Building a Clean Protein Brand with Sean Hall

Sure. I’m Sean. I’m the founder of Wellious. Prior to Wellious, started a fresh food package food company years ago. We cold shipped nationwide, made hundreds of thousands of units in commercial kitchens and kind of did it the hard way. And then as a side project, I had built a website called the Online Farmers Market, which eventually evolved into a portfolio of publications around food and wellness that reached millions of people, partnered with some really great food and beverage brands there. And then, a couple of years ago, I had some personal health stuff come up, just got kind of extra conscious about everything I was consuming and realised that my protein powder was kind of one of the worst offenders and had more bad ingredients than a lot of the junk food I was cutting out.

So it’s led me on this kind of crazy journey to try to make a truly clean protein powder, developed well as myself, just for real food ingredients. It’s 100 % plant based. They call it farm to scoop, kind of go really deep on sourcing and third party testing and making it something, one of the few packaged foods they can really feel good about consuming. yeah.

Yeah, I think in a broader sense, it’s the modern wellness consumer. I think the person who, obviously protein pattern in general has been like this muscle building thing. And that’s certainly a main functionality of ours. But, you know, it’s kind of the gym bro, bodybuilder like supplements. But obviously, like the average wellness consumer these days looks different.

They do, you know, group fitness classes and they’re doing yoga and then going to the gym to lift and running. And really their priority is health and what’s good for them. So ours is like, the protein, but you care what is and isn’t going into your body with it. And so that has, we’ve captured a lot of like 25 to 40 year old women has been a huge, just white space, I think, cause they are not spoken to by brands in this space very much. But I love that we have consumers of all ages, all genders, across all demographics. It’s definitely a product for everyone because everyone should prioritise what’s in or not in their protein powder. But we’re definitely capturing this new age of customers.

Yeah, I think, I mean, when we launched, we’re, truly differentiated. I developed the product myself and, you know, we were the only protein powder on the market that was made from almond protein and chickpea protein combined as the base. And I’m one of the very few that was flavoured with real ingredients like a cow or vanilla powder and sweetened with just pure monk fruit. And you know, almond protein is a unique ingredient. It’s California almonds that we extract all the saturated fat from, even with you with higher protein per gram and per calorie. And so you get kind of the functionality of an almond, all of the things that make it a superfood, but without the one negative, which is the saturated fat. And so you get the high protein and then a bunch of other, you know, cool functionality.

I think what people, the tangible reaction that people get that’s different with our protein powder is two things. One is the taste and texture. I think there’s a kind of common knowledge that vegan protein powder has a pretty bad taste and texture. And ours is just delicious. Doesn’t have aftertaste, doesn’t have a gritty texture. And then I thought that would be the main tangible reaction and that long -term people would feel the benefits of it being clean. But there’s actually been like a secondary tangible reaction where, it’s a lot of people were dealing with bloating and cramps and other gastrointestinal issues immediately when consuming protein powder. And this could be from the whey source. It could be from sugar alcohols. And since ours doesn’t have any of that, people are drinking ours and saying, wow, I feel good right after this is the first time I’m not getting bloating, I’m not getting cramps, etcetera and so that’s been a huge propeller of the word of mouth because people want to talk about this, this delicious but it’s actually making me feel better even immediately.

Vanilla, we do more volume of vanilla, but I’ll say that it’s, I think that every brand in protein powder is selling more vanilla. It’s just a higher search term and there’s more demand for vanilla protein powder. So we definitely sell more vanilla, but we sell a lot of chocolate. Our chocolate’s really good. And I think one cool thing is that we’ve seen a lot of people who are like, I used to only use vanilla, but I tried the chocolate because they tried it like one of our sample packs or something like that. And they’re like, completely converted me and it’s like the first time I’m using chocolate protein powder, but I’m obsessed with it. So I use the chocolate more often than the vanilla, so I’m kind of a chocolate stan, but vanilla does sell

That’s how I am in life. I’m picking chocolate over vanilla, but I used to pretty much exclusively use vanilla protein powder. I didn’t really like the taste of the chocolate and now I realise it’s because it was fake leaf flavoured. But now that ours tastes like real kind of natural chocolate. Yeah, I’m kind of obsessed with it.

Yeah, we are a true bootstrap. I started the brand with $3 ,000 of savings, think even obviously when you say you’re bootstrapped, it means something. But even a lot of times people are bootstrapped and they might have had hundreds of thousands of dollars of family friend money or personal savings or something to put in it, which is different. So, you know, that’s been a challenge for every facet of the business, but not in certain ways like demand creation has never been really an issue. I have kind of an organic marketing background, so that’s helped the product being just awesome is what’s really helped. But we’ve been able to create awareness and when people get it in their hands, they want to talk about it. And so the demand has grown exponentially. I think the supply side of fulfilling that without cash has been tough.

So like just needing to pretty much double our production every time we go into production after we’ve sold out. But like needing twice as much cash as the time before, but until you’ve sold through all the products, you haven’t made that back. Usually, you know, for most CPG brands, you’re not making any of that back because you’re losing money. We obviously didn’t have that option. So we are making it back, but the cash flow cycle, the lead times makes that whole puzzle really, really difficult.

So there’s been a lot of times where we’re just sold out for longer than I’d like to be, or we can’t move as fast as we wanted to, or we’ve had to say no, it’s opportunities like big retailers and stuff like that. And so I don’t know that I’ve overcome it, but you just move a little slower and figure it out as you go. But I’m very fortunate to not have had any major roadblocks so far i mean, every day as an entrepreneur, obviously, and an uphill battle and there’s constant, you know, forks in the road, but

Yeah, I would say because by focusing on the product being really exceptional and the user experience being really exceptional and being a nerd about operations and not spending money stupidly, we’ve been able to miss a lot of common pitfalls and more just have to deal with the fact that we are bootstrapped under resourced brand.

Yeah, so my ambition with this brand is large for sure, partly because I’ve just seen the opportunity, how much people love it. And I think it deserves a place in the marketplace and that market is huge. So why not grow it? Personally, I’ve started a couple of small profitable, lifestyle -y businesses. And so the creative challenge of trying to grow this thing is exciting to me. But I think that It’s great to have big top line number goals and it’s great to have cool things you want to have into the brand and maybe we raise now and maybe we raise in a couple of years and maybe we sell one day. But I really think a lot of that stuff is buy products of what I truly want to do, which is just build a really, really great business so just keep on making the product the best thing that exists out there. Keep making the user experience the best that it can be an operationally efficient and sound business, create a ton of awareness and demand in a unique way, and build a real relationship with our customers and community and if you can do all that stuff at scale and we can create something truly, truly special, there’ll be plenty of optionality and cool wins along the way. But it’s just, yeah, trying to just get great products in as many customer’s hands as possible that they want to keep buying it and If we can do that, the rest will fall into place.

We’ve done a mix of stuff for sure. Partly with budgets being tight, partly because of my background and just wanting to test stuff. But we’ve done gifting to influencers. We’ve done a lot of organic content on our own channels. We’ve done some ads. We’ve done a lot of channel optimization on Amazon, places like that. I would say it’s all worked.

Nothing has been like a silver bullet. There hasn’t been any like, here’s this one thing that’s so ROI efficient and crazy scalable, et cetera. It’s like some stuff works extremely well, but it’s really hard to scale. Some stuff is really scalable, but doesn’t work as well. And I think brands these days almost need a, you almost need the layers of like, they got to see it. A customer needs to see it from an influencer and your ad and your organic content and your funnel be good or your landing page or whatever.

And then they make a decision. So most of the brands I see winning are doing a lot of different angles. I’d say if I pick something to go the hardest into, I do think influencer in general is a really great channel. I have audiences that have trust now expecting like one story from even a really strong influencer to move the needle for your business. It’s just not going to happen. So it’s much more of a large-scale approach to it. Like I said, for us, it’s just been all we can afford to do is gift. So it’s just like, we’ve just tried to get product in, in cool people’s hands and then been very fortunate that they loved it so much. They wanted to talk about it organically. And then the next kind of stage of that for us is like, okay, how do you go deeper with those people as we do have bigger budgets? What’s the smartest way to work together? So they have a ton of upside and incentive, but it also can drive results for us as well.

yep. Just the website and Amazon and we’re on TikTok shop. We’ve actually done really well there. We have some good retail irons in the fire, but nothing to speak on yet, but probably

I think the intention matters of creating a really great product that deserves to exist. And you can reverse engineer that that customers and influencers, whoever you want to get it to retailers are going to fall in love with this thing and that’s hard. Sometimes that takes a long audit process of skipping on some ideas that you think are pretty good because they just don’t make as much sense. Or you know what you want to do and it takes a long time to develop it so it hits all these things that are going to make it great. I think it just makes life much easier as an entrepreneur, which is going to be so hard anyways, that you believe so deeply in your product that this thing should, that it’s better than the thing that’s out there that’s making $100 million. And so you’re like, okay, why not ours?

And that people get it and fall in love with it. And there’s not a crazy amount of competition for the exact thing you’re trying to do. It’s just going to make every step of the process that much easier. That said, if you’ve never started anything and you don’t have the perfect idea and know exactly how you want to execute on it, just start something. You’re going to learn more in a week of being, you know, diving into entrepreneurship and trying to develop just literally pick something and learn and make a two -year timeline where it’s, you know, either in two years, it’s like, okay, you’re ready to keep going with the same thing, or you’re ready to put that to bed and use all that knowledge to then like create the thing that you really want to.

Cool, thanks a lot Stephen.