How grüum scaled from startup to 1M orders a year with WooCommerce

I'm Simon Leonard, the co-founder of Grüum, and I mainly look after operations at the business. Hi, my name is Bethanie Sleigh, and I'm one of the co-founders at Grüum. I mainly look after design, branding, and the website UX. We all met at our previous company, so it's me, Simon, obviously, Andy, and George making all the decisions together. Worked really collaboratively. We worked together in the Netherlands and met the three of us plus Andy back in the UK, still part of the same business, and we were quite clear that when we left we wanted to do something different. We first started in January 2016 when it was the two of us sat in a co-working space trying to figure everything out from scratch basically, the brand, the product range, exactly what we were going to do. And fast forward to September 2016, we launched with approximately 10 key products. Yeah. And then we've kind of evolved from there, really, to be honest. As the company evolved, our focus moved away from just skincare, and we really started to think about how what we were doing was impacting the planet around us. A really key thing for us was to make sure that we were being more sustainable in our packaging, the products that we were making, and just our business practices as well. We are very much about products that work but don't do harm to the environment. Our initial process for creating products when we first started was we were very reliant on contract manufacturers and other companies. But as we've grown, we've started to bring a lot of those processes in-house and we try to own as much of our supply chain really as we can. So we're pretty on the path of being vertically integrated at this point. Creating the product through to developing a product, through to then manufacturing the warehousing it, to eventually pick and pack fulfillment all the way through. The big innovation for us is where we're sat today in our lab. We've kicked the chemists out, and about two years ago we brought in cosmetic scientists made our products better. We've been able to put so many iterations into product development rather than relying upon contract manufacturers. So our typical customer personally is atypical. That means that we have customers across all demographics. We don't really know who they are, I'll be honest. We work with a wide range of affiliates to initially acquire customers. So that kind of also feeds into why we have so many different demographics of people because it could... anywhere, anybody could be our partner. So we do a lot of initial introduction promotions. It's more important for us to get products in customers' hands as opposed to spending money on advertising. Our big focus is on building long-term relationships, not just short-term sales. We have a repeat custom rate of about 35%. We process up to one million orders a year and they're all through our direct to consumer ecommerce website. We launched our WooCommerce, so we've been using it for nearly 10 years. And one of the reasons that we chose WooCommerce is that it's open source, which means we don't have any rigid licensing costs and we have full control over our whole back-end system. We managed to build a store experience that truly fits our business. When we started Grüum, it was a bit of an eye-opener for us, especially George, our CTO. He came across Woo and was like what took us in the old business a year, we can probably have up and running in a month. That was the simple reason why we went to Woo. It gave us the speed to market at an affordable cost as well. I believe that WooCommerce has enabled our business success through allowing us to sell products in exactly the way that we need to sell our products. Do that in many ways. So we run a lot of promotions, we do a lot of bundle products, we run subscriptions, and we have one offs, so there are solutions for all of those. One of the great features about Woo is how it's so extendable. We use Yoast SEO for SEO, we use Gutenberg for page building, we use product bundles, we also use a plugin for gift cards, we use a platform called Metorik, which is a really powerful analytics tool, which was made specifically to integrate with WooCommerce. That has been an absolute game-changer for us. Woo Subscriptions is really good. The data's ours, which is quite different to a number of other subscription platforms. It gives us the control over our customers rather than giving them to a third party. One of the great things is we don't get charged a percentage, which initially, when you're turning over £10,000, you pay 1%, you're not that bothered. However, when you're doing £10 million through subscriptions, that soon adds up. We chose Woo Payments for a number of reasons. Cost was one, but also being part of the native WooCommerce ecosystem, it's all just in there, which is crucial and it means that your site speed or checkout speed is faster

therefore, cart abandonment is lower. The bonus as well for us with Woo is the incredible support that you get. It's absolutely phenomenal. It allows us to really feel as though we are, we have a true partnership with WooCommerce, we're not just a customer. So looking to the future, we have some really exciting new product launches coming up over the next year. We're also continuously working on improving our efficiencies and processes. We have a few small brands in our family already, and we're looking to bring some other companies on board so that's continued to grow the portfolio. We're building smarter, scaling sustainably, and remaining purpose driven.