With no in-office perks due to the COVID-19 pandemic, SMPL needed an outlet to distribute products to corporate clients with remote teams
Founded: September 2019
Category: Bars & Bites
Takeaways
1. SMPL needed an outlet to sell their products to corporate clients who are now working from home
2. SnackMagic became the liaison between SMPL, their corporate clients, and their employees and provided access to the work-from-home market
3. With SnackMagic’s real-time, daily reporting, SMPL can make informed decisions related to their sales, marketing, and have better analytical insight
How it Began
SMPL is a line of snacks with a purpose, combining superfoods with balancing adaptogens to create delicious wellness snacks for when you need them most. Founded in September 2019, SMPL is on a mission to innovate functional snacking. “I started the brand out of a personal need, I was big into functional superfoods and looking more into the adaptogen in a mushroom space and really using plants as medicine for myself,” said SMPL founder, Ellis Fried. “I wanted a convenient way to consume these powerful functional ingredients while on the go, while still maintaining my strict diet standards of no added sugar, gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free. It basically combined two aspects of my daily routine into a typical energy snack and these functional ingredients into one.”
This niche category of functional foods quickly attracted working professionals and the corporate benefits space became SMPL’s largest market. After employees across many industries were forced to make the shift to work from home, companies needed to rethink their employee benefits structure and brand partners like SMPL needed to rethink how they provide their products to employees at home. SnackMagic took on the role of becoming the liaison between these brand partners and their end-user client as a way to streamline coordinating employee perks programs.
How SMPL Came to Us
Prior to COVID-19, SMPL was supplying their products to predominantly corporate clients who would enjoy SMPL snacks throughout the day as part of their in-office benefits. “The food buyers would buy our product and leave it out in the kitchen for all their employees,” said Ellis, “so once COVID hit, obviously all that stopped and we needed to quickly pivot to find a way to continue getting our products to those corporate employees.” SnackMagic was an attractive retailer to brands like SMPL during such an uncertain time because it provided a platform to actively drive sales for products through an employee perks gifting program without having to coordinate individually with each end-user client. “Our clients were giving gift cards or sending products individually to their employees, and it just became a huge hassle. Some corporate clients even gave their employees credits to our storefront, and we only saw a 20% redemption rate,” explained Ellis. With an average redemption rate nearly four times as high, SnackMagic was the optimal way to distribute SMPL that’s more personal than a gift card.
With their client’s employees scattered around the country, SMPL had a huge need for coordination and looked to SnackMagic as their centralized solution for managing these partnerships. “From our experience corporate clients move a ton of products, but it’s very difficult for them to manage us and for us to manage them, and so we needed more of a distribution channel,” said Ellis. By consolidating all their corporate clients to one retail channel, SMPL was able to grow faster than if they had gone directly to each individual corporate client. Moreover, as SnackMagic acts as a gatekeeper to the work-from-home market, SMPL gained access to a new customer base.
Partnership Dynamic
After 6 months of business together, SMPL has become a standout brand at Snackmagic with a healthy daily velocity for a premium product. Customers rave about its eye-catching packaging; it’s sleek look and feel match its ingredients and mission statement. By placing their products on the same menu as other products that share the same audience, SMPL actively boosted their sales. “SnackMagic has been a distribution channel between us, corporate clients, and employees, which helps us get to more people, so a lot of our operations are just a lot easier with SnackMagic involved versus going direct to everybody.” With live tracking features, SnackMagic brands have the ability to see how their product is doing in real-time, which allows us to work together with full transparency.
SnackMagic provides brand partners with daily updates on important metrics that are helpful with sales, marketing, and insightful analytics through an innovative omnichannel platform. “From a reporting aspect, SnackMagic is probably the best retailer we work with. The real time inventory reporting and sales reports are awesome,” said Ellis. “Customer service is great too. When I send an email, you guys usually get back to me in about 30 minutes.” By providing a distribution tool that is both easy to monitor and simple to manage, SnackMagic is a discovery platform for niche brands that offers collaborative features other larger retailers cannot. We’re an ideal solution for brands like SMPL who are seeking full data transparency, consistent communication, and results-based promotion from a retail channel that has their best interests in mind.
