How Nathalie's Goodies scaled from 0 to thousands of orders in 6 months in the hotly contested chocolate bar market.
We talk to online retailers and new e-commerce brands every day who want to launch their shop. From experience, we know how hard it is to gain a foothold online. Reality often doesn't match expectations, and the lion's share of new e-commerce players are off the market within 6 to 12 months.
You're often already competing with established brands in saturated markets. That makes it even more important to go in with the right strategy and the necessary focus.
Nathalie's Goodies is a prime example of how a new brand can position itself successfully in a niche with a small product portfolio.
The market for snacks and chocolate bars has gotten significantly more diverse and competitive over the past few years. Ten years ago, the usual suspects like Snickers, Mars, or Knoppers were primarily what you'd find in retail; now, new players have entered the market.
Brands like Koro, Jokolade, or Nu3 initially focused on the direct-to-consumer market and sold their products exclusively online. By successfully building out the online business, they collected experience and wins they could then use to enter food retail and further penetrate the market.
In early 2024, Nathalie Gleitman decided to enter this hotly contested market with her brand Nathalie's Goodies.
But she didn't want to offer just another generic chocolate bar — she wanted a truly healthy, tasty chocolate bar that's also suitable for people with food intolerances.
So she designed Nathalie's Goodies with 2 chocolate bar varieties developed specifically for an audience with lactose, histamine, and gluten intolerance.
At €29.88 per 12-pack (€2.49 / bar), Nathalie's Goodies sat above the market average — but that was no showstopper. Quite the opposite.
With her two self-developed varieties, White Cocos Cookies Bar & Double Chocolate Cookie Bars, she hit the nail on the head and within 6 months established herself as one of the fastest-growing DTC brands in the food market. So how exactly did she pull it off?
In early January 2024, the shop went live and racked up more than 500 orders in the first 2 days alone — a level of success Nathalie and her team hadn't expected.
To prepare optimally for launch, the Nathalie's Goodies team decided to bring in an expert for one of the most important success factors in the e-commerce market — shipping.
We at Zenfulfillment® have years of experience handling order and returns processing for new DTC brands and social media brands. We've built established processes that make it possible to efficiently execute volatile order volumes that come with product drops and deliver them the next day after order.
Within a few days, the entire stock had sold out. Since Nathalie's Goodies hadn't anticipated such high demand, the next production batch had originally been scheduled for months later.
But Nathalie didn't want to make her community wait that long. It took 2 months for the next delivery to be ready, but the first product drop after launch was an even bigger success.
That speaks not just to the marketing, but more importantly to the high product quality.
Alongside many new customers, a large share of orders came from repeat buyers.
By June 2024, across 3 product drops after launch, they generated 5-figure order volumes in the first 6 months — self-funded, without any outside capital.
Currently, 2 new varieties are in the works, and according to founders Nathalie Gleitman and Sybill Schirmer, they'll once again hit the healthy taste buds in all the right ways.
DTC sales will stay front and center, but the next step is retail. Thanks to the brand's outstanding development since launch, Nathalie's Goodies is already in talks with leading retailers — so it'll be exciting to see what the future brings.
"It really wasn't easy to find the right partner for shipping Nathalie's Goodies. I spoke with a lot of shipping providers and visited several in person. In the end, only Zenfulfillment convinced me. From day one they took Nathalie's Goodies seriously and answered and solved every question and every issue with endless patience. A very special thanks here goes to our account managers Nuri & Jannia — they consistently take care of everything around shipping for Nathalie's Goodies with great commitment. We're more than happy to have such a shipping partner and look forward to everything that's still to come!" - Sybill Schirmer, co-founder Nathalie's Goodies
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