The Turmeric Co: scaling your brand on Shopify from €0 to multi‑million euros

The Turmeric Co. is founder Thomas ‘Hal’ Robson-Kanu’s way of helping professional athletes and other individuals overcome injuries and reach their peak physical performance levels. 

A professional footballer with a career of more than 10 years playing at the very highest level, Robson-Kanu very nearly didn’t make it. After a potentially career-ending injury at the age of 17 he required surgery on his knee. Post-surgery he was prescribed a host of standard medication from doctors, but none of them prevented his knee from swelling and aching after games.

Determined not to give up the dream, he looked to natural properties for help and soon began making Turmeric shots at home. Drinking them every day allowed him to play football free from the pains and aches that would otherwise have cut his dreams short.

Having benefited from homemade turmeric shots every day for over ten years of his career, Robson Kanu couldn’t believe there were no high quality shots available on the market. He tried numerous off-the-shelf products and was astounded at their inferior quality. 

Towards the end of his playing career he founded the Turmeric Co. to produce the all-natural shots he was making at home. He built a production facility in west London and now supplies England’s national rugby team, a string of professional football players and teams, numerous nationwide gyms and various retail stores with his shots. From this platform Robson Kanu is aiming to bring the benefits of natural nutrition to people throughout the world.

The Turmeric Co.’s shots are daily drinks for athletes that help with recovery and prevent joint and muscle injuries. Made from all-natural ingredients, they’re synthetic-free, 100% plant-based and packed with vitamins and nutrients. 

In his talk with Yotpo’s Senior Partner Manager, Lawrence McNeill, Robson-Kanu gave some key insights into how he has successfully scaled The Turmeric Co. to a multi-million euro business in just a few years.

Yotpo is an e-commerce marketing platform with advanced solutions for SMS marketing, loyalty and referrals, subscriptions and reviews. The all-in-one platform ties each of these separate marketing channels together, compiling dashboards and reports into one unified hub. 

As we’ll get into, Yotpo has been there at every step of The Turmeric Co.’s growth journey.

Decide a channel

The first key decision for any business is their main sales channel. As mentioned above, there were turmeric shots already available in retail stores when Robson-Kanu was building his business. And whilst these shots were of inferior quality, to a potential customer browsing the shelves they’d all look just the same.

Businesses that choose retail have just a split second to sell their brand. With a unique story to tell, Robson-Kanu quickly decided that The Turmeric Co.’s best route to market was through direct-to-consumer e-commerce.

Through this channel they could focus on customer experience, education and building brand loyalty. This leads perfectly into the next key insight for building an e-commerce business.

Retention over acquisition

For The Turmeric Co., customer retention has been the key to their success. They average a retention rate of around 60%, an astounding figure that is twice the industry average.

By investing heavily in marketing in the early stages, they’ve developed a community of customers with an exceptionally high customer lifetime value. Here are some lessons to learn from their model:

Subscription service

Their business is perfectly set-up for a subscription service. The shots are designed to be drunk daily, so The Turmeric Co. know when their customers will likely need to restock. With this information they’ve built a subscription service that makes it as easy as possible for customers to keep purchasing.

Yotpo have recently launched a subscription app specifically for Shopify merchants. It’s an easy to use subscription management system for brands to generate recurring revenue at the click of a button. For more information, read on here.

Customer engagement at key moments

Every e-commerce business emails customers when their orders are on the way, right? So why not use this key moment as an opportunity to increase customer retention? The Turmeric Co. email their customers notifications about delivery times, and also inform them they have “X,000 Turmeric Tokens” to redeem on their next order. 

Small gestures like this, delivered at the right moment, go a long way to ensuring customers return again and again.

One of Yotpo’s greatest strengths is its SMS marketing solutions and The Turmeric Co. have made great use of these in their rapid expansion. 98% of customers will open an SMS message, and 90% of these opens occur within the first 3 minutes of delivery. It’s a powerful tool for reaching your customer base in a more intimate, less formal manner than email. For more on Yotpo’s SMS services, head here.

Reviews

Reviews are an essential ingredient to successful e-commerce, especially for new businesses. The social proof they provide is often the deciding factor that tips a potential customer into a successful conversion. 

So with this in mind, The Turmeric Co. have made reviews a key factor in their business model. They incentivise customers to leave reviews with their Turmeric Tokens reward system, and they make reviews easily accessible all over their website. 

With the added bonus of having influential sportsmen and women vouch for their products, The Turmeric Co. quickly built a level of trust for potential customers, and this has gone a long way to building their success.

Yotpo’s reviews services help businesses like The Turmeric Co. collect and display content from their customers using AI. The platform helps customers write their reviews, and directs business on the best places to display them for optimal conversion rates. Head here for more information.

From these solid foundations The Turmeric Co. plan to expand in 2023. They first want to expand their product range, having previously reached their dizzying heights with only 3 SKUs. In 2023 they will drive the category of functional daily shots forward with a number of innovative new products.

They also intend to scale around the globe. The first port of call is North America. Having already focused marketing strategy on the North American market, they have a healthy amount of traffic reaching their website from the U.S, but currently they don’t supply the country. 2023 will see them take advantage of this opportunity and expand the business across the Atlantic.

For more info on the brand and their story, watch the video below of founder Thomas Hal Robson-Kanu speaking at The D2C Summit: Future Commerce.