We recently connected with Itai Schimmel and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Itai , thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

I founded Artza during the Pandemic from the comfort of my lockdown bedroom in Jerusalem with two missions in mind: 1) I want to take people on an immersive journey through the Land of Israel, building and strengthening their connection to the Land, stories, and words of the Bible that took place here in Israel.
2) I want to provide an opportunity to support the local small businesses and charities here in Israel. I want to find the small local mom & pop shops, the charity organizations doing incredible work with teens and young adults with special-abilities, to kids who have been saved from the streets and I want to find a way to help them – to make real impact on peoples lives.

I grew up in London to an Israeli mother and English father, I new what it was like to feel connected to Israel – so when I decided to move here after high-school at the age of 18 I wanted to find ways of providing this connecting to others – who may never have the opportunity to visit. And I wanted to do this in a way that is meaningful, immersive, educational and fun for the entire family!

Itai , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

So like I mentioned, I grew up in London to an Israeli mother and English father, I new what it was like to feel connected to Israel – so when I decided to move here after high-school at the age of 18 I wanted to find ways of providing this connecting to others – who may never have the opportunity to visit.

I have always loved the consumer world and market – when I graduated university studying neuroscience and psychology I went to work for an early stage venture capital fund, where we invested heavily in consumer start-ups. This was where my passion was really ignited, and i had the incredible opportunity to learn the about the process, challenges and hurdles of running and building a successful consumer brand.

My other passion has always been hospitality and community – how can we create something more than a product, how can we create that emotional connection that creates bonds between people, consumer, provider, and the other consumers.

It is through these passions that I create Artza – the fastest growing faith subscription box with over 100,000 boxes sold in under 2.5 years.

With every Artza box that you will receive packed with up to 9 handcrafted gifts, arts, foods, spices and more , we will give you and your loved ones a taste of this incredible Land. We will introduce you to its people, and take you on a journey. From the comforts of your home in America, we will deliver a little piece of what makes the Holy Land so special and bring the places we read about in the Bible to life.

I am most proud of two things:

1) The amount of businesses and charities that we have managed to support in our short time since founding Artza – 83 small businesses and over 11 charities. The amount of them that have phoned us up crying letting us know how we have saved their businesses is overwhelming and inspires us every day to do better. Both myself and the team are humbled every day that we have the opportunity to make such impact.

2) The other thing that I am most proud of is the community that we have built – Artza is something that you open together with others, be it family, kids, parents, spouse of church groups and friends. Our subscribers film their reactions, often crying with joy and emotion – they join an exclusive Facebook group and they upload constant footage of how they use their products, what it means to them – and the feedback is sensational! We love watching the Artza group which we call the “Artza Family” grow and interact with one another – we truly feel like we have built the foundations of a strong and thriving beautiful community.

What’s been the best source of new clients for you?

As with many consumer businesses – a majority of your clients and customers are going to come from Meta paid marketting.

But for us – the constant question is “How can we diversify” and can we reach customers in other ways. And the best way for us has been through PR and getting picked up on by the press. Every time we secure a big TV interview, newspaper feature are online feature we immediately see a boost in sales – and this has really helped pick up the business. When people are able to hear form us first hand in an interview what we are doing at Artza – they connect, and they subscribe.

We also have a very large team and group of influencers that are very loyal to our brand after so many years of working together and they are a real boost to – they constantly promote our products, our mission and talk so highly of our brand that their followers have become loyal subscribers too – I would recommend finding your niche of influencers and building up a strong relationship with them – it makes the world of a difference.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Wow – great question. We love our social media page – it is one of our main passions, and although we are still pretty small with 82k follows on IG and 100k on Tiktok, we love where we are at. Our engagement rate is over 15% which is wild – it just goes to show how dedicated and invested our followers really are – they care.

For us our social media channels where developed totally organically, and the aim was to build the voice of the brand. We focused les on the product itself and more on what we want to deliver – which is a unique connection and look at the land of Israel. From its culture and people, to Holy religious sites, archeology and landscapes. We pride ourselves in giving such a beautiful and fresh look of Israel which we find noone else has done or is doing – we have a professional team of videographers who travel the country shooting gorgeous footage for us to create and share with our followers as Reels.

It is then on our stories where we have more fun – this is where we shar ethe organic content, we share product, we share behind the scenes and more – this is the real personal side to the brand.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.artzabox.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artzabox/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/artzabox
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/artza-experience-israel