Karen Danudjaja Bootstrapped Her Superfood Biz to $7.5M in Sales

Karen Danudjaja’s superfood latte business, Blume, hit $7.5 million in sales last year and has landed in more than 2000 stores, including Whole Foods and Nordstrom and she landed those numbers fully bootstrapped.

The idea for a better-for-you latte line came to Karen in 2017 while working in corporate real estate, having multiple coffee meetings each day and then getting the caffeine jitters.

She started off working a full time nine-to-five and also running Blume at night. By the time Blume hit around $200,000 in sales, Karen went all in and quit her day job to grow the company.

At the beginning cafes were her biggest customer, with healthy spots adding Blume’s superfood lattes to the menu. But when lockdowns hit, 85% of Blume’s business was food service—and it all shut down over night. Karen quickly brushed up and pivoted the company to ecommerce.

“I took a digital marketing course March-April 2020 and then launched our first themed bundle for our ecommerce store in mid-April.”

After that, the biz shifted to ecomm-first during the height of the pandemic, before settling into a 50% wholesale and 50% ecommerce split that includes distribution across 2000 cafes, grocery, lifestyle stores, as well as the www.itsblume.com website.

When Karen needed to find a cost-effective way to scale sales without hiring a team, she came up with a smart solution: build a separate, password-gated Shopify store with minimum order sizes for cafes and independent retailers to place bulk orders.

“We duplicated our regular Shopify store, adjusted pricing and added a login. We have flows set up for them the same way we do for our DTC customers, targeting abandoned carts and returning customer, but set up specific for the needs of a retailer.”

When bigger retailers like Whole Foods and Nordstrom wanted to stock Blume, Karen then built out her sales team. During all of this growth, Karen continued to bootstrap, which meant carefully managing cash flow was key.

Her tip to other bootstrapped brands is to push back on retailers’ standard 90-day payment terms to make sure invoices are paid more quickly.

This year after ending 2021 with $7.5 million in sales, Blume raised its first round of money from investors, closing $2.5 million in five weeks.