Why we decided to scale up

Spill the Mayo · No. 2

When I ran my seaweed business, I kept hitting the same wall. We couldn't scale.

In food and grocery, margins are already thin. That leaves you two real paths. You can charge a premium, make your profit on each unit and stay small. Or you can go for volume: lower margins, but more distribution, more stores, a wider range, more bottles moving.

With seaweed, I never quite cracked it. So when I started Umei, I promised myself I'd take every lesson from that experience and try to do better.

Starting small, on purpose

We launched Umei deliberately small, with a small-scale manufacturer. I wanted proof before taking the leap. Would people actually buy it? Would they come back?

They did. Customers are buying and loving it. Stockists are taking it on. Distributors have started knocking. I'm confident we have product-market fit.

The problem was me

Here's the honest part. Apart from physically making the mayo, I was doing everything myself.

Packing boxes. Dispatching orders. Marketing. Sales. Finance. Tastings and markets. Operations. Ingredient sourcing. Purchasing. All of it.

It took every bit of my time and energy. And I realised that running it this way would never get the business where I want it to go. I'd built myself a job, not a business.

So I had a decision to make. Stay as I was, or scale: get the distribution right, build a team, and eventually step back from the day-to-day so I can build something bigger than me.

There's a practical side too. I'm running a business, and I want it to be a good financial return. If one day we want to sell, nobody will buy a company where the founder is the only person who knows how everything works.

What it's actually been like

It's been a massive journey already. There have been plenty of surprises. It has needed more patience than I ever imagined, and a lot of challenges along the way. (More on those in upcoming posts.)

The risk I'm taking now is ten times what it was when we were small. I won't pretend that isn't scary.

But I truly believe it's worth it, to build a business that's meaningful, sustainable and profitable.

So that's what we're doing. Growing the volume. Getting the distribution right. Building the brand one day at a time, and one bottle of mayo at a time.

— Sarah

Catch up on No. 1: Is there any point launching if the new stock isn't here by mid-November?