In a world full of high tech innovations and complicated concerns, sometimes it’s the elegant innovations that mean the most and for one local entrepreneur, simply allowing customers to enjoy the nourishing comfort of a good soup has catapulted her to social media fame.
Art of Broth sells a powderized form of bone broth that fits into a single-use teabag. The easily transportable bags just need to be added to some hot water and they steep just like any tea would.
Sophie Helfend, the business’ owner, is running the show by herself entirely through her Instagram and her website but she’s also making direct connections to her customers who appreciate the quality and convenience of her product.
Through the digital and personal soup selling methods, she’s found a way to build upon the business founded by her father, Jody Helfend, in 2019. Originally, the family business was only serving 10 pound vats of soup to hotels and restaurants, which is typical for a soup company. However, this one-person-serving revolutionized their product which is now fully based around the “tea” bags.
When Helfend’s father asked her and her brothers to take over the business so it wasn’t bought out, she jumped at the chance and was happy to keep something that had been such a strong part of her childhood in the lineage.
“I like to joke that 90% of my blood is like chicken broth. Like I grew up going to meat plants with my dad, going to trade shows with my family, we were taste testing soup all the time,” said Helfend. “So soup is really in our DNA, and that's why taking over this company just felt like such a natural progression of the family business, and I didn't want it to die, because it was a big part of my childhood.”
Taking over the business presented a major question for Helfend: how should she promote this product? Advertisement is expensive, especially when it involves a business in L.A. and a one woman show. She decided on using Instagram as an advertising platform.
“Instagram really allowed me to create a digital footprint or a digital store of my business, and I was able to communicate just directly with my consumers. And I think most brands kind of fall into this like, Oh, we're really corporate, and we have a message, which is great, but we don't really know who runs the company … And I wanted to have a brand where, if someone said, like, oh, who runs the art of broth, they know exactly who it is. It's Sophie.”
Helfend explained how important it was for her to have a direct relationship with her customers. She is the only person working at Art of Broth, and it’s better for her to be able to speak directly to consumers if they have a problem with shipping or have feedback for her. She has found that through talking to customers herself, she’s able to understand people’s preferences better.
“Talking directly to a customer just helps me as a brand so much because it tells me, oh, customers that are living in this area don't like this flavor because of this reason, or customers in this area will use the product three times as much in this region because of this,” she said.
While she’s adapted to using social media as her primary platform, she’s still working through the nuances of being a female owned company in a cutthroat business. She said smaller entities are more susceptible to mistreatment from larger rivals and there are challenges operating at small scale, like a lack of resources.
However, she said the only way forward is to push through those problems.
“I would say the quality that you need to succeed online is relentless persistence. You're not going to go viral on your first video or your fifth video or your 100th video, you’re likely to go viral on your 7,000th video,” said Helfend. “And I think it's so important for founders to know that it's a volume game and you just have to keep posting, keep trying and start just taking little tidbits of what worked and what didn't work… as long as you just continue to learn what's working, what's not working, and just keep kind of improving over time, then social media is incredible.”