Click here for Part I & Part III

Promoting happiness and wellness with natural health and beauty products

Sam Wolf is the founder and “Chief Wellness Spreader” of LuckyVitamin, an online retailer of health, wellness, bath, and beauty products. The company’s origins date back to 1956, when Sam’s grandfather Ed Wolf opened a pharmacy outside of Philadelphia. Driven by a passion for alternative medicine, and under Sam’s direction, the Wolf family business has evolved since then into a global destination for consumers seeking natural, non-pharmaceutical remedies for health concerns such as anxiety, diabetes, acne, joint pain, and high blood pressure.

EDWIN WARFIELD: What happened after you came up with a business plan for the new company? Take us through some of the big milestones.

SAM WOLF: There have been a lot of milestones over the last 12 years. When I think back to the launch of LuckyVitamin.com: as much as I had experience and knowledge, and learned—as I was building this business in the early days of it about—what it would take to start a website, I didn’t have all of the things figured out around running an e-commerce company. Take that back to the very first order that I received after the website launched—in fact, the website launched and it was over a week before we got the first order, and I had to spend over six months trying to figure out building this website, building this business site—I turned it on expecting all of the orders and business to come in, and it didn’t quite work like that. Very quickly I went into small panic as I realized that the last six, six-and-a-half months of my life might not have been the best investment in my time, and started to educate and explore all aspects of what it would take to do online marketing. I quickly found some avenues to bring awareness and optimize the site through search engine optimization and search engine marketing, and about a week, week-and-a-half later, I finally got that first order.

That was a little bit of a relief, except for the fact that I didn't even have it fully figured out how I was going to ship that order. The order came in, I went to the store to find the inventory that I hoped we had in stock—because we didn’t have a live inventory system or anything like that—and fortunately, the fish oil that a customer ordered was in stock and available to ship. The only problem was that I had no packing tape. I had to run down the street, buy some packing tape, take that back. And then I realized I didn't have a box to put it in. Long story short: about eight hours later got that first order out the door, and I realized I was going to have to find some efficiencies if this business was going to be successful, and fortunately we did.

That was the first milestone: getting that first order and getting it out of the door. From there, things started to really scale quickly. We went from one order a day to ten orders a day to hundred orders a day, and the next thing was I needed help. So, as any scrappy entrepreneur does when you need help, I went with the free help and pulled my mother and my brothers into the business, and said, “Hey guys, I need you to come help me pack and ship orders, because I can’t do this 15, 16 hours a day on my own anymore. I can’t pay you anything, but I’ll buy you lunch. Please help.” They saw the opportunity, and saw what was happening, and were excited to help out in anyway. I think that’s the key thing about a family business, which we’ve got: everybody works together. And now we’ve got a much larger family, but we started out with just my core family.

Q. How has the business evolved as you’ve expanded?

A. When we first started out, we started out representing many of the major natural products, organic product brands; we partnered with a lot of great partners who have been instrumental to our success as we’ve grown and have worked with us. Over the more recent years, we’ve started to actually invest and develop some of our own products in areas where we think we can provide added value to consumers, either through more premium products, different formulations, or just comparable products at a better value. We’ve started to launch several products under the Lucky sub brand that we’ve got now. We’ve got our own vitamin products, we’ve got products in the food and grocery space, we’ve got products in the sports and fitness category, and we’ve got several other branded products that we’re working on rolling out over the next year or so.

Connect with Sam on LinkedIn

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ABOUT NEWMARK KNIGHT FRANK

Newmark Knight Frank (NKF) is one of the world's leading commercial real estate advisory firms. Together with London-based partner Knight Frank and independently-owned offices, NKF's 15,000 professionals operate from more than 400 offices in established and emerging property markets on six continents.

With roots dating back to 1929, NKF's strong foundation makes it one of the most trusted names in commercial real estate. NKF's full-service platform comprises BGC's real estate services segment, offering commercial real estate tenants, landlords, investors and developers a wide range of services including leasing; capital markets services, including investment sales, debt placement, appraisal, and valuation services; commercial mortgage brokerage services; as well as corporate advisory services, consulting, project and development management, and property and corporate facilities management services. For further information, visit www.ngkf.com.

NKF is a part of BGC Partners, Inc., a leading global brokerage company servicing the financial and real estate markets. BGC's common stock trades on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the ticker symbol (NASDAQ: BGCP). BGC also has an outstanding bond issuance of Senior Notes due June 15, 2042, which trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol (NYSE: BGCA). BGC Partners is led by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer  Howard W. Lutnick. For more information, please visit www.bgcpartners.com.

Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

If you're interested in reaching CEOs, please contact edwin.warfield@citybuzz.co

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https://www.luckyvitamin.com/