Crunchy Mama Box A Journey of Wellness and Sustainability

Hi everyone. So my name is Wanda Malhotra and I’ve been in the wellness, beauty and wellness industry for 30 years now. And I created Crunchy Mama Box. I’m the founder of this wellness platform that curates beauty, wellness and health products that are trending with clean ingredients, sustainable packaging. So we audit the brand’s mission, how do they give back to the community, their ingredients, we review all their labels, we do research on the ingredients that they use, and then we test the products for performance. So, we’re a hub where we help these Indie Beauty and Wellness brands to get their product out there in the market. We give them exposure with our audience, and then we also help consumers find clean products that are safe, healthy for their bodies and for the environment and in addition to that, we also have a lot of content, wellness content, because I’m also a journalist. I have a lifestyle column at Authority Magazine. And I interview industry leaders, even the ones that are not on my platform. I also interview stars who make a difference. So we have, you know, celebrities, musicians, actors that are, you know, supporting a cause, either it’s animal rights or for the planet or for the community education. So it’s a holistic wellness platform. And I created this after being in services, CPG, all always in the health and wellness industry. So that’s what I do. I love to help people find the healthier, most sustainable solution for their lives.

What really inspired me to create this was, I think it’s a lifelong dream because I’ve been in this crunchy world since I was born. My mom was kind of a hippie. My grandmothers used to live with me and we planted, we had our vegetable garden in the backyard. We always cooked from scratch. We had a very crunchy way of living, always very natural, very clean. And then, my love for animals, I love, love, love animals. I used to adopt pets and bring them home since I was a child. Like I would go to the park and just come back with some kind of animal. The normal ones like cats and dogs and the crazy ones that you can imagine. You know, growing up living like this and then, you know, working with CPG goods, having my own brands for skincare, hair care.

And then I had a brand that was a hair colour, like a Henna based hair colour. And so I started working with CPG Goods at a very young age. I started when I was 18 and I founded this company with my mother at the time. And I loved what I was doing and I do love working with CPG brands and promoting them and selling them. But I wanted something with more like content. I wanted something that would help more brands, not just my own brand. I wanted to grow my brand, but I wanted to help other entrepreneurs that were on the same path because it’s not an easy path to be an entrepreneur in any industry, right? And the beauty, health and wellness industry has been growing so much that the competition is huge and the shelf space, it’s so hard to get shelf space. So right now we have a big project helping these indie beauty brands. I’m collaborating with the Conscious Beauty Collective and we are bringing brands to stores, to smaller retailers. It’s called the Pop -in Concept and we have this beautiful shelf that we curate like 10 to 15 brands and we bring these brands and we give them exposure and they sell in a location that they would not otherwise without our program. But it’s so fun because it’s bringing the community together. It’s bringing great brands that people don’t know of yet to communities, to people that are looking for these brands. They’re looking for them. They just don’t know that they exist.

So I love doing this. I always loved helping people, connecting people, and now connecting these amazing mission -driven brands to people that are looking for a healthier way of living. It’s perfect. It’s like my dream, you know, business right now.

So my ideal target audience are, I like to say families because it’s called Crunchy Mama Box and it started with me as a crunchy mama trying to look for the best,you know, safest products for my kids, for my family. But it’s families, it’s individuals, everyone who’s looking to live a healthier life, who loves sustainability, who loves eating clean, using clean products, who likes to support small businesses and who love to find out what’s trending, what’s new in terms of ingredients, of products, and that are steering away a little bit from the conventional synthetic ingredients, food colouring and all that. So the same thing that we put in our bodies through food, we need to think about what we’re putting on our bodies.So, if my target audience is really that person that is really conscious about what they’re consuming, what they’re eating, what they’re feeding their mind and their bodies.

I really don’t know like whom, you know, my competitors. It’s hard to say competitors in, my field, in my platform because we’re a wellness platform. We have content. We also have an ethical marketplace, but I don’t call myself a marketplace. I don’t call myself a magazine or an editorial. I call myself really a wellness platform, a hub where we connect, you know, amazing brands with people that are looking for these brands, these ingredients, the results that they offer. So I don’t know, I’d like to collaborate a lot. So competition for me has to be a healthy thing and not like, my competitors do this and I do that. You know, like I’m not better than anybody else, but I do I perform a deep analysis in every, like with every brand that comes to us because I want to make sure that what they are promising, they do. So I think maybe our differentiation is that we test all the products that are listed on our website. So that’s a guarantee that we give to all our customers that we have tested. We know the texture, we know how it smells. We have been educated on their ingredients. When we have our customer service, I’m very proud of our customer service because when they call us, they talk to real people, not to robots. So when they call us,

We can give them full information, everything that we learned on the products, we can teach our audience. And if there’s something we don’t know, of course, we’re not an encyclopaedia, we’re not Google, we can go and talk to the brand founders. So we talk to the person who created that brand with the person that is manufacturing that product. it’s just, there’s no like It’s not an automated answer. It’s really a human to human connection. And that’s what I love about our platform is that we’re, you know, it’s kind of like going back to the old days. Of course we have the technology, but we, we, don’t want to miss out on the human part of things.

Our best -selling products are skincare products, bath bombs. People love bath bombs, face oils, moisturisers. But our number one, I think, are the gift sets. People love gifting our products. it really, it varies. Sometimes they’re buying gift boxes. Sometimes they’re buying like a mug that says, Crunchy Mama Strong, which is the name of our community on Facebook and our t -shirts that say Crunchy Mama Strong.

I didn’t even think when I created those, created because someone asked me to, they’re like, can you create t -shirts? We love the name. And I said, okay. And I didn’t even think they were going to sell. And they started selling and I was like, okay. That’s cool. You know, cause it is, it is a funny name, crunchy mama strong, but people love it. And they love the bath bombs. They love the skincare. They love our natural remedies. So we have, this beautiful brand called Isabella’s clearly, and she creates these like, rash, know, ointments and embed like bites, know, like bug repellent for kids, for babies. And people love it because it’s all natural. There’s no like, you know, chemicals or side effects for their products. And I just love it because people are always asking us on our Facebook group. So what you know, I have a rash or I have this. I don’t want to use, you know, any like chemical products, any pharmaceutical products, what can I use? So we have all these natural remedies and I have, you know, like recipes that I create on our platform as well. So we have everything from recipes to products that you can buy, to content, interviews, and even pet stories.

So sometimes I just for fun, I go there and I post some stories with my pets, because I have a lot of pets, because I still rescue, I still do the same thing that I did when I was little. And it’s just, it’s work, yes, of course, it’s our business, but at the same time, it gives me so much pleasure and I know that everyone around us, they like, they enjoy what we do. And if they don’t, I always tell them, if this is not something that you love doing, please like, know, find something that you do, so our team is very much involved in all this passion that we have.

Well, the future plan is to continue growing so that we can bring in more brands and we can promote more entrepreneurs that are doing amazing things that are mission driven and that are creating products that people are looking for, right? And, you know, giving them the opportunity to showcase their products, to talk about their mission and to also fulfil their dreams through the businesses that they’re creating. So the more we grow, the more we grow together, right? And then we also give back. This is one of the things that are like our core value is to give back. So you know, brands that are with us, they give back to some capacity, some are small brands, so they can’t make huge donations, but they volunteer in their community. They benefit the planet with the products that they create. They either, you know, 1 % for the planet or they’re certified cruelty -free or vegan. So…

I’m so sorry, I don’t know why this thing keeps going on. I have to turn off my phone. But anyway, so our plan is the more we grow, the more we grow together, right? We grow with all our brands that are joining us and our team and just creating this movement where we get the small brands to become bigger brands.

Well, I think the number one challenge is when you’re, you know, bootstrapping is always your bootstrapping, right? I don’t have like a huge, you know, VC or, you know, any kind of financial, you know, like no one’s funding the company. So I’m growing organically. I’m growing with, you know, the brands that are joining us and, you know, we have a lot of support. We have a lot of, like our customers are amazing. They wouldn’t be here without them and our brands as well. But, bootstrapping can always be a little challenging so it can, you know, make your growth a little slower. Although I think we’ve been growing very fast and it’s amazing. Like I think the technology is something that I want to, you know, increase as we go because technology helps, don’t want to eliminate the human touch that we have, like all the people answering the phones and testing the products, that of course we can’t eliminate that ever. Also because we want to employ more people. But the technology is something that I think was a challenge, maybe is a little bit of a challenge because we would like to do more. We would like to have more technology into our platform, but we are getting there.

And I think this is the most, like the biggest challenge because we started this wellness platform with a huge demand with people that are, you know, have some kind of illness and that are looking for natural alternatives. They’re looking for something that, you know, sears them away from what they’ve been trying to use. And it’s not solving their problems, not solving their migraines. It’s not solving their allergy, their gut health issues that they’re having.

And then when they find us, they’re like, my gosh, this is exactly what I was looking for. So the, the, think it’s been very, like, we’ve been very welcomed, you know, by our customers and our community. We don’t have challenges in regards to that. And, and of course, you know, as a small brand, sometimes you need, you know, the extra funding to, do more, to get, you know, a little bit more, just more structured, but we are.

We are doing really well. I’m very pleased with where we are and with the brands that are joining us and with the timeframe that everything is happening.

Well, we do a lot. run ads, course, online ads on Facebook, Instagram. We have a YouTube channel that started so small. We started with just a few friends and now we’re over 5 ,000 subscribers. So I think people like our content. Events, we’ve been growing our events. These have been amazing because we connect with the communities. So we have in -person events. They’re not online events and we spread out samples from the brands and we have the last event, we had live music, we have this incredibly talented young man, Horatio Monroe, came and he played the guitar and he sang. we just have, you know, I think events have been great. They help a lot in -person events, people miss those. And all the ads that we’re doing, the content that we create, the social media and our YouTube channel has been really surprisingly growing very fast.

Well, first of all, you have to be very passionate about what you’re doing because if you’re not, you won’t be able to handle all the obstacles and the struggles because it is very hard. Like some people think that they’ll, you know, they have a great idea. The brand is beautiful. The packaging is beautiful. But then when they launch it, they expect to sell millions of dollars in the first year and it doesn’t happen. And sometimes it can be frustrating. And also, can be very detrimental to their finances. So I think you have to plan really well before launching a brand and you have to know that you’re gonna have to live off your savings or you’re not gonna make as much money as you think you’re gonna make in the first year or maybe the first years. So, being aware of that is important. And I think that you have to not just follow trends but follow really your heart and your passion, what you truly believe in because you can’t sell what you don’t believe in. you wouldn’t, know, entrepreneurs today, they are passionate. They’re doing this because they’re passionate because to just go out and get a job, anybody can do that. But to really, you know, endure all the challenges of being an entrepreneur today in this very competitive market, that means that you’re mission driven. You’re looking at something really special that you want to build in your life and give back to others, give back to the community. And I believe that if you’re doing it with your, you know, you’re building this business with all your heart, with the best intentions, with the best ingredients or materials that you’re using, you’re looking at packaging, you’re looking at the market, you’re doing your math right, everything is, you know, your margins are calculated correctly. You will thrive and a good marketing plan and good partners, not, maybe not business partners, but who you’re going to connect with because also sometimes you’re, you you hire a certain company or you hire people that are not aligned with your values or with your mission where, you know, don’t understand your goals. They, there’s going to be a little bit of a waste of time until you get that right. So you just have to really pay attention to who you’re collaborating with, partnering with, I think that’s really important. The values have to be aligned.

Thank you so much for having me. I love your podcast. Thanks. Have a great one.