Can you change the world with chocolate? And can you launch a product using only the Web's power to build communities and spread word of mouth? Sweetriot is a small multichannel start-up that aims to do both those things, one sweet tooth at a time.
Don't look for big changes yet: The New York-based company is not yet a year old and has only four full-time employees, along with a dozen part-timers. Nevertheless, Sweetriot has begun to make a name for itself selling cacao "nibs", small pieces of cacao bean dipped in high-quality chocolate, both in stores and over the Web at www.sweetriot.com.
Founder Sara Endline went looking for an entrepreneurial idea after getting her Harvard MBA and spending some time at Yahoo working on brand positioning, customer communication, and loyalty strategies.
She knew some of the trends she wanted to tap into. "People are living in this global, connected environment," she says. "They want small indulgences, but they're also worried about health and want small, controllable portions. They're living with iPods and portability. They want to buy specially-made products, and they want to support companies that show they have values."
The answer was chocolate-covered "nibs"— small remnants of the cacao bean, shaken out of the football-sized bean pods after they've been dried and roasted. The irregular pea-sized pieces are then dipped in one of three milk/dark chocolate mixtures (70% is the darkest and bitterest) and packed into recyclable tin canisters. The tins sport the sweetriot logo, a thumbprint-shaped map of the world that suggests the product's human values and quirkiness, and sell for $6 a container, or $72 for a pack of 12 one-ounce tins.
Sweetriot adopted a dual-front marketing strategy: high-profile placement in "premium natural" retail outlets such as the Whole Foods chain, and Web sales driven largely by buzz marketing from heavy PR coverage in magazines ranging from Business Week and Vanity Fair to Elle Girl and Gourmet. In its second month of operation, sweetriot chocolate became the first food product offered for sale at the design store of New York's Museum of Modern Art—not exactly bad for buzz.
For now, the retail outlets are concentrated in New York, Boston, Washington D.C., San Francisco and Los Angeles, so Sweetriot made sure to have a full-featured transactional Web site up and running at launch for non-coastal customers. Internet shoppers can buy a single tin or a three-flavor sampler pack, or they can subscribe to get either a monthly or a quarterly shipment of sweetriot for about two-thirds the retail price. Sweetriot also has special buying plans to supply weddings or other special occasions, along with Web links to special packaging ideas.
The company hasn't yet ventured into search marketing or other online advertising, although it does produce a chatty monthly newsletter and maintains e-mail communication with its online customers, if they wish it. But the Web site takes a soft-sell approach and stresses the sweetriot customer community with heavy use of photos, and online "postcards" to let users e-mail feedback or just random cacao facts. Readers can add comments to the site's blog and can also get advance notice of sweetriot events at stores and gatherings in their area.
Those events give the company some of its biggest marketing traction, Endline says. Mostly they're in-store promos at outlets like Balducci's or San Francisco's Rainbow Grocery; but Endline and company are just as likely to show up at the Sundance or Tribeca film festivals and the South by Southwest Music Festival, toting sweetriot samples and sporting "I riot for cacao" T-shirts.
That communal approach extends to the Sweetriot blog, which Endline authors. While she offers no traffic stats, she can tells it's read by the customer responses it gets, and by the links from other hot blog properties such as Gawker and Boing Boing.
"Growing the community is growing the company," says Endline. "We want to have strong relationships with our customers. We want them to smile when they get our newsletter, and to send us postcards from their travels."
"We're really trying to set an example of how to build a community of people around your product, and how to develop a product that's far beyond just something on the shelf. It's innovative, it has meaning, it's healthy, fun, joyful and has principles behind it. These are all tenets of our product. And they're things our customers seem to believe in too."
