Retail Technology Show review - Deliciously Ella founder discusses social media journey
The founder of the plant-based food and wellness platform Deliciously Ella is looking for someone to help handle her social media accounts after acknowledging it is “insane” she has been running them on her own for a decade.
Ella Mills had a “reality check” when responding to customers' queries about recipes in the middle of night while looking after her young baby daughter.
“I am hiring for the social media team for the first time in ten years. I have done it all this whole time, which is insane, I recognise that”, Mills said at Retail Technology Show, which took place this week in London.
“Up until my first daughter was born three years ago, I used to reply to every single [social media] message,” she commented.
“When she was about six weeks old, I was still replying to people in the middle of the night. I was up with the baby replying to people asking if they could swap peanuts for cashews in a recipe.”
“And I was like: what am I doing? I think I had a bit of a reality check of how much as a person I can do in any given day when having kids and trying to balance that with building the business.”
However, Mills said her brand’s authentic social media experience has been key to growing its community of customers and fans.
“We’ve had countless opportunities to licence the brand and to sell this or that, and we could have made a lot of money really quickly doing that but it felt like it robbed the brand of authenticity. And it wouldn't have allowed us to really build equity in the company in the long run.”
Mills added that businesses have to think how they can be “genuinely useful” to their customers following them on social media on a day to day basis, as opposed to “just kind of taking that number of people and just trying to flog them stuff every day.”
“It can’t just be a platform to sell a product, that has absolutely no benefit to the consumer. Why would they want to be part of that community if it’s just ads all day long?” she stated.
The Deliciously Ella brand started as a recipe blog by Mills in 2012 when she was still at university.
In 2011, Mills had been diagnosed with a condition called postural tachycardia syndrome, which meant she could not control her heart rate and blood pressure properly, while also struggling with digestive issues, chronic fatigue, and a series of infections.
She turned to managing the condition by changing her diet to a whole foods and plant based one, blogging about her journey and the recipes she was making on a website called Deliciously Ella.
Ten years later, the Deliciously Ella brand has evolved into a collection of best selling cookbooks, a restaurant, an app, a podcast, and a range of plant-based food products in 7,000 stores across the UK.
The company is now launching in locations across Europe and looking to expand into the US.
Mills said there has been a “fundamental shift” in the past ten years in the availability of plant-based foods and recipes, but this was not the case when she started.
“The website grew really quickly because the resources [for plant based recipes] just weren’t available at the time. In the first few years it had 130 million hits, the community grew really, really quickly. It was clear we could capitalise on that fast growing need for healthy plant-based products.”
The company has also begun selling its food products direct to customers, following the start of Covid-19 lockdown when it was forced to sell off a huge amount of stock normally destined for retailers such as Costa and Starbucks.
“We said we would never go DTC [direct-to-consumer] but there was a kind of obvious opportunity there to leverage the ability that we have as a brand to have this audience.”
“We set up a web shop in a week and we managed to sell through all the stock on a heavy discount. But I think now it's really exciting, because we have this opportunity to now actually genuinely look towards the future.”
Mills concluded: “We just launched in Austria last week, we're launching in Germany in a few weeks’ time, and our Marketing Director just moved out to the US to start building the business there. So it's going to be a big year.”
