in other factories, very, very large factories. Some of the biggest manufacturers that you can imagine. And so I spent like the first five years of my Entrepreneurial career, working in these very large highly compliant, highly controlled environments. And so when I set up this business and when I started to develop the hardware technology, so the actual 3D printers itself, I knew the kind of parameters that we would have to stand up to in order for us to be able to sell product in a safe, hygienic, and legally compliant way. And that is really a massive barrier for people who are not from the industry because the regulation is different in every country. And it is different for every product category and if you manufacture your self the amount of things that you need to do in order to be fully compliant is quite expensive, it's very time consuming, and it's not ever over. And so for example, our current facilities are "FSSC 22,000 Certified," which is the same level certification that Unilever or Mondelez has. And that costs quite a lot of money of every year. We also have a full staff of quality control team checking and randomly batch testing all of our products. We have to buy special machinery like 'metal detection' and 'presence testing' and 'stability testing'. And we have to keep records of all that and be able to maintain it, and be able to produce it on the fly of any random product that we've made at any time to be able to prove traceability and ability to recall. And so this is something that is a is a big barrier for, you know, people starting out in food. And I think the other thing people don't realize is a lot of people think that medicine is regulated at a higher level than food. And that's really not the case at all. There are certainly different things that happen when you talk about bringing a new drug to market because usually new drugs are not naturally occuring and so they have to go through a whole phase of trials; clinical trials, human trials, double-blind controlled placebo trials, et cetera, to prove firstly, the safety, then the efficaciousness, and then there's a whole phase of trials called "Scale-Aware". They have to go through all sorts of different potential users, so that they can determine dosages for different types of people. They can provide that to the end patient provider. Doctor usually, or the pharmacist, et cetera. That doesn't happen in food, but everything else around the regulation is pretty much the same. And so this why you often find the administrations that handle the regulation are the same. So in America, we have the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA. Then in the UK we have the EFSA, and now it's the UKFSA. But that also garners all natural and OTC medication as well. And so, you know, level of strenuousness that we are put under the lens, that we are put under as a food manufacture and certainly we also have natural ingredients which are vitamins and supplements as well. It's very, very similar to that of medication and it's absolutely crucial that we do that for the safety public. So Melissa, I'm just interested that, and I don't wanna do it too long, but you don't highlight that particularly on the website. So I'm just interested why you don't do that. Is that because it's a given in order to be sold that people will know that it is passing regulations? You know, it's actually a really good point. We should shout about it more. Because it is a legal requirement, many brands are not doing it correctly. And so that was one of my big pain points or bug bears with the industry when I started Nourished, you know, firstly, people are making false health claims that had no clinical substantiation. This bothers me immensely. So everything in our product range has at least one, double-blind placebo controlled human trial that has been peered reviewed and published in a medical. And so we don't ever make a claim substantiation or a benefit claim unless it's been proven and put up to scrutiny in the scientific community or the medical community more relevant to. The other one was, there are people who are not doing stability testing and are making claims on labels based on what's called "Manufacturer Input." And so there's two different things when you think about vitamin, supplement, and food, in general. So there is the amount of nutrients that are there on day one. So manufacture input. But just like with fresh food, like produce, nutrients, micronutrients, vitamins, and minerals dissipate and reduce over time. And so what we do is we test our products on day 1, day 30, day 90, 6 months, 12 months, 24 months, to ensure that the efficaciousness of the product is robust and maintain throughout the potential maximum shelf life of the product. Many other companies don't do that, but you raised a really good point. And funnily enough, I came out of a meeting just before this call, where we were discussing our website and where we were missing, where we were not communicating as well, some of the things that we do. And I'm gonna send a message to my team right after this say, "Hey, someone else who's totally unbiased also mentioned this. I think it's worth looking at. Claire, well, you can hear that Nourished obviously has extensive, you know, health checks. But yeah, it's not necessarily something one would see. So it looks as though, Melissa, that you are working with people, especially with the social proof. Do you wanna just share with us the strategy for Nourished around social proof? Because you've profiled user reviews above maybe some of the efficacy trials that you've put on. So, what's the strategy there? Absolutely. When you're brand new and you have no customers, it's really tricky to get social proof, but it's also the biggest, I think, needle mover in the way that you can convert new customers. We live in a world now where reviews are necessary to win conversion, and that is because of "TripAdvisor" and because of "Trustpilot" and because of Amazon. Reviews are absolutely vital, but it's really challenging when you are brand new because how can you have customer reviews when you have no customers at all? So, we went until probably the end of April of the first year of trading, just contacting every person who purchased, getting their really authentic and honest feedback, making adjustments where we could improve, where they were giving us feedback, where we're like, "You know, we could actually modify slightly that, and it would actually really help. I think that would make a lot of people more happy." And then by the end of April and the beginning of May, we had so many five-star reviews that we were actually named the "UK's Number 1 Customer Rated Vitamin and Nutrition Product." And that kind of changed everything. It changed the way that all of our ad campaigns efficiencies worked. It changed. We had people referring us, our direct traffic and organic traffic started to go really high. And really, our customers now, I think we have 5,005 star customer reviews across all the different platforms. And they are really authentic. They're really honest and true, and they are real third party verified customers. And so of course, we utilize their feedback in ways that we can show to other people who maybe have not heard of, or tried our brand before. You know, that other people have. And there's a lot of safety here because all of these other people are loving this product and you probably will too. And I think that's really human nature at its very basic route. And our customers are lovely, they send us pictures. And one thing I think that's important to mention, is we have never since the brand started, and I really have a blanket policy on this, ever paid an Influencer to talk about our product. And I won't really do that, unless something crazy changes that I can't really imagine right now. We've provided free product to people, definitely. But we have never paid someone to stand there and go, "I love Nourished." I think it's totally fake. It bothers me when I see other brands do it. It makes me feel like they think that I'm not smart enough to know that they're paying that person. I find it condescending. And I think that the consumer in general, the mainstream consumer is also wise to this now. So I think real customers are such a better Ambassador and proponent and Spokespeople of our brand. Melissa, thank you for that. Melissa Snover, who is the CEO, Founder of a company called "Nourished." And we're nearly running out of time, but you've got an Ambassador program as well, Melissa. Just very briefly, how does that work? Absolutely. So we started that on the back of our customers, really recommending our product without being told to do so or being, in any way compensated. And so now, anybody who wants to join our ambassador program can do so on our website, and they get access to a bunch of content. They get a free box of product to try, and they get a code generator. And then if they recommend our product, then they basically join what is a individualized affiliate program where they get a small amount of compensation for each of the people who buys our product, based on their recommendation. Melissa, I love that. Now, you've made it sound like a textbook case of building a brand. Is there one thing that hasn't worked? Could you share that without giving away anything that might be embarrassing? Oh no. None of it is embarrasing, but none of it is pretty either. I think, you know, when you're starting something new and certainly when you're doing something no one has ever done before, you have to make the mistakes because there's no case study that I can look at. No book, there's no guidebook. There's no dummies guide to how to build a 3D printing nutrition business. We are really comfortable with failing and we actually have something in our Friday meetings where we do "Failure Brags" and we like celebrate failure, and then what we learn from it as opposed to hide that, don't talk about it. The ones that I made the wrong call on that I don't regret because I would still be making mistakes if I hadn't learned the lesson. But, you know, when we first started, we actually thought TV would be a great way to raise awareness about the brand. And TV was very expensive, but we thought we could do this one small thing on tv and that at least it would raise awareness. It made no difference, whatsoever. And I think the reason for that was two things. One, you need a ton of money and a very consistent long-term campaign to make a difference on TV. And if nobody knows who you are at all. It's really too early to do TV. It's what I took from that lesson. I guess another lesson that we learned was, you know, you should really focus on your core thing that you're the best at. And so the best thing that we are unique in the world in is doing this personalization. We tried a bunch of other, you know, pre-formulated products, and none of them have ever represented more than a single digit of our total revenue. It's always personalized. And we lost energy and focus by diverting our attention towards them. However, we quickly nipped it in the bud. And now, you know, we're back to focusing on number one. Melissa Snover, Founder and CEO. Inspirational Female Entrepreneur from New York, now living in Birmingham. If people wanna find out more about you and Nourished, where can they go? They can go. They can just type in 3D-vitamins or Nourished on any search engine. The website is "get-nourished.com." Wonderful, and I will put that of course in the show notes. Melissa, thank you so much for joining and sharing fantastic story and I'm really excited and looking forward to trying the questionnaire for my daughters and signing up to try those. Thank you for joining me today. My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. It's been wonderful. So what an inspiring story. And for those of us that have wrestled with bags of vitamins at the airport, you know now there's a solution. And if you've enjoyed this interview today, do please share it with a fellow unnoticed Entrepreneur. And if you like the show, please review it on your favorite player. And until we meet again, I just do encourage you to keep on communicating. Thanks for listening.