Karen Danudjaja, the bootstrapping baddie that built Blume to $7.5 million in sales and 2000 stockists (including Wholefoods!) is on Female Founder World today!

The idea for a better-for-you latte line came to Karen in 2017 while working in corporate real estate, having multiple coffee meetings each day and then getting the caffeine jitters. 

She started off working a full time nine-to-five and also running Blume at night. By the time Blume hit around $200,000 in sales, Karen went all in and quit her day job to grow the company. 

“I felt like there was enough proof of concept, like returning customer feedback from retailers, that I was ready to go all in.”

At the beginning cafes were her biggest customer, with healthy spots adding Blume’s superfood lattes to the menu. But when lockdowns hit, 85% of Blume’s business was food service—and it all shut down over night. Karen quickly brushed up on digital marketing and pivoted the company to ecommerce.

“I took a digital marketing course March-April 2020 and then launched our first themed bundle for our ecommerce store in mid-April.” 

After that, the business shifted to ecommerce-first during the height of the pandemic, before settling into a true omnichannel strategy that’s split 50% wholesale and 50% ecommerce and includes distribution across 2000 cafes, grocery, lifestyle stores, as well as the itsblume.com website.

When Karen needed to find a cost-effective way to scale sales without hiring a team, she came up with a smart solution: build a separate, password-gated Shopify store with minimum order sizes for cafes and independent retailers to place bulk orders.

“We duplicated our regular Shopify store, adjusted pricing and added a login. We have flows set up for them the same way we do for our DTC customers, targeting abandoned carts and returning customer, but set up specific for the needs of a retailer.”

When bigger retailers like Wholefoods and Nordstrom wanted to stock Blume, Karen then built out her sales team.

During all of this growth, Karen continued to bootstrap, which meant carefully managing cash flow was key. Her tip to other bootstrapped brands is to push back on retailers’ standard 90-day payment terms to make sure invoices are paid more quickly. 

“We were really firm from the beginning with retailers that we couldn't do net 90 [to get paid for orders]. Because we were bootstrapped and we didn't have access [to cash], I just literally had to say no.”

This year, after ending 2021 with $7.5 million in sales, Blume raised its first round of money from investors, closing $2.5 million in five weeks. 

Feeling inspired? We have the exact pitch deck Karen used to raise $2.5 million in five weeks available for you to download in the Female Founder World community home. We’ve shared this resource as a first look at something exciting ✨new and shiny✨ Female Founder World is launching for our besties later this year.

Enjoyed the conversation? Take a screenshot and tag us on your Instagram stories @femalefounderworld and @jasminegarnsworthy. (Thank you :))

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Female Founder World is the place to meet your business besties online and IRL. Join our online community and get alerts about upcoming events in your city: www.femalefounderworld.norby.live

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Links and resources

• Explore Blume: itsblume.com 
• Streak email CRM: www.streak.com
• 'Meet 100 People' by Pat Hedley
• Asana: Asana.com
• Rebuy
• Typeform
• Klaviyo