Naturitas, the leading e-commerce platform for natural and organic products, celebrates 10 years exceeding 100 million euros in turnover. We speak with Nicola Lavarino, CEO, and Laura Milán, Marketing Director, about the company’s philosophy, growth, and future plans.
The quality and variety of supplements offered by Naturitas is one of its hallmarks.
I’d like to start this interview by talking about your soul, mission, and values.
Laura Milán: Our mission is to bring natural health to more and more people. We focus on different types of profiles or people we can have as our audience and seek to help them take care of themselves, making self-care something easy that they can integrate into their daily lives in a simple way, knowing that they have Naturitas, which provides them with the products they need when they need them..
Nicola Lavarino: It’s important to highlight that we are not a marketplace. All the products we sell, we buy, store, and sell them ourselves. We take responsibility for the product in the sense that we have a series of very marked processes and criteria regarding the brand, product quality, ingredients, etc. We put a guarantee seal from Naturitas that it’s really what people are looking for.
Laura Milán: Additionally, we assume responsibility with the customer which translates into our values: product quality, transparency, helping customers understand labels… We create articles, for example, on the blog about how to read supplement labels, what to look for. We not only offer the product itself but also this information and help to make it easy for the consumer. We also focus on innovation and offering a satisfactory service.
Nicola Lavarino was appointed CEO of Naturitas in January 2022, after being Country Manager in Italy for the company for nearly three years. A passionate people manager who builds, leads, and motivates teams, he is an expert in Human Resources, IT, and Finance.
What type of products help the most in customer loyalty?
Nicola Lavarino:Considering that more and more people are tending to supplement their diet, we notice a very strong increase in products like magnesium.
On the other hand, regarding food, buckwheat has lately been getting a lot of attention, because it allows eating flours without the implied sugars. We have a very wide range of products derived from buckwheat.
Laura Milán: Yes, we have breads, breadsticks, crackers, cookies, buckwheat pasta… Everything that is gluten-free is having a lot of demand because there’s more awareness about reducing gluten consumption.
Nicola Lavarino: Plant-based drinks are also growing a lot, whether it’s oat, coconut, soy… People are moving away from lactose and looking for alternatives. Even in bars now they always have two or three types of plant-based drinks. Sea water is also gaining a lot of momentum.
Moreover, we’re quite daring in getting into things where others haven’t yet, but which have potential. For example, we’ve just launched bamboo flour for making cakes, which has particular properties. We’ve also launched glycine, which is something not easily found elsewhere.
Laura Milán has been the Marketing Director of Naturitas since January 2019. An expert in communication and social networks, she has led the company’s communication for more than half the years since Naturitas was founded in 2014.
How do you prepare for Black Friday?
Nicola Lavarino: It’s complex, it’s a campaign that involves all departments and that we start working on before summer.
Laura Milán: At the marketing level, we define the campaign broadly, both visually and content-wise. In parallel, the Category Managers team starts to probe the promotional approach with the brands. In September, everything converges in a meeting to define the bases and from there to November it’s execution, so that everything is ready when it starts on November 1st.
Nicola Lavarino:Operations prepares for the tsunami of orders, we triple sales that day. During the Black Friday month, we could say we do 30-40% more compared to another month. Human Resources prepares the necessary resources to manage this increase. Finance foresees the necessary overstock.
IT is oversized to withstand access peaks. Two years ago, on Black Friday, almost all large companies fell, including us (which in a sense gives us pride). Last year they worked for a month doing simulations and we didn’t fall despite having tremendous peaks. It’s a preparation that starts before summer and ends in January, especially for departments like logistics and customer service, which have to manage late deliveries, errors, etc.
Laura Milán: Black Friday this year falls on November 29, but we usually campaign throughout November, with more or less communicative pressure. Then from there also derives Cyber Monday.
Naturitas has developed its own brand Naturitas Essentials with essential products for self-care.
What are your international expansion plans?
Nicola Lavarino: Our strategic focus is Iberia (Spain and Portugal), Europe and then the rest of the world. In Europe we’ve just opened new countries like Denmark and we’ll continue opening others that we believe have potential. Outside Europe it’s not a priority focus at the moment, as it’s much more complex due to transport issues, etc.
In Iberia we continue to grow and we believe there’s still a lot of market. When I ask in groups how many people know Naturitas, the percentage has grown a lot in recent years, but when I ask how many buy, it’s still a relatively small percentage. This indicates that there’s still a lot of potential ahead.
Laura Milán: At the marketing level, until now the focus has been Spain, but we’re going to evolve the strategy in strategic countries like Portugal, France or Italy. We’ll start doing collaborations with influencers, work on email marketing and the community in these countries, which we believe will take us very far in a short time.
For example, in Spain we do about 40 collaborations with influencers every month. We’re going to start little by little doing the same in these neighboring countries to make ourselves known, gain visibility and start being talked about. In Spain, if you move minimally in the sector, you’ll see Naturitas immediately on social networks. We want to reach that point in other countries.
What are Naturitas’ current figures?
Nicola Lavarino: Currently we have about 170 employees. This year we’ll exceed 100 million euros in turnover, coinciding with our tenth anniversary. As for customers, globally we exceed 2 million in our database, with more than 1 million active users in the last 6-12 months.
It’s important to clarify that in e-commerce, the definition of active customer can vary. We consider active those who have bought in the last 6 months or a year. Someone who bought three years ago, even if they made four purchases, if they haven’t returned, we no longer consider them active.
Naturitas celebrates 10 years reaching 100 million in turnover and 1 million active users.
Have you considered opening physical stores?
Nicola Lavarino: It’s a complicated issue. We believe that everyone should dedicate themselves to what they know, and we know how to sell online and create an online community. We don’t exclude the possibility of going down to physical stores in the future, it’s in our roadmap, but it’s not planned for either 2024 or 2025.
We could consider various models, such as entering a corner of an existing chain or doing a fixed pop-up. It’s not simply about opening a store on La Rambla, for example, which would involve a great economic and resource effort.
Moreover, we don’t have anyone expert in selling in physical stores. The first thing we should do is go hand in hand with someone expert, whether internal or consultants, who can guide us on how to proceed.
Organic, Healthy, Sustainable and Genuine define Naturitas and the consumption actions of its customers.
What’s new regarding your own brands?
Nicola Lavarino: We’re launching new products every month in our own brands, especially in Essentials. We observe what the market demands and respond to that. We continue working on our brands: Naturitas Essentials, Zentrity, Zeutics and Woments.
In Woments, we’re in a process of focusing the brand on a specific sector that we believe has potential. We’ll give it a twist to make it more suitable for what the market is requiring now, because we believe it’s a brand with tremendous potential.
Author: Oriol Urrutia, Co-Editor.
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