Under The Hood: Patrick from MOSH
Insights from 1 half of MOSH: A mission-driven wellness company focused around brain health through its nutritious flavorful protein bars.
Welcome Patrick! When did you launch MOSH and what’s the growth been like since then?
This company has been 20 years in the making! We launched in September of 2021, but my background in CPG coupled with my mom’s passion for brain health since her father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's has led us here.
We spent 1.5 years sampling / testing and eventually launched exclusively D2C (and we’re still D2C).
Has growth been steady or rollercoaster-like?
Up and down since day 1. We’ve been fortunate to sell out a few times, but that also means our sales drastically go up and then back down when that happens. Forecasting supply is really the area I most struggled to get to grips with. We started with the smallest batch possible (45,000 bars), but we sold out in 2 days.
And then after all that - COVID supply chain issues were our next challenge . Back then, I could process a purchase order for inventory and get product the following week - but today, that timeline’s extended to 14 weeks - so we’re often in the dark on what’s required to not overshoot, while not selling out.
Tell me about subscription: Is that a big help for forecasting? And how do you make that an attractive proposition?
Yes definitely. 32% of our orders come from subscribers - so it’s a very significant portion of sales.
We’ve added benefits to subscribing in addition to the 20% discount. That includes things like free shipping and early access to new flavors. We’re trying really hard to make that path to purchase the most attractive - and now also unlocking that via Amazon.
Ultimately - our bars help with your brain health which is something that needs to be worked on over years - so subscribing to our bars helps you do that. Our product isn’t a one-off fix.
Let’s chat acquisition: What have you cracked along the way?
Not to toot my horn, but the relationship of my mother and I starting the company together coupled with our genuine obsession with brain health and our connection to Alzheimer’s has been a huge driver of our success.
The public trusts my mother on brain health topics: She’s done a TV show, a movie, testified in front of Congress all with the objective of raising awareness & money for Alzheimer’s research. So the public is already well aware and bought in on our mission.
All of that helps with acquiring customers.
But we have cracked additional pieces. For instance honing in on our core demographic (48-68 male) who have had some exposure to Alzheimers’ either personally or via a relative. And also on the channel front, now testing with podcasts and of course running Facebook / Instagram ads.
Let’s chat about your website: How has that evolved over time?
We’re always evolving. I’d say the biggest change has been around pricing.
When we launched, we were too cheap. I didn’t imagine such an overwhelmingly positive response to MOSH, so we priced ourselves low to drive sales - that eventually had to change. We can demand fairer prices & also we want to detract “deal-seekers” and instead attract life-long fans.
Those early prices also crushed our margins post shipping costs. So we did some A/B testing to figure out the right price on our trial pack & raised it about 30% which was a very important decision. And actually 87% of first time orders purchase a Trial Pack - so it’s a very significant piece of our equation.
After that - there have been so many little tweaks like adding nutritional fact panels in product pictures or adding a progress bar in the cart to show you how close you were to unlocking free shipping.
What tools are powering MOSH?
There’s a lot. Here’s our full list:
- E-comm: Shopify Plus
- Email: Klaviyo
- SMS: Attentive
- Subscription: ReCharge
- Customer Support: Gorgias
- Attribution/Analytics: Triple Whale
- Direct mail: Audience
- Reviews: Okendo
- User Segmentation: Repeat Customer Insights
- Social Content Curation & Analytics: Hootsuite
- Surveys: Typeform
In short, Shopify Plus is for very successful Shopify businesses. Shopify Plus can handle over 10,000 transactions per minute, can operate with unlimited staff accounts and includes personalised, dedicated help and support which makes it the perfect platform for a large business.
Gorgias centralizes all your support tickets in one place and enriches them with lots of extra context about a buyer's profile. Through Gorgias, you can connect directly to your eCommerce store and edit orders, modify subscriptions, and refund payments without leaving your helpdesk.
Turn customers into Superfans with Okendo, the unified customer marketing platform for reviews, referrals, loyalty, quizzes, and surveys, making it easy to cultivate advocacy, scale word-of-mouth, and maximize lifetime value. 8,000+ Shopify brands use Okendo to mobilize their customers for faster and more efficient growth, including SKIMS, Liquid Death, and Oh Polly.
Typeform is a very user-friendly form and survey builder. The design is clean and the features are smart: You can customize your survey in different ways, and you can also create lots of clever interactions using features like "logic jumps" which create unique paths of questions based on answers.
Last question: What's been the key to success?
Our mission and our founder's story.
With our family background - we’ve been approached by individuals who wanted to run cookie-cutter celebrity brand/product playbooks - where they’d take 50% of the business and run it themselves.
But that was not interesting to my mom and I. We’ve been up for the challenge and growing it how we like. And also loving every bit since launch.
That drive and energy really comes from our mission & close mother-son relationship.
