Our 5-Step Process for New Product Flavors

Hello!

Welcome back for some more bites to chew on. 

On the Menu

At Obvi, we regularly introduce new product flavors to keep customers engaged, happy, and excited to try more of what Obvi has to offer. 

Here’s our 5-step process of how we approach expanding our flavors.

Bite 1: 🔎 Sourcing Ideas from Facebook (Qualitative)

🌟 We take a qualitative approach to getting new flavor ideas and a quantitative approach to narrowing down what we’ll actually launch.

On the qualitative side, we’re always reading posts in our 75,000-strong Facebook community who are posting all the time, every day, and we consider all their feedback, good and bad. 

We’ll see that there are frequently posts about wanting new flavors for certain products.

For example, someone will post about our collagen, saying “I really want a caramel macchiato flavor.” Then, a bunch of people will start piling on that post and commenting “Oh my God! That sounds amazing!” and “I need that!” 

If something really catches our eye and has particularly high engagement, we’ll consider it and put it on the list of things we need to explore.

Bite 2: ❓Asking the Community (Quantitative)

From those qualitative stories and comments, we’ll gather a list of the 10-20 most popular suggestions, then start sourcing quantitative feedback.

For example, we have sent out surveys saying:

• How has your experience been with Obvi?

• What are your favorite products?

• We’re thinking of expanding the flavor line. Here are the flavor options. Please rank order them from 1-10.

From there, we’ll look at the results, and we’ll consider the top flavors.

🌟 We only launch flavors that are heavily voted for.

Bite 3: 🧪 R&D’ing

When we have the flavors, the next step is to start working with our manufacturer, which comes down to:

• Talking about what’s possible

• Asking for samples

• Getting them overnighted

• Tasting them as a company 

• Giving feedback to the manufacturer (too sweet, less sweet, more of X flavor, less of Y flavor)

• Further refinement

• Alignment

 🌟We’ll never launch anything that we don’t come to full agreement around.

Bite 4: 🏭 Manufacturing

Once we approve the flavor, the manufacturing process begins. 

First, we need to figure out how many we should be making. We’ll look into buyer behavior and create an estimate. For example, a new flavor may be in the ballpark of one we already have (or have data around), which can inform quantity.

For example, if you have a coffee flavor of a product that’s done extremely well, and you’re looking to release a coffee variant (e.g., the caramel macchiato), you likely can place a higher order. If it’s something completely new, you might want to be a bit more careful with order quantity. 

For us, we’re deciding whether we go with our manufacturer’s minimum order quantity so that it can truly be a limited edition release. That way, for customers who really want a flavor from Obvi, they’ll buy it. 

After that, it comes down to label design, website planning, and our manufacturer shipping product to our WI warehouse.

Then, the marketing will begin.

Bite 5: 🚀 Launching (Marketing & Shipping)

Marketing will start in the communities: We’ll go live on FB and announce something is coming (“The caramel macchiato flavor is coming out this Friday, and we’re going to give a few away NOW.”). 

We’ll ask the members to comment about why they’re excited about it, basically with the goal of trying to go viral within our own community.

We want people to be as engaged as possible. 

Then:

• Email promos 

• SMS promos

• Designers and editors will start creating ads

• Web changes: the entire website will be updated for the launch

When we launch, we know we’ll sell out, but we’ll continue to promote it until it does in fact sell out. 

Rinse and repeat.

Bonus Bite: 🤔 Deciding on Permanent Products

The above represents a limited quantity -> selling out methodology.

For us, a flavor that does really well will sell out in about a week. (Our slower-sellers may take a month or so to sell out.)

We’ll likely bring back flavors that do sell out in a week a couple months later. It’ll probably be a minimum order quantity to ensure we quickly sell through our stock.

🌟 We’ve found that if we bring a flavor back, it sells out even faster the second time. 

However, making something more permanent requires more thought, and it comes back to the community. If folks are saying that they’re going through the product really quickly and the flavor is being brought up a lot in posts and comments, only then will we make something more permanent.

Also: Keep in mind that not everything makes sense as a permanent product, and that’s actually a good thing. It keeps people looking forward to your seasonal offerings. (Should PSL even be a thing in April?)

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Catchew Later!

We sincerely appreciate every moment you spend with us and reading our work. We’ll see you soon.

All the best,

Ron & Ash