347 | Leveraging Existing Markets for Faster Growth | with Bradley Savage
Bradley Savage is the Founder & CEO of Gardencup, aka Salad as a Service, a D2C meal subscription brand that ships ultra-premium, ready-to-eat salads and produce snacks nationwide.
What started with Brad taping boxes in his kitchen after getting tired of eating hot pockets every day has grown into a $29M ARR brand in just 18 months. Along the way, Gardencup scaled to nearly 2 million salads shipped a year, fueled by organic Instagram buzz and influencers before a single dollar was spent on ads.
Brad’s story blends scrappy bootstrapping with rapid execution. From migrating to Shopify and building a custom tech stack, to juggling ecommerce, operations, and logistics under one roof, to solving retention challenges like menu fatigue, he’s learned what it really takes to scale a food subscription at breakneck speed.
Whether you’re building a DTC subscription, navigating operational “puberty problems,” or looking for ways to blend convenience with customer loyalty, Brad offers an unfiltered look at the grind, the pivots, and the lessons behind turning fresh salads into one of Shopify’s fastest-growing brands.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
- [00:20] Intro
- [01:04] Creating a product from personal need
- [02:55] Solving churn through menu rotation
- [05:44] Migrating to Shopify for growth
- [09:44] Gaining traction from influencer posts
- [11:06] Driving adoption through daily habits
- [11:28] Stay updated with new episodes
- [11:39] Testing content angles and audiences
- [12:50] Finding right partners at each stage
- [14:49] Scaling ads without huge capital
- [15:12] Episode Sponsors: Electric Eye, Heatmap, Grow
- [18:27] Collecting revenue before vendor bills
- [20:00] Leveraging Facebook’s feedback loop
- [21:15] Gaining strength from co-founders
Resources:
- Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on Youtube
- Delicious chef-crafted meals at your door gardencup.com/
- Follow Bradley Savage linkedin.com/in/savagebradley
- Schedule an intro call with one of our experts electriceye.io/connect
- Clear, real-time data built for ecommerce optimization heatmap.com/honest
- The Premier Conference for Ecommerce Operators joingrow.com
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Transcript
Chase Clymer
One of the secrets to success is having a product that people want. It's often overlooked by entrepreneurs.
Bradley Savage
I like to say you need to either need to have an extremely innovative product to create a new habit, or your product just needs to insert itself into an already existing habit. Otherwise, you're swimming upstream.
Chase Clymer
Honest Ecommerce is a weekly podcast where we interview direct-to-consumer brand founders and leaders to find out what it takes to start, grow, and scale an online business today.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today, I'm welcoming to the show the founder and CEO of Gardencup, Bradley Savage. Welcome to the show, Brad.
Bradley Savage
How are you doing, Chase?
Chase Clymer
I'm doing fantastic. I was before this trying to think where we met. And I believe it was SubSummit 2 years ago when we first met.
Bradley Savage
I think you're right. At the pool party.
Chase Clymer
Yes. Brad had a fantastic pool party. I met a bunch of awesome people there. A few of them I've actually had on the podcast. Brad and I finally got around to getting him on the podcast. So excited to have you here.
For those listeners that aren't aware of Gardencup, could you quickly let them know what's the product you're bringing to market? What are you guys selling over there?
Bradley Savage
Yeah, for sure. So Gardencup, we like to call it Salad as a Service. It's the freshest SaaS company out there. We ship premium ready-to-eat salads nationwide, direct to homes and offices.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing. Now, take me back in time. Where did this idea percolate where you're like, I need to send salads to people?
Bradley Savage
Yep. Well, it of course started with the desire to send salads to myself that I didn't have to make personally. So I first started doing my own DIY salad prep all the way back in college, about 10 years before I even started the business. I actually bought the Gardencup.com domain, started working on the business plan.
I'm thinking through how to do this while I was kind of living out of a dorm at A&M, running around. I was just eating Hot Pockets 24-7. I loved having salads, but it would take me four hours and 150 bucks at the grocery store just to get five of the same exact salad. And I was using old Starbucks cups. So it was really handy when I would do it. It's kind of a grab and go handheld, healthy meal, but it was so impractical to do all that prep all the time.
So I would end up doing it very, very rarely. And so I ended up going into commercial real estate thinking I was going to kind of, you know, save up a little bit of money for a year or two and then kind of start this dream project. got sucked into real estate for nine years and started and sold a small business there. And after that, I kind of decided to give this thing a shot full time. So obviously, a lot of transferable knowledge between commercial real estate and salad manufacturing and Ecommerce.
Chase Clymer
I know you're joking, but I'm sure there's a few things. What would you say were some of those learnings that are, it doesn't matter. Just cutting your teeth in learning and business.
Bradley Savage
Zero transferable knowledge. Let's be real clear. Let's be honest about the Ecommerce journey here. I knew zero about anything that Gardencup requires. So the first year and a half honestly was my own education.
And the majority of the money I put in went to my own education, AKA got incinerated. So, but we figured it out. We started out in a ghost kitchen. I found a kind of culinary, you know, food production guy and we shipped salads out of a ghost kitchen. We got to the point where we're in this 500 square foot ghost kitchen shipping 20 pallets a day next door to like Uber Eats restaurant tenants.
We turned this little ghost kitchen into an industrial operation. So that's when we kind of had to hit the brakes a little bit. Got to a $20 million run rate in our first year, 13 months to be exact. And we realized like we are over our skis right now on this production facility and it's really hard to come by a food grade processing space. We're actually still, we're out of the ghost kitchen luckily, we're in a little bit bigger kitchen space, but we're not in the ideal food production facility.
We kind of had to hit pause on the growth trajectory a little bit while we figured out some of these, what I call puberty problems in the startup phase. Kind of, you're not an infant anymore, but we're not quite fully grown up yet. So we're in this kind of awkward tweener phase that we're trying, you know, we've identified roughly five major transitions we have to get through.
Get on the other side of that, we've already kind of knocked out two of them. One of which was moving to a custom tech stack for really precise subscription processing and subscription management of a custom bundle. The other was moving from just nationwide, you know, express shipping, super expensive to kind of a managed logistics network of our own. So much more efficient, cost effective shipping now, significantly better on time delivery rates.
The three remaining problems are production, a proper production facility, getting the freshness extending technology that we've been working on fully implemented and installed and then unlocking culinary menu rotation. Most other meal subscriptions will rotate their menu every week or every month. We add a new cup every month or two at best. One of the bigger reasons for churn in our business is menu fatigue. So that's one of the big opportunities still waiting for us.
Chase Clymer
You shared so much there. So I'm just going to go back to the beginning. How does somebody go from selling 1 cup to selling 2 million cups? That's a whole, you just jumped to the end there. So how did you sell the first couple to people that weren't friends and family? What was the go-to-market strategy?
Bradley Savage
Oh man, so we kind of tinkered with, you know, honestly early on, I didn't know anything about Ecommerce. I was literally Googling the difference between, you know, BigCommerce and Wix and Shopify. I literally didn't know which one was better. I made the wrong decision at first. I went with a non Shopify platform for a year while I was, you know, kind of trying to figure out how to get custom bundling, custom dynamically priced bundles on subscription, which at the time was not a Shopify recharge function.
So ended up wasting a bunch of money and time going down the rabbit trail trying to build a custom bundled meal subscription website and all these other, the hell of freshest and daily harvest of the world. Their websites were around long before any of the fancy native subscription functionality came out really just in the last two years.
So they're like multi-million dollar websites. They cost them, you know, a million plus a year just to maintain. I was trying to do this for, you know, the cost of monthly usage fees. It was a learning experience. We sold on BigCommerce for a little while, just essentially like one time orders. couldn't do some, you know, custom subscriptions. So you could kind of build your cart. We did a minimum. You had to buy at least six cups and that was all we could do.
So we had you know, boxes that were half full and all sorts of stuff. It was not ideal. We also sold in some airport convenience stores for a while. Those sales were outstanding, but we decided to focus 100% on D2C starting out. That was kind of the original goal was shipping these Gardencups directly to homes and offices and kind of putting clean eating on autopilot for the customer. So yeah, we, you know, worked on an escape path from, you know, this very restricted functionality in terms of a subscription management website that was on BigCommerce at the time.
Finally got migrated over to Shopify. In the process, we realized that we'd spent all this money trying to customize BigCommerce just to have custom dynamically priced bundles released as a native feature after about a year of banging our head against the wall trying to figure that out.
So now Shopify was the answer. We finally migrated to Shopify. We launched our subscription only platform in March of 2023. Started with zero subscribers, zero ARR. We grew all the way up to 20 million ARR within 13 months. And then all kinds of the operations started breaking. My attention goes from Ecommerce to operations back to Ecommerce and then over to shipping and logistics.
And so it's really like two or three businesses in one trying to manage all of ourselves. Anyway, yeah, shipping our very first salad to non friends and family, we started out. I've got pictures of me in the kitchen, taping boxes and chopping onions and trying to figure out how to build a fulfillment team and production team was a long and storied process. So it was fun, man.
We finally got to the point where we had, got up to like 50 plus people in the operation. And we are to this day about that size. And we went from shipping our very first day shipping salads, we had eight boxes. And I was so proud to deliver all eight boxes in the back of my Model Y over to the UPS terminal. Now we've got full 53 footers pulling up four days a week to pick up 20 plus pallets each time. So it's been a journey to say the least.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And finding those customers, what was your main marketing channel?
Bradley Savage
So we got a lot of early love from 100% Instagram. Social media was huge. We haven't really done much on TikTok yet. But before we launched on Shopify, we didn't do any paid ads, no paid advertising anywhere. And we just got a lot of organic love from influencers who I think were like, “Hey, wow, there's been Pinterest salad jars online for 15, 20 years. Now you can actually buy these and get them shipped straight to your door.” So a very Instagramable product. It's like a vertically layered and oriented meal product.
Most other meals are in a kind of boring horizontal tray, whereas ours are very aesthetically pleasing. You can see all the layered ingredients right through the cup, very transparent. So a lot of influencers, you know, micro all the way up to macro were, you know, coming across us on other people's stories and stuff. And they would say, “Oh, that's a novel.” They ordered themselves up.
We didn't even reach out to most of them early on. They would post us. So that's kind how we got to, I wouldn't say we went viral on Instagram, but we definitely got some early traction there. Very slow and steady early traction.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, that's amazing. One of the secrets to success is having a product that people want. It's often overlooked by entrepreneurs.
Bradley Savage
I like to say you either need to have an extremely innovative product to create a new habit, or your product just needs to insert itself into an already existing habit. Otherwise, you're swimming upstream.
Chase Clymer
Hey everybody, just a quick reminder. Please like this video and subscribe if you haven't. We're releasing interviews like this every week, so don't miss out. Now back to the interview.
Chase Clymer
When you made that move to Shopify, do you remember what number made you nervous when you started to really get into performance marketing?
Bradley Savage
In terms of ad spend?
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
Bradley Savage
From the very beginning, I didn't really care what the gross dollar spend was. All I cared about was CAC. So if we were profitable by the second order as a subscription only brand on CAC, I was like, man, spend as much as you possibly can. So we spent a long time. I went through a couple different agencies and I think that each one was the right fit for us at that time.
And we would eventually kind of scale out of one and say, I think we need to try something else and get some more firepower here and try another. It's been pretty exhausting, honestly, trying to learn how to do all the performance marketing stuff, what content angles are working and what audiences are converting. But never really cared about it. At this point, I care about spending as much as I possibly can at our CAC limit. So it's all about LTV to CAC.
Chase Clymer
What you said there, I want to just reiterate is found the right partners at the right time, which I think a lot of people don't realize that there are the service provider side of things, be it paid media or whatever agency that you're going to partner with, there are better ones for the size of your business too. And some people overspend and underspend at times picking the wrong partners.
Bradley Savage
Yeah, I think early on, we had a partner who, you know, did their best. Honestly, I think, you know, we got what we paid for, but like the creative quality was okay. It was kind of amateur, but it worked at the time. And so I think when you're early, early on and you haven't saturated a channel yet, or really come anywhere close to saturating it, you I mean, like our cap was 10 bucks our first month and it went to 20 and then to 25. And now, you know, now we're at 5560.
And I think some of the big, big national meal subscriptions are 160. But they figured out that their LTV can handle it. Yeah, some of these agents, every agency kind of has a different approach, a different skill set and forte. And I think we really tried to get folks on a performance basis rather than flat monthly fees.
So I always try to keep agency partners fully aligned in the boat with me as much as possible so that there's mutual incentive to spend efficiently and create good content and test all the different messaging hooks and all that. So yeah, I think once we realized folks were out of tricks up their sleeve, we said, “Okay, I think we need to level up a little bit and just go find a partner who might have something else that can move the needle.” Yeah. It's always, spend it as much as you can at your CAG limit is always the goal. At least it has been in our case so far.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And you mentioned that you invested in the business at your beginning. But at the beginning, I'm just curious for other listeners out there, if they've got a product that is moving on one of these channels, paid media is working for them. How do you unlock that additional people just don't have extra hundreds of thousands of dollars laying around to turn that engine on.
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Bradley Savage
What benefited our business and allowed us to kind of bootstrap this thing was that we have a negative cash conversion cycle. We actually, we get paid from our customers before we buy the vast majority of our inventory because it's fresh food. So one of the very few silver linings of this highly complex and zero margin for error business with fresh salads is that we do have this negative cash conversion cycle. So we can actually, we can collect revenue before we pay most of our bills to vendors.
A lot of others like hard good CPG brands, you've got to pre-purchase inventory and then sell through it. So we were able to use that kind of two or three week positive working capital buffer to go out and acquire customers. And then we pay our bills and then we have more money to spend on additional acquisitions the next month.
So the more you ratchet up that CAC relative to LTV, the more careful you have to be with how much you kind of allow yourself to spend. Because we didn't really know what our LTV was until really just recently we got our very first 24 month cohort which I think is kind of a good estimate of what your true LTV really is.
A year is a little bit, certainly six months is too short, five years might not be reflective of new cohorts acquired but a good 24 months you really kind of understand what your customer. How long your customer is willing to stay with you and how many repeat orders they're going to place. So at this point, we have a pretty clear understanding of what we can spend to acquire a customer and make money on that customer.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And I think that it's a mindset that a lot of entrepreneurs don't have. Because one of the things that initially attracted me to Ecommerce is it's like, yeah, there's strategy on this channel but it's also just math.
Bradley Savage
Yeah, it's true. It's very straightforward. Yeah, performance marketing, direct response marketing is, I mean, I really don't know how I'd ever do like to justify spending on a billboard. Even CTV is getting a lot more efficient than it used to, much more transparency. But yeah, Facebook really, really pioneered like this, this one for one kind of, you you put money in, you know pretty well what you're getting out.
So I think there's really no other way to do it for a startup coming out of the gate, especially for an Ecommerce brand. Going out and buying billboards and running linear TV, man, you don't have any idea what's converting, what's working.
So the feedback loop that it enables and unlocks is crucial. Facebook will tell you exactly which ads are working, which ones aren't, and what kind of audiences are converting. So it's very helpful. Staying very, very surgical with your marketing investment.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Brad, is there anything I didn't ask you about today that you think would resonate with our audience?
Bradley Savage
Man, no. I think I could just leave everybody with some encouragement. As hard as things are, as hard as the grind is, growing the business and working on getting a new product to market, think. Always remember, there's always a harder business out there. I like to think that ours is one of the hardest. Being fresh food with zero margin for error, namely lettuce.
Imagine shipping a box of fresh lettuce from Dallas to Phoenix in July. It's not easy in a UPS trailer. I think things can always get harder. In my experience, the longer you work at something and the less you give up, the more likely your odds are to have a breakthrough. All you gotta do is last long enough to get to that next breakthrough.
So I think Steve Jobs said that half of success in entrepreneurship is attributed to just not quitting. So if you can just outlast the trials and tribulations, you'll finally get to, so long as you're selling a product that works, I think that's crucial. So find a product that is solving a problem or 10x better than the last thing, or just inject your product into an existing habit. If people already like coffee, for example, there's a never-ending market, I think, for coffee.
Literally everybody drinks coffee multiple times a day. And so that's why you've got hundreds and hundreds of coffee brands, thousands that are doing just fine because there's a market for it. Finding a product that fits very well into a pre-existing market or solving a huge problem, I think are two of the biggest ingredients to product market fit. And then, just don't give up.
I think there are other founders around there who would love to come around, come around, you know, other folks and come alongside you in terms of growth marketing operators all the way up to founders. I think there's a difficulty, it's a very difficult world to navigate alone. So make sure that you're doing it with other folks.
That's probably my biggest encouragement. I was a solo founder for the first three years. I brought in an operating partner about a year ago who's a veteran in the fresh prepared food space. And it's been super helpful to have someone else in the trenches with me. So if you don't have a co-founder, go find one. It's worth it.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Yeah. I don't think that the agency would still be here if I didn't have a co-founder. And probably one of the most serendipitous and luckiest things was that we do complement each other. They're not the same skill sets. But when we first got this thing going, we had no clue about any of this. Most businesses out there, you just get started. Next thing you know, you're still doing it.
Bradley Savage
Yeah.
Chase Clymer
But yeah, having a co-founder is great.
Bradley Savage
I love that. Everything is figureoutable.
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
Bradley Savage
It's a matter of resilience and tenacity.
Chase Clymer
And creativity.
Bradley Savage
Yeah, for sure. Creativity. Yeah, I would say resilience drives creativity, trumps intelligence every time.
Yeah, raw intelligence is great for problem solving. But if you don't have the drive and the willingness and the creativity to go out there and do it, those are the foundational ingredients.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. There's some saying out there like, “If you want to find a new way to do a hard job, give it to the laziest person.” It's like, just find an easier way to do it.
Bradley Savage
That is so true. That's literally the reason why Gardencup was founded. It's because I was too lazy to prep my own salad.
Chase Clymer
I love it, Brad. Thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing all those amazing insights.
Bradley Savage
Thanks, Chase. Talk to you later.
Transcript
