Capitalizing on your audience to kickstart your business
How Lara Zaugg leveraged her followers to make her vegan cakes a success
Lara Zaugg started blogging about food a decade ago. Later, she grew her Instagram account to more than 125K followers. She could have pursued her marketing career at Google but preferred to launch the food startup Grainglow instead—together with her partner Matthias Stieger.
They come packaged in a box of 12 and cost 39 Francs. Small vegan cakes, 4x4x3 cm, some made with berries, others with chocolate or caramel, and all of them taste delicious. Even if they’re raw, they sell like hot cakes (in three online shops and in around 25 restaurants in Switzerland) and the food startup Grainglow had to upgrade their production and storage facilities. A shiny new walk-in fridge stores the delicacies that a shiny new industrial-scale mixer churns out (the cakes aren’t baked). Another sign of success is a distribution deal with a food retailer that will be announced soon. The vegan bakery has been established in Albisrieden, a calmer part of Zurich by Lara Zaugg and her boyfriend Matthias Stieger. They’re just hiring their first employee to handle all the orders. Neither of the two young entrepreneurs has worked in the food industry before, they’ve learned their trade on the job. Lara worked at Google in a marketing role, and Matthias was a product manager for the influencer tech platform Picstars. But they’re not just hopping on the trend of vegan food because it seems to accelerate. The history that led to this company starts much, much earlier.
Born out of necessity
“Let’s get an ice cream!” young Lara’s mother declares. The family enjoys it, but five-year-old Lara gets a stomach ache from it—every time she eats ice cream: She’s lactose intolerant. What should be a pure sugary joy is mixed with pain. As a young adult, Lara’s kitchen experiments fail, as cakes without butter and cow milk stubbornly refuse to taste like the real thing. But ultimately, she cracks the code. Dates, almonds, and cashews are some ingredients that figure prominently in vegan desserts. As early as 2010, Lara meticulously writes down every recipe she finds online and tries out and publishes them on her blog Vanillacrunnch. She studies business administration but finds it “a bit dry for creative types.” While she enjoys writing and taking pictures of her creations, and the blog establishes her as an authority on vegan desserts, a new platform appears: Instagram.
Instagram works well for Vanillacrunnch. Lara likes the “social” aspect of the social network, and if somebody writes her a direct message asking about how to replace an ingredient in a recipe, she happily replies and takes on the role of “cake consultant.” Such responsiveness drives engagement. Today, Vanillacrunnch has more than 125K followers on Instagram.
Leveraging social media expertise to land jobs
In 2015, after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in business administration, Lara is able to put her social media expertise to work as she gets headhunted by UBS, a bank. While Lara enjoys the work, it isn’t very fulfilling. She registers for a social media workshop organized by Google but gets turned down as not qualified enough. This, she could not let stand and complains about it, upon which she does get invited. The event turned out to be a recruiting event, and Lara wins the day. The week after, she interns for the search giant in London and works on its social media presence in several European countries. It is a high-pressure position, but Lara lauds Google as a very good employer. After two years in London, she stands at a crossroads: Her superiors want her to move to the US headquarters in Mountain View, California. But she is loath to leave her friends and family in Switzerland behind and quits.
It starts with an online shop
Later, Lara meets her boyfriend, Matthias, who at the time works for Picstars, a software-driven influencer agency Lara had been working with. They want to start something together. “We could do an online shop for vegan cakes,” they say to themselves after rejecting other alternatives. In 2018, starting with an improvised kitchen in a small room, their idea catches on. Soon, without spending money on marketing, they hit their capacity and have to look out for a larger, more professional setup. With the business growing organically, Matthias leaves Picstars, and Lara reduces her influencer work. If someone she doesn’t know asks her what she does for a living, she still replies with “marketing,” though. She fears “baking cakes” would sound a bit like something a granny does. In late 2020, they moved to a new space and invested in new machinery that is able to produce thousands of cakes every week.
It’s still early days in the development of Grainglow, but the business already allows them to pay themselves a modest salary that is enough to live in pricy Zurich. They live a minimalist and frugal lifestyle. She says that many colleagues working in the financial sector complain about how they don’t have enough money and shakes her head. “We haven’t gone to faraway places on holidays recently; we don’t go shopping for fun. We re-invested a lot of money in our production. But we make a point of asking ourselves at the end of every month what we couldn’t do because we lacked the money. And the answer turns out to be: nothing. People need a lot less than they assume they need. We have the privilege of being our own bosses, and you can’t even put a price tag on that. Every week, I hear someone who is fed up with his job saying how much they would love to work with us.”
Know what you’re aiming for
Adapting to the freedom that entrepreneurship allows took some time, Lara notes. There isn’t anyone that tells you when you have to work and how. There is a steep learning curve as a first-time entrepreneur, from negotiating with suppliers to the minutiae of food law. And if your only co-worker is also your life partner, discussions can get heated when one pushes forward and wants to accept a big order while the other exclaims that they’ll never manage to produce 200 boxes in time. Sometimes, you just have to call it a day, Lara says, but even more important is a good alignment on the goals you want to reach and those you don’t want to run after. “We want to become successful and be able to pay ourselves a decent salary, but we don’t want to scale at any price or expand internationally. We have a good consensus on that,” she says. This understanding led them to decline what could have resulted in substantial growth of the business. While they will soon work together with a retailer, they have declined a request by a big chain of gas station shops. It would have meant a lot of money, but it also would have meant to produce and deliver every day of the week, including weekends, and selling in an environment that didn’t fit with the premium positioning of the brand.
“The pricing is justified”, Lara says. Grainglow uses only organic ingredients and a complex production process. Frozen, the product has a shelf life of up to nine months and a week in the refrigerator. It is a dessert, but quite healthy. And Lara counts on the support of a loyal fan base. “People realize that they vote with their shopping list on what is possible for entrepreneurs to achieve.” She definitely doesn’t lack ideas: Recently, Grainglow launched its latest product, a protein-rich, gluten-free vegan mix that people can quickly turn into a snack at home.