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 going to love. You're going to find it really nourishing. at the risk of using the term. We're going to 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're 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 going to talk to us today about how you've managed to build Nourished. Melissa, tell us about Nourished, the brand 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 to 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 confectionery. 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 and 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. On one occasion, I was in Germany and I was going through the fast-track security line in Düsseldorf Airport. And at the time when I was traveling, I'd 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 and 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 hall over even, I found one. And I spent like the next 10 minutes, much to the dismay of the travelers behind me, on my hands and knees picking them up. And I kept thinking to myself, there's got to be a better way to do this. And, you know, that light bulb moment came to me when I thought, well, 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 the back of a napkin, a Flybee napkin, and came back to my team who were working on 3D printing of confectionery at the time and said, right, I've got an idea and we've got to run some tests and see if we can do this. Thus, the vision and dream for Nourish 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 the concept to market in January of 2020.

Wow! 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 the sort of thing one would get in a cake shop. 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.

Yes.

which is amazing. And then 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 if 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 in the CapEx and the ingredients and raw materials and humans that it takes to actually make a product. They usually find another manufacturer that will make it for them. They design a beautiful brand, a very pretty website, and then the majority of the money that they have set aside for the business can be spent on, just as you rightly said, getting the brand notice. 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 preorder 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 kinds 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 of 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 we're not by any stretch 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 product is free from allergens. It's vegan. It's sugar-free. So, on top of being personalized, it has a lot of these other callouts. 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 using SEO, really well-written blogs, and search, we were able to 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 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 area 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 2. I bought gummy bears for my daughters, little teddy bear ones, which they, you know, 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 5 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 printer 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 yourself, 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 22000 certified, which is the same level certification that Unilever or Mondelez has, and that costs quite a lot of money 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 of 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 real 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 occurring. 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 SCALA where they have to go through all sorts of different potential users so that they can determine dosages for different types of people. And 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 is 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. And 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 manufacturer, and certainly we also have natural ingredients, which are vitamins and supplements as well, is 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 want to dwell on 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 bugbears with the industry when I started Nourished was, you know, firstly, people were 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 peer-reviewed and published in a medical journal. 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 2 different things when you think about vitamin supplements and food in general. So, there is the amount of nutrients that are there on day one. So, manufacturer 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 maintained throughout the potential maximum shelf life of the product. Many other companies don't do that. But you raise 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.

Great. Well, and 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 want to just share with us the strategy for Nourish 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 5-star reviews that we were actually named the UK's number one 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 5,000 5-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 root. And our customers are lovely. They send us pictures and, you know, 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 Nourish. 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 and founder of a company called Nourished. 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.

Listen, 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 embarrassing, 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 There's no case study that I can look at. There's no book. There's no guidebook. There's no dummy's 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 learned 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 2 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 is 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 Snova, founder and CEO, inspirational female entrepreneur from New York now living in Birmingham. If you want to 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.