From 1 customer to 10,000

Co-founder James Mansfield talks about building Field & Flower from scratch and tells the story of how we signed up our first ever subscription customer...

Customer acquisition on day 1 was simple. We called in a favour and asked our mums, then our friends to buy a box of our beef. We only needed to sell 30! They each wrote a cheque and we got to work selecting a Home Farm heifer for our business idea. Four weeks later (the time it takes to age our beef) we made our first burgers in Flower’s mum’s kitchen and packaged up our boxes full of steaks and roasting joints. We even wrapped every box in brown paper!

Our mums and friends were dutifully complimentary on the quality of the beef and we began to think about how we’d get some proper customers. We had no idea how to market online so we started with good old-fashioned face-to-face sales. We started with our personal email list and phone book. It was a good obvious next step. At the same time we built a small non-ecommerce website and got involved with a great company called the Real Food Festival, who we still work with today. They allowed us to have a stall at Borough Market and then later at their food festival. We got some coverage in the national press, friends recommended friends and we managed to slowly build our business. This included building our email address database, which has proven very important.

Alongside selling meat by email and phone for the first year, we launched an events business to manage our stock. We took our grass fed beef to Glastonbury and V Festival and sold to festival goers from our field kitchen. As we grew the business we focused on telling people our story, explaining the benefits of grass fed beef and how we could deliver this straight to their homes, which was unique.

Direct selling was and still is a very important part of growing our customer base. We’re still in touch with many customers whom we met at our first ever food show, such as the famous Billy brisket from Texas who wanted a brisket every month. Our first subscription customer.

We accelerated our growth with a small team who helped us at food shows. We continued to build our email address database and send weekly emails. Our customers continued to recommend us and we started running Meat Up butchery events for them to bring their friends and family to.

We slowly built the customer base so we could deliver a personal service and ensure our members were looked after. We stuck to our guns and continued to focus on producing the very best product and a reliable service. Our ecommerce website launched and we started to get orders from people searching for particular cuts of grass fed, free range meat. Focusing on SEO was important. Ecommerce technology helped the ordering process for our customers too.

Now we’re at 4,500 customers who spend £537 in their lifetime with an average spend of £51 per box. 95% of our customer base are subscription members. We service a varied demographic, and even go as far as Edinburgh and the Isle of Wight. Many of our customers have been with us from 2011. There was no golden bullet when acquiring customers, just a belief in the product and that there are many people out there looking for premium free range meat.

We now have plans to get to 10,000 active customers in twelve months. The opportunity for us is twofold. We will build on direct channels that have served us so well and then move for the first time into digital marketing. We know people are increasingly searching for grass fed, free range products and we need to help them find Field & Flower amongst the busy marketplace which is the internet.

Our plans for the next 3 years are to bring digital marketing skills into Field & Flower. We have just hired Abel&Cole’s Head of Digital Marketing. We will test and promote our service via social media advertising and PPC to complement our offline marketing plan. We will launch a mobile app and we’ll integrate a semi-automatic customer referral scheme. We will also continue to collaborate with ambassadors and drive online PR and referral. This plan has been formulated over the last 6 months and we’re excited. The investment has been made in the website and our picking and packing operations so we’re all set to go!

What now? We need your help to hit our funding target which will in turn help us continue to find our new customers and ambassadors. We’re proud that our tech food business is solving a problem for so many already that are turning their back on supermarket meat. Hopefully you’ll join us.

For more information on investing please watch our crowdfunding video, or read more on our Crowdcube page.

*Investments of this nature carry risks to your capital, please remember to #InvestAware. See Crowdcube’s terms and conditions for more information.