In Two Years, We Doubled Subscription Box Memberships And Opened A Tasting Room

Belinda Kelly and Venise Cunningham

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Published: July 7th, 2022

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Belinda Kelly and Venise Cunningham

Founder, Simple Goodness Sisters

$7K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Simple Goodness S...

simplegoodnesssisters.com

from Enumclaw, Washington, USA

started September 2018

$7,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

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Want more updates on Simple Goodness Sisters? Check out these stories:

1. On Launching Our New Brick And Mortar Soda Shop (2021) ➜

2. How We Left Our Jobs At Tech Companies To Sell Farm Fresh Cocktail Ingredients (2019) ➜

This is a follow up story for Simple Goodness Sisters. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published almost 5 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

I’m Belinda, co-founder, recipe developer, and bartender behind the Simple Goodness Sisters beverage brand. We make a garden-to-glass drink syrup with ingredients from our cocktail farm to help our customers drink better at home.

The clean ingredient syrups make delicious, seasonal craft cocktails, mocktails, sodas, tea, and coffee easy to make at home for anyone who wants a great-tasting and better-for-you beverage without a lot of effort.

We teach our customers how to use the syrups through the dozens of recipes we’ve developed, a bi-monthly cocktail subscription box called the Cocktail Farm Club (imagine is a CSA and a wine club had a baby, that’s kind of it), monthly virtual Happier Hours, and our tasting room, the Simple Goodness Soda Shop.

In the past two years, we’ve launched and more than doubled our subscription box membership and opened our family-friendly bar and tasting room, which is essentially a lab where we show you the endless possibilities for using our syrups in drinks and treats.

Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?

Since we initially launched 3 flavors of handcrafted simple syrups made with our farm’s harvests, we’ve introduced 3 more flagship flavors and launched a subscription box with smaller batch seasonal flavor offerings, garnishes, and recipes to create monthly cocktails and mocktails called the Cocktail Farm Club.

From March 2021 to May 2022, we grew the Cocktail Farm Club by over 300%. We continue to push efficiency to get the subscriber's boxes out the door each month, while also keeping the quality and authenticity of this very special product box intact for our customers.

We also opened our brick and mortar the Simple Goodness Soda Shop amid the Pandemic and started constructing our syrup-making factory adjacent to the Soda Shop that will be open for touring.

We were even featured on National Television a couple of times, including live cocktail-making demos on Cheddar News and a feature on the Rachel Ray show! We’ve done most of this by hand, with hard work, insane hours, and with the help of family and friends.

We were able to keep the Soda Shop open and successful and in the last year, we hired 5 part-time employees as well as 2 part-time employees at the farm who assist us to maintain the gardens and help us ship our products nationwide.

This was a huge relief, as initially, we worked every shift behind the counter of the tasting room ourselves while running and growing the rest of the business. We’ve taken on no investment beyond our initial $17,000 Kickstarter campaign to open our Soda Shop and value-added products matching grant from the USDA to help market our product line.

The USDA VAPG grant has been hugely advantageous to allow us to invest in PR (our Cocktail Farm Club was featured on the Rachel Ray show, Sunset Magazine, and Martha Stewart Living last holiday season!) and paid to advertise, so that we can funnel cash from revenue increases back into the business for renovations, facility build-out, packaging, payroll, and ingredients.

We worked with a marketing company, Intellitonic, to launch a new website and improve our SEO and we work with two PR companies to share our story.

What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?

Opening a restaurant, the Simple Goodness Soda Shop, when so many were closing around us during the Pandemic seemed crazy and we were the only two employees for the first year. We would hold our strategy meetings, apply for grants, develop new recipes, file for permits for the continuing renovation and call our co-packer all in between serving customers milkshakes and cocktails. Burnout was a real possibility.

You have to be willing to work in that place of discomfort and especially during a Pandemic, with all of its shortages and complexities, respond to the environment of the moment, not what you wish you could/should have.

There were days in 2021 when my sister and co-founder and I were fighting, one of those inevitable disagreements among business partners that as sisters who were at the end of their energy, turned into a screaming match. Customers walked in and we had to stop and smile and apologize and take their orders.

Humility and dogged determination were absolutely a requirement but having a brick and mortar has paid off significantly. Our tasting room shows the full breadth of opportunities for uses and creativity with our product and it inspires our customers to want to keep creating yummy drinks at home, so they buy syrup before they leave.

Having our retail store sell through during the Pandemic was very important to our business at a time when Farmer’s Markets, food festival events, and many stores were closed, wholesale accounts were impossible to get into, and no stores were offering demos that could help a food producer compete on their shelves.

We were just executing our wholesale strategy in March 2020 when the Pandemic began and the new customers we had completely pivoted to essential goods and the demands of the Pandemic.

Like many people during this time, we also suffered significant personal losses that made operating a demanding business extremely challenging. In those times, we felt immense relief to understand one another’s pain on a deep level given that we are siblings first, before business partners.

After surviving our first season being open, we were able to hire our first part-time employees and ease up on our schedule. This was good because just a month before we had launched the Cocktail Farm Club our subscription box was filled with drink-making goods that are hyper-seasonal.

It was quickly apparent that our customers loved this product and as it grew, we’d need to spend more time crafting, packaging, shipping, and marketing for Cocktail Farm Club. The first time we shipped the boxes, it took 3 people a full week to assemble, wrap, and ship. Now, we pack 3 times as many in 2-3 days.

From March 2021 to May 2022, we grew the Cocktail Farm Club by over 300%. We continue to push efficiency to get the subscriber's boxes out the door each month, while also keeping the quality and authenticity of this very special product box intact for our customers.

It takes a lot of creativity to come up with new flavors and recipes every two months, and we do a ton of experimentation and sourcing research before each flavor goes out. If we can’t grow an ingredient ourselves, we buy direct from farmers whose ethos aligns with ours, so we’re always trying to meet new farmers and seek out new flavor possibilities. Staying ahead of the calendar on this is a monthly challenge.

What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?

So much of business ownership is taking on more than you think you can handle and engineering backward how to meet the goal. That may be finding new employees, purchasing new equipment, setting the date on an event you’re planning for 6 months from now even when you’re feeling overwhelmed at the moment, or unwinding a spool of paperwork and licensing needed to meet the task.

We like to stay ahead of ourselves in goals because if you wait until you’re ready, often the right moment for the idea you had is already passed. You have to be willing to work in that place of discomfort and especially during a Pandemic, with all of its shortages and complexities, respond to the environment of the moment, not what you wish you could/should have.

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

Our long-term goal is to spread Happier Hour all across the nation, by shipping our products direct to more households and growing the Cocktail Farm Club community. At the Simple Goodness Soda Shop, we want to show our customers the full story of how the goodness goes from our Cocktail Farm harvests to the syrup bottle to their glass.

We’re creating an agritourism experience akin to a brewery, but completely family-friendly, sober life-friendly, and cocktail friendly. And we hope to be a positive force in our community as we grow, promoting healthier, moderate imbibing, championing small farms in America, preserving a safe and balanced American food system, and bringing joy to our customers through our products.