TheVeganKind

Idea

Introduction

TheVeganKind is an online vegan and plant-based supermarket and subscription box service. Motivated by our personal mission to make a vegan lifestyle accessible to all, we founded TheVeganKind to promote a more sustainable way of living.

Today, the business has generated more than £5.6m in revenue and stocks more than 4,500 different vegan and plant-based products, ranging from household to beauty, vegan cheese, plant-based bacon, and even doughnuts. With thousands of customers across the UK and beyond, a social following of more than half a million people, and having shipped out over 130,000 orders in 2019 alone, we are well on our way to our aim of becoming the UK’s leading online vegan retailer.

We’ve achieved all of this without any external investment to date and with the number of vegans having quadrupled in the last 4 years, we are now ready to scale the business and play a critical role in the future of food.

Intended impact

We founded TheVeganKind in November 2013 after becoming frustrated with how difficult it was sourcing and buying vegan products in UK supermarkets. We started life as a vegan subscription box delivering vegan goodies to customers’ doors once a month, but thanks to soaring demand, in 2016, we decided to launch an online store with the vision of building the biggest & best online vegan supermarket in the country.

We have a substantial product range, including high-demand, rare vegan cheeses and we also have a vast array of other difficult-to-find chilled products in stock. And we’ve grown our operational infrastructure to enable next-day delivery across the UK, enabling access to vegan foods for 1000s of customers.

The scale of the opportunity is massive. The global vegan food market will be worth $24bn by 2026.

Substantial accomplishments to date

• £2.5m revenue generated from Nov 2018 - Nov 2019*.

• 100% average CAGR since the company was established

• Over 500,000 social followers across Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter

• £90k MRR (Subscription boxes) and £130k monthly average revenue (supermarket)

• Scottish Edge Winner 2017 recognising the most promising startup businesses in Scotland

• Successfully raised £65,473 from 710 supporters in a rewards-based crowdfunding campaign in November 2018

• Strategic partnerships secured within the vegan community e.g. Veganuary and Ecotricity

*based on unaudited management accounts

Monetisation strategy

TheVeganKind has two primary revenue streams.

1. www.thevegankind.com - a subscription box model that seeks to help people go, and stay vegan. Customers can purchase subscriptions for both vegan food boxes and cruelty free beauty boxes, and we were recently named by Grazia magazine as being one of the UK’s best beauty subscription boxes! The vegan ‘lifestyle’ subscription box starts from £8 per box every month and the ‘beauty’ box starts at £12.75 per box every two months. Customers can also purchase gift subscriptions for 3, 6 and 12 month periods.

2. www.thevegankindsupermarket.com. This is our 100% vegan & plant-based online supermarket where customers can browse meat alternatives, vegan cheese, plant-based milks and much more, without having to check the ingredients! We have an average order value of £38 and a customer retention rate of 30%.

Use of proceeds

60% of the funds raised will be allocated towards marketing and branding. Investment in targeted digital marketing will enable us to continually track and monitor our return on advertising spending. We will also pursue further strategic partnerships, content creation and affiliates to increase the volume of organic traffic to our sites. In turn, this will further cement our position in the vegan community and increase brand awareness.

20% of the funds raised will go towards warehouse expansion, helping improve our efficiency and increasing our inventory so that we are able to grow with the increased demand as a result of our marketing activities.

20% of the funds raised will go towards operating expenditure and expanding our team to assist with our continuing growth, enabling us to fulfill our mission statement - “to make a vegan lifestyle easily accessible to all”.

Thank you so much for reading, we are excited to welcome you aboard Team TVK.

Scott & Karris (Founders)