Customer Story: Anushi from Plant Pops

Hi Anushi! Let's dive in. When did you start Plant Pops? What’s the growth been like? 

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I started Plant Pops towards the end of 2019. The idea was very much inspired by Lotus seeds originally. 

It's a very common snack in India, where I grew up. It's kind of a crisp, a nut and a popcorn all rolled into one. When you go to the cinema in India, that's what they serve. 

And when I moved to the UK, I noticed that similar products didn’t exist locally. 

So I set up our own production site in India and started producing chickpea based snacks that were super light and crunchy + loaded with seeds as well as light and melty puffs. 

Tell me about the DTC channel for you. How important is it? And when did you start investing in building up a strong Shopify store?

Originally DTC was kindof an afterthought. We were very much focused on brick and mortar stores, wholesale, and food service. Things like that. On our DTC site, everything was sold in cases of 24 bags, and you had to know us already to be able to buy such large quantities. 

But then COVID happened. And a lot of our food service sites closed. Offices and wholesalers were struggling.So we started experimenting by offering smaller cases, and packs of mixed flavors on the site. And people were reacting really well to the change. People liked trying different things, the 6 pack wasn’t a big commitment.

After seeing some early traction - we thought: Maybe DTC is actually a channel we should invest in more seriously after all. 

So over the past 18 months, we’ve invested in features such as enabling customers to build their own bundles on the site and bit-by-bit transformed the experience into an online store that is now a really important tenant of our business.

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So how did you interact with Storetasker? What was your experience like? 

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I knew I needed help. And I had spoken to loads and loads of agencies - but  nothing felt quite right. It was ridiculously expensive - and it would just take so long to get any kind of ROI on that. 

So I submitted a brief on the Storetasker site, describing the project in as much detail as possible - and pretty quickly, we were matched with Erin. 

We had some base ideas in mind and then Erin took that and ran with it. She not only coded the website, but she also designed it. It was unusual for us, because all the people we spoke with told us we’d need multiple people involved - but Erin did it all beautifully, and by herself. 

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Last question from me: What's been your key to success so far? 

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There's so much we've done wrong and I don't think we've actually figured it out.

But what we’ve focused on is getting a lot of feedback in terms of our flavors and also product sizing. And with our own production, we’ve been able to experiment and incorporate feedback extremely quickly. 

So we've killed a couple of flavors and textures from our last batch: If we don’t get repeat purchases, we know something’s off & we can iterate to create the best tasting product for the consumer. 

That’s been our key. 

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Thank you Anushi. Go go Plant Pops!

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