WellEasy Co-founder & CEO Sonny Drinkwater

WellEasy

In this Q&A, WellEasy co-founder and CEO Sonny Drinkwater discusses the brand’s ecommerce platform for healthy groceries and products. Sonny shares how the company’s member-based model unlocks affordability and accessibility to better health for more people.

Can you tell us about what you’re working on at WellEasy?

Sonny Drinkwater: WellEasy is an online membership club making healthy living easy and accessible for everyone. Our members access up to 35% off recommended retail price (RRP) on an expert-curated range of healthy groceries and products, for every lifestyle and value, delivered to their door.

Additionally, for every new member that joins, we sponsor a free membership for a low-income family, student, teacher, NHS worker, and armed forces veteran.

With the best prices on the market, the most convenient one-stop shopping experience, personalisation tech connecting consumers to the right products, and the upcoming launch of our own brand, we are the first health and wellness grocery offering in the UK that allows people to shop for more healthy products more often.

How did you come up with the idea? What key insight led you to pursue this opportunity?

SD: Whilst at university, [co-founder] Josh Barley and I both experienced significant health issues. I’d gotten far too into a calorie-counting spiral and was eating pretty much nothing. Josh had really bad exposure to black mould in his university halls and was unwell for a long while.

Looking for ways to get better, we both became very passionate about healthy food, healthy living, and lifestyle changes. But, we soon realised that when you walk into any UK supermarket, the first products you see have ingredient lists as long as your arm and many you can’t even pronounce — and yet they sell for like 50p.

The product or brand that’s better for you, better for the planet, and has better ingredients is lucky to even be in the store in the first place. If it is, it tends to be marked up in price by up to 60%. You end up overpaying in costs and shipping fees, shopping at multiple places, and having to do your own research to find out what’s actually healthy.

The problem? The UK food system just isn’t set up to incentivise healthier choices. With people facing high prices and confusing information, we set out to build a grocery store for the modern-day health consumer.

How did you turn your idea into a company?

SD: When we first started, Josh and I took out a small startup loan, ordered some stock from a wholesaler, and started packing orders from my parents’ garage. A Shopify store and some ads on Google were all we needed to get going.

Within three months, we had to outsource our fulfillment, as we had more orders than we could manage as well as a lot of damaged products from our inefficient packing. Fortunately, at nine months, we raised our first £400K pre-seed round from some amazing angel investors that loved our space and knew how fragmented health and wellness retail currently was.

At the time, we had 400 annual members and about £8K in monthly revenues. Since then, we’ve achieved nearly 4.5K annual members and are doing £100K in monthly revenues.

We’ve got a small team with rockstars in marketing and customer success, as well as some very experienced tech developers from The Hut Group. Fundraising hasn’t been the easiest in this climate, but our model, unit economics, and cohort data are helping us out tremendously.

How big can this get? What’s the addressable market and how do you go about capturing it?

SD: The health and wellness retail market is already huge, estimated to be worth over £6.75T by 2030. However, there are still enormous parts of the population that are yet to become part of this market due to high prices, inconvenience, and confusion about what’s actually healthy.

We want to help over 1B people shop regularly for healthy groceries by 2030. And we’ll directly tackle the three barriers with our price-saving membership model, a convenient one-stop shop and next-day delivery service, and the most personalised healthy shopping experience based on AI, values, and nutritional data.

We’re making it ‘WellEasy’ for everyone.

Who is the core customer? How are you acquiring customers? And how will you grow the customer base?

SD: Right now, we have a few different cohorts of customers. Our members tend to range from young millennials living in cities and wanting cleaner groceries and products to older-aged adults (50–70s) that choose our membership to help with weight loss, battle diseases like cancer and diabetes, or keep healthier for longer.

One of our largest customer groups at the minute tends to be mums with young children that are either making healthier choices due to menopause, wanting organic food products, or just generally looking to make better choices. Statistically, they also purchase on behalf of their partners and children too.

Currently, we are fortunate to have one of the fastest-growing affiliate communities in the health and wellness space (made up of nutritionists, health coaches, trainers, and more) that we are looking to scale up quickly. With in-person communities and a strong presence online, they all have a large following that would value shopping with WellEasy.

Supported by an effective Google strategy, SEO, and shoppable recipe and blog content, we’ll continue scaling our membership base across this community while building the brand that takes this market to the masses.

Looking at your road map, what are some of the milestones you’re targeting over the next 3-6 months?

SD: In the next six months, we hope to close our next fundraising round, invest further into the personalisation and AI on the WellEasy store, onboard five additional team members, and launch our first 10 SKUs from our own brand range (to be announced soon).

With our current growth rates, we’re aiming to get to £2.5M annualised revenue run rate and hit 6K annual members.

Anything else you’d like to share with readers?

SD: We’ve recently launched our brand new Health Points scheme for members. You can now earn health points on every order, with every friend you refer, and loads more activities. All of these points are redeemable on future WellEasy shops (and eventually more to come).

If you’re interested in having your company featured in our Startup Q&A series, send an email to team@fitt.co.