Munich Startup: Who are you and what does Bears with Benefits do? Please introduce yourselves briefly!
Bears with Benefits: We are Lena Hien (32) and Laurence Saunier (44), and we previously managed a communications agency together for almost ten years. Therefore, we know that our teamwork works very well.
Before founding Bears with Benefits, Laurence earned her MSc from the London School of Economics and then worked in marketing for several years at Unilever and L'Oréal, eventually building the agency together with Lena. After studying public relations at the University of Westminster, Lena joined the advertising agency directly and built up the digital division.
We have already done a lot of product development together in the agency for FMCG customers (= Fast Moving Consumer Goods, e.g. food, Editor's note) and decided to take the next step and to develop a product yourselfThe trigger was that, like many women in Germany, we were rushing back and forth between the office, daycare, and yoga studio, all while trying to eat a balanced diet, shop appropriately, and cook freshly. The result was that we looked increasingly tired, our hair became increasingly messy, and our guilty conscience grew ever stronger.
We wanted to find a way to easily integrate a good and healthy lifestyle into our daily lives without additional stress. We realized that existing nutritional supplements seemed outdated. Starting with unnecessary artificial additives, the product presentation was dusty and masculine-rational, reminiscent of bitter medicine rather than the positive beauty routine we were actually looking for.
This was the birth of Bears with Benefits: A Beauty productOne that you won't forget to take, but rather something you'll enjoy. Made with natural ingredients, vegan where possible, available with or without sugar, and without artificial additives or allergens.
From a standing start to a category bestseller on Amazon
Munich Startup: What problem does your startup solve?
Bears with Benefits: We offer a new generation of nutritional supplements in the form of delicious gummy bears. These are highly concentrated beauty vitamin complexes that we developed together with pharmacists and nutritional physicians for natural beauty from within. Our first product, the "Ah-mazing Hair Vitamins" for healthy skin, hair, and nails, became a category bestseller on Amazon straight away. A nationwide listing at Douglas followed promptly.
Munich Startup: But that's been around for a long time!
Bears with Benefits: The market for nutritional supplements is large. But other providers often offer significantly lower dosages or use artificial colors, separating agents, or fillers, which we completely avoid. Furthermore, competitors' branding often suggests: You're sick, you have a deficiency, you need to optimize something. Nutritional supplements are often very old-fashioned, joyless, masculine, and rational. This excludes large segments of the relevant target group, such as young, feminine millennials. With the trend toward natural beauty, they are specifically looking for beauty products that can support their specific beauty needs from within. We now offer nine proprietary formulations for this purpose.
At first it was difficult to get a foot in the door…
Munich Startup: What have been your three biggest challenges so far?
Bears with Benefits: The first challenge was finding the right partners. We are marketing experts ourselves and strong in execution, but from an R&D perspective, we also wanted a first-class product of the highest quality from the very beginning. We wanted to deviate from the usual "standard" with a completely customized and highly potent formulation and unique packaging – clean, vegan, and sustainable. As a startup, it wasn't easy to get a foot in the door and make our presence heard without significant volumes and a solid history. Today, we produce in Germany with a fantastic team of pharmacists and nutritional medicine specialists.
… Bears with Benefits are now present everywhere in the relevant market
Another challenge was and currently is certainly the coronavirus, even though, as a beauty and health product, we fortunately don't belong to a particularly hard-hit industry. Fortunately, we have a very broad distribution. Customers like DM and Rossmann didn't have any store closures and continued to order. Furthermore, our products are currently selling very well online. Therefore, we were fortunately able to compensate very well for the temporary closure of the brick-and-mortar Douglas stores.
And, of course, it's proven to be a good idea that, as a company without outside investors, we're extremely lean and don't have unnecessarily large cost blocks. This allows us to be very flexible and easily transition to working from home.
Munich Startup: How are things going?
Bears with Benefits: We were fortunate enough to launch our bears quickly. We are now widely distributed throughout the DACH region and listed at Rossmann, DM, Douglas, QVC, Flaconi, Bipa, and Marionnaud. Overall, we generated seven-figure net internal sales last year and sold well over 100,000 products. Sales are expected to more than double in 2020, despite the coronavirus pandemic. We launched our online shop in February, which is growing rapidly and contributes a significant portion of our sales. We've been profitable from the very beginning—even if investors don't like to hear that.
Profitable since launch
Munich Startup: How do you rate Munich as a startup location?
Bears with Benefits: Munich is the secret startup capital of Germany, due in part to its excellent universities and high quality of life.
Munich Startup: Tea or coffee?
Bears with Benefits: Definitely coffee.
