Greg LaVecchia is an excellent example of the potential of selling Nutra products. He is less than 30 and started Bloom only four years ago.
Bloom is now doing 100M in annual revenue, which would value the business more than 1B+.
Watch this amazing interview with Greg here:
Main takeaways from this interview:
He started the company with the girl he dated in college (Mari) and eventually married.
The story starts with her weight transformation and gaining some traction on social media.
Greg helped with his marketing background and helped her grow even more by using Facebook paid ads.
They offered a PDF workout guide to buy for $10, which he marketed on Facebook and Mari’s social pages. He didn’t care if the ad cost $10, and he broke even because they gained more followers through that campaign.
Their very first physical product was a “booty band” from Alibaba in 2017.
He marketed it by having the workouts in the PDF with the booty bands as part of the workout, so you “had” to buy them. He upsold the bootybands in the workout PDF. He sold over 1 million of the booty bands.
Greg explains how he converted so well that the ads were targeted so they would “follow” Mari’s social pages.
Then, people would buy it because of how Mari engaged with the community, related to everyone, and used the booty band in her content. They did not serve ads to booty bands; they served ads to follow Mari, and she used the bands, which built trust, and people bought them.
They also used Facebook Groups and prioritized community and building Maris’s social following.
They continued to sell booty bands and grow Mari’s social page, and in 2019, they received a lot of feedback asking them what supplements they should take from their audience.
They started with their first product for Bloom, a pre-workout powder with three flavors.
They got the MOQ, used all the cash they had at the time, and instantly sold out of it.
Then, they expanded to more sports nutrition products such as EAA’s (Essential Amino Acids), protein powders, etc.
He realized that while these products were working, they only addressed an audience of women who lift weights, which is very niche.
In 2020, they released their greens superfood product. Their customer went from a woman who lifts weights to a woman in the United States. And that’s when he says everything changed.
The feedback they got from the green products was very positive.
By combining influencer marketing on Instagram and what is now TikTok, they realized it could be the following most significant product. And it did that.
Then, they spent $1.5M to advertise on Amazon’s front page for one day. He says it helped bring massive awareness, and all the distribution channels started calling him Walmart, Target, investors, etc. He does not think about ROAS so much but about building the community.
Because of his strategy with short-form content on Instagram, he was very intimidated when the ecosystem started changing to TikTok. He wasn’t sure what approach to do.
He hired his old high school buddy in a “boiler room” type of Wall Street sales job. And they applied that to aggressively approach micro-influencers on TikTok to try their product and build that relationship.
They have 20+ women going through social media aggressively and searching for new micro-influencers to build relationships with.
They love their influencer connections, send them gifts, wish them happy holidays, have actual life events, invite them to them, and build genuine friendships.
He says the most important things are to keep your customers happy, keep the morale of your internal team high, and maintain their relationships with the influencers.
They competed by being creative because they needed more budget to hire agencies. They hired creative, hardworking people right out of school.
He succeeded with the product being the best, creatives being the best, and relationships with everyone they work with being the best.
He noticed that TikTok viewers will check if the product is on Amazon immediately. So if you’re on TikTok, you need to sell on Amazon.
