Bloom Nutrition Takes a Greens Supplement to Nine Figures
Today’s story is proof you don’t need a new idea.
Bloom Nutrition reached nine figures in annual sales within four years by offering a daily greens supplement, but where AG1 wasn’t. Retailers.
Now if you don’t listen to podcasts you may not have heard about Athletic Greens or AG1, but it’s a daily supplement that was launched in 2010 and bootstrapped to $100 million in annual revenue in a decade.
Recently, AG1 raised $115 million at a $1.2 billion valuation.
Now back to Bloom!
The year is 2017 and Greg LaVecchia and Mari were dating in college. She had a fitness transformation and while she lost 90 pounds she shared her wellness journey on socials.
@marillewellyn Instagram
She had around 10,000 followers and Greg, who was in digital marketing, decided to try a Facebook ad campaign to gain followers. It worked. And everyone started asking how do I lose weight like you did?
They put together a $5 .pdf workout guide and followed that up with a resistance band. Sales and the community grew. They sold over a million bands.
In 2018 the community started asking about supplements so they created a pre-workout in three flavors in 2019 and sold out. Protein and recovery powders followed.
They had built a niche set of products for women who work out and the business was doing well, but they always hit a ceiling.
But in 2020 in comes the green powder! They launch Bloom Nutrition Greens and the rocket ship takes off.
Now this is a decade after AG1 launched. AG1 is doing $100 million in sales. Would you have started a competitor?
But Greg thought it was an advantage. He didn’t need to educate people on what a green powder was.
They focused on influencer marketing and getting into Target. They used a broker and would ask for a 30 minute zoom call with the rep. They finally got the bottom shelf in 600 Target stores in 2022. Right off the start they became one of the top five sellers in their category.
They begged to get into all Targets before the 2023 resolution season but they met some resistance. So they put their money where their mouth was. They gave Target $1 million in stocking fees to put them in all stores for two months. They were the #1 product in their category during the resolution season.
They reached nine figures in annual sales in 2023 and recently sold a portion of the business for $90 million. Greg and Mari are still the largest shareholders.
I love this for a bunch of reasons:
They don’t care about performance marketing when everyone else is saying learn Meta first
They launched a product against a tough competitor, but went omnichannel to capture customers that were educated on what a green powder was, but hadn’t yet purchased it
They built off of a niche audience and kept launching larger TAM products
They bet $1 million in cash on Target when they were still a bootstrapped brand
Other interesting tidbits:
In June 2023 Target wanted to know what the two new products Bloom would launch were in April 2024, they didn’t realize how long of a lead time retailers work on
Retailers provide a moat as it can take a year for a competitor to get into the store
Greg got his best friend Leo, who was working on Wall Street doing biotech venture capital, to run their influencer program, he’s now the COO
Originally they just had a B on the bottle but people were searching for the “B brand” so they had to adjust immediately to having their whole name on the packaging
Approximately 90% of the revenue comes from the greens product
Sources:
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