Wife-and-husband duo Martha and Curt Van Inwegen have never had an outside investment in their e-commerce startup.
But in case a potential investor comes knocking, they made a pitch deck that details each instance their company, Life Elements, hit a potentially-fatal snag.
That’s right, the pitch deck walks investors through every time the company teetered on the edge of failure.
We’re a 13-year overnight sensation.”
What makes this a not-terrible idea is that the Van Inwegens seem to have a knack for pivoting on a dime — in the right direction. After the 2008 recession zapped demand for their line of body care products for couples (who needs bubble baths when you have mortgage bubbles?), they donated their entire inventory except their stock of personal wipes.
Martha threw up a new website, changed the product’s name to “Action Wipes” and marketed them as the perfect all-natural solution for hikers and festival-goers. It was an instant hit, and they continued selling the wipes for the next decade.
“It was one of the key elements folks took to Burning Man,” Martha added.
Another inflection point came in 2018 when California’s Farm Bill removed hemp from the Controlled Substances Act. Martha had been developing hemp-based, CBD-infused body products for the past three years at the behest of her daughter, and she knew the market was about to flood with would-be players.
They decided to set themselves apart by focusing on hand-made, carefully measured products that ensure the same dose of CBD each time — as opposed to the more common method of tossing CBD into a larger batch and hoping it disperses evenly, Martha said.
A year later, their bet is paying off. Life Elements just hit $1 million in annual revenue, a benchmark only two percent of women-owned businesses hit.
“We’re a 13-year overnight sensation,” Curt said.
His comment makes sense in an industry that has been, and continues to be, a wild ride. With trends soaring and crashing, search engines evolving and the ever-looming Amazon, e-commerce is not for the faint of heart.
To succeed, bootstrapped founders have to make tough calls about when to shift with the times and when to stick with their roots.
When to transform, and when to double down
While Life Elements has several times switched up its product offerings, its focus on all-natural ingredients has never wavered. For Martha, it’s non-negotiable.
“I love working with the flowers, the stems, the leaves, the roots, everything coming together. I’m just — I’m enamored with it,” she said. “We stay away from anything that’s synthetic. And, of course, some things may be synthetically processed, but we avoid that as well. I want it to be as pure as possible to the single ingredient I’m looking at.”
We’re competing with a lot of other Davids, and definitely a lot of Goliaths.”
She isn’t alone in her convictions. As American consumers increasingly demand beauty and body products free from synthetic materials, even the biggest brands are getting on board with their own natural or organic lines. However, because those terms aren’t regulated by the Federal Trade Commission or FDA in the personal care space, companies can call a product “natural” or “organic” regardless of what it contains.
“You know the story of David and Goliath?” Curt asked. “We’re competing with a lot of other Davids, and definitely a lot of Goliaths.”
To stand out in a muddled and saturated market, Life Elements leaned toward medicinal, authoritative-looking branding, Martha said, and its upcoming rebrand will stick to that vision. However, the company is retiring its packaging in favor of amber-tinted glass containers, reducing its plastic use by 85 percent.
The Van Inwegens also tried to differentiate the brand by placing themselves front and center in marketing materials.
“We’re real people who are accountable, as opposed to the super sexy Instagram feed or glossy brand,” Curt said.
From the kitchen table to a 6,000-square-foot facility
Before becoming entrepreneurs, Martha and Curt both worked in the tech space. Martha did sales for a public safety company that specialized in fingerprinting technology — “She’s been in most of the major prisons,” Curt said — while Curt worked for a tech-focused marketing agency.
Martha ran the company solo until 2015, when Curt left his job to join her.
After years of working from their kitchen table, spare bedroom and garage, they’re moving to a 6,000-square-foot facility in December and are even in talks with California-based Elite Engineering to develop a mechanical arm that uses AI to weigh CBD and dole out the correct amounts.
Life Elements currently has six employees, and Curt hopes to add a data specialist that can help better estimate demand and production needs, he said.
We’ve never had the connections.”
Despite the company’s recent revenue milestone, sales growth isn’t easy to come by. CBD producers aren’t supposed to advertise on Facebook or Instagram, although some of their competitors manage to slip through the platforms’ regulatory cracks, Martha claimed.
“We haven’t been able to get one past yet,” she laughed. “Those brands that are advertising, I don’t know how they’re doing it, but that’s my next goal, to try to get our ads on Facebook and Instagram. It’s getting people to recognize who we are, how the product is made, what our ethos are.”
Until then, Life Elements will keep doing what it does best: Not stopping.
“We’ve never had the connections, everything we’ve done is by hard work, and that’s what I’d say to folks,” she said. “Have the capability and the willingness to change the direction you’re going in. And maybe try something different.”
