Nubocha
Brand Background
Founded in 2019, Nubocha is a plant-based, low sugar, delicious gelato. Created by the founder of Italy’s most prominent Chocolate brands, D’omori now an Illy Café Brand, it has been heralded as 2020’s most flavorful and innovative plant-based gelatos in the marketplace. Using Allulose as its sweetener, it boasts a very low carb count and glycemic index yet tastes just like the real thing.
The Challenge
New Brand Launch During COVID-19
Nubocha launched and planned on going to market with the release date coinciding with Expo West 2020 or better known as the beginning of Covid. With the cancellation of one of the biggest venues to release a new product Nubocha faced a significant challenges. How would they go to market without exposure to new buyers? How would they move into distribution during the most daunting health and fiscal crisis in the history or the modern world? Additionally, Nubocha’s CEO was based in Italy and unable to travel. How could they activate retail from so far away?
The Solution
Outsourced Sales, Marketing, Operations and Marketing Team
Nubocha engaged Venice Made. Our first order of duty was to bring Nubocha to the local SoCal market without the exposure afforded at Expo West. Within 48 hours of being hired we built a plan to do street and event-based venues where we could sample the product, capture social media content to build brand presence in all of the regions where we expected to provide shelf placement.
Maximize Every Opportunity, No Matter How Small
In order to forecast sales for the year and gain clarity on business cashflow, we modeled a go to market plan with immediate, mid and long term opportunities. All were based on the clear issues we faced with both Covid, product not yet in distribution and no active customers. We gained distribution for SoCal with a small regional distributor and began to gain placement almost immediately. We created a curbside ordering program with Postmates and built a D2C online ordering platform to continue to swell brand interest. A big push with PR helped immensely. Nubocha was named as one of the Nexty Award winners for 2020 and several publications wrote articles noting the brand and its unique attributes.
Spread the Word
We developed a broad influencer program as well. Within the first 6 months of our engagement we retained 109 influencers, all at no fee, and expanded IG and FB followers by 364%.
The Results
During one of the most chaotic and difficult periods for new brands, Venice Made was able to bring Nubocha to more than 381 retailers in SoCal and the SouthWest.
This was an achievement of 1018% above goal and has been a buoy to the success of the brand as it carves it way forward.