OWL Venice: Organic Growth Strategy for a CPG Health Brand
100 Orders From One Facebook Post: How OWL Venice Got Started
In late 2015, Lindsey Wilson posted on Facebook that she had extra jars of homemade bone broth available. Within a couple of days, she had 100 orders. That single post, placed in local Los Angeles women's health groups, was the entire launch strategy for what would become OWL Venice, a bone broth and wellness brand now distributed in over 50 California retailers including Erewhon, Mother's Market, Lazy Acres, and Jimbo's.
The product itself came from a personal need. Wilson was managing her own digestive issues and could not find a commercial bone broth without garlic and onions, which she was eliminating from her diet at the time. She started making her own, layering in herbs, vegetables, and roots until the result tasted less like traditional broth and more like a savory tea. That product, now called a bone broth elixir, remains the brand's core offering alongside a gut reset program, supplements, skincare, and home goods.
How to Find Your First Customers Without a Marketing Budget
The early OWL Venice growth playbook was built entirely on knowing exactly who the customer was: women aged 25 to 55, based in Los Angeles, interested in health. Rather than broadcasting to a general audience, Wilson found where those people already gathered online and showed up there. Local women's Facebook groups gave her a direct line to her target demographic before she had a website, a logo, or a business plan.
By February 2016, roughly two to three months after that first Facebook post, Wilson had built and launched the website. Her background in freelance graphic design, web design, and photography meant she could handle that herself, which removed a significant barrier most early-stage founders face. The site did not change the customer base at first. It simply made order fulfillment easier for the same group of people already buying from her.
Using Retail as a Customer Research Channel, Not Just a Revenue Channel
Within one year of starting the business, OWL Venice was in physical retail locations. Wilson made a deliberate choice to treat those early retail placements as feedback opportunities rather than pure revenue drivers. Store demos, product sampling, and farmers markets gave the brand direct contact with customers and shaped everything from flavor development to packaging decisions.
This approach meant the product improved faster than it would have through online-only sales. Real-time customer reactions informed what stayed in the lineup and what changed. For any founder building a consumable product, that early in-person feedback loop is hard to replicate through surveys or analytics alone. Sadie Scheffer of Bread SRSLY describes a similar philosophy, using wholesale relationships as both a revenue channel and a source of ongoing product and market feedback.
Influencer Gifting as a Low-Cost Acquisition Channel
Before OWL Venice invested in paid advertising, influencer gifting was the primary channel for growing online sales. The strategy was simple and tightly scoped: identify local Los Angeles women with social media followings aligned with the brand's existing customer profile, send them product, and let authentic experiences drive the posts. No payment, no briefs, no performance guarantees. If someone loved the product, they talked about it.
That approach worked because the brand chose influencers whose audiences matched the customer avatar it already understood. The authenticity came from actual product affinity, not a contract requiring positive coverage. Breanna Greenberg of Stratia Skincare built a nearly identical gifting strategy, sending product first with no strings attached and letting genuine enthusiasm generate organic posts.
How the Paid Advertising Shift Changed Everything Post-COVID
The strategy Wilson built over the first several years of the business became significantly harder to execute after COVID removed in-person sampling and tightened organic social reach. The brand moved into paid advertising on Instagram, Facebook, and more recently Google, spending the past three years building paid acquisition capabilities it had not needed before.
Retargeting existing customers, once a reliable tactic, became more difficult as platform tracking changed. The team shifted focus toward cold audience acquisition, which requires a fundamentally different creative and messaging approach than reaching people already familiar with the brand.
Paid influencer partnerships also became more common as the pool of people willing to post about products for free shrank. Wilson's team developed a process to navigate this: always send product first, confirm the person genuinely likes it, and then discuss a paid arrangement. Not every potential partner agrees to that sequence, but it protects the authenticity the brand was built on.
What Wilson Would Do Differently Starting Today
Wilson is candid that the conditions that allowed OWL Venice to grow organically in 2015 and 2016 no longer exist in the same form. Organic Facebook reach has collapsed. The influencer economy is far more transactional. And the regulatory complexity of launching a CPG food brand, including certifications, labeling requirements, and food safety compliance, demands research before the first batch ships rather than after.
Starting today, she would talk to founders who had already navigated CPG before spending money, establish a real business plan, and set a working budget from day one. The head-first approach worked then. In the current environment, it would be a much harder path. Sarah Delevan covers exactly this terrain, walking CPG food founders through the financial and regulatory groundwork that should be in place before a product ever hits shelves.
Key Lessons From This Episode
- Find your customer avatar first, then find where they already gather online. Wilson's early Facebook group strategy succeeded because she targeted a specific demographic in specific communities, not a broad audience.
- Retail can serve as a product research channel before it serves as a significant revenue channel. Early sampling and demos shaped the OWL Venice product line more than any formal research process would have.
- Influencer gifting works best when product affinity comes before any commercial arrangement. Requiring a try-first step screens out partners who are not a genuine fit.
- The tactics that built a brand in 2015 may not work in 2025. Organic social reach, free influencer posts, and in-person sampling are all harder to rely on than they were at OWL Venice's launch.
- CPG founders who skip the foundational research on certifications, labeling, and food safety will learn those lessons eventually. Learning them before launch is significantly cheaper than learning them after.
- Staying current on platform algorithm changes and testing new acquisition channels continuously is not optional. Wilson treats marketing strategy as a moving target that requires rebuilding roughly every year.
Hear the full story directly from Lindsey Wilson, including how OWL Venice navigated the transition from a home kitchen operation to a multi-SKU wellness brand in 50-plus retail doors, in the complete conversation and transcript below.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
- [00:00] Intro
- [01:22] What products does OWL Venice offer?
- [01:43] Where the idea of OWL Venice came from
- [02:22] From solving a personal need to a market idea
- [03:26] Her personal solution becoming a full-time job
- [03:51] Shifting to a traditional direct-to-consumer model
- [04:42] Lindsey’s initial growth strategy
- [06:47] Creating a jump-off point for new customers
- [08:08] Mistakes are learning opportunities
- [09:59] Sponsor: Electric Eye electriceye.io/connect
- [10:56] Sponsor: JSON-LD for SEO jsonld.app
- [12:10] Sponsor: Wayflyer wayflyer.com/ecomm/honest
- [13:31] OWL Venice’s current marketing strategy
- [16:06] Where to find OWL Venice’s Bone Elixirs?
Resources:
- Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on Youtube
- Organic Bone Broth & Cleanses owlvenice.com
- Connect with Lindsey linkedin.com/in/lindseyerinwilson
- Take the first step towards Shopify success electriceye.io/connect
- Get your free structured data audit for your store jsonld.app
- Funding a better way wayflyer.com/ecomm/honest
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Transcript
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