We were lucky to catch up with Leslie Zinn recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Leslie thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What sort of legacy are you hoping to build. What do you think people will say about you after you are gone, what do you hope to be remembered for?
We have been committed to serving our community, and to offering easy ways to be healthy for more than 25 years, so I hope that Arden’s Garden will always be known as a place that provides a path to ultimate health and longevity.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?
Arden’s Garden started when my mom, Arden Zinn, started a small-scale cold-pressed juice business in 1994. Arden was a health, wellness, and exercise pioneer way before they were popular. She owned a chain of fitness studios and was a fitness correspondent for CNN in the 70s and 80s. She read about the Norwalk juicer – a cold-pressing juice machine, in 1963 but couldn’t afford it at that time. In 1993, she finally bought the Norwalk using her credit card and that’s how it all started. To make herself feel better after the expensive purchase, she started offering her juice to her friends…for free. At the time, I had graduated from Ga. Tech in business, but I wasn’t fulfilled in what I was doing, so I started helping my mom sell her juice.
Now we have 16 retail stores throughout the greater Atlanta area, two manufacturing facilities, and wholesale partners in the southeast region. We’re happy to share our passion of bringing health and wellness to the community in a way that’s both accessible and affordable.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
In 2003, we bought our first manufacturing facility. At that point, we had been selling to Publix for five years. One day, they called us and informed us that they decided to switch out our products for Odwalla, who at that point was owned by Coca-Cola. Publix was a big part of our business, so I wasn’t sure we were going to make it without them. So, I thought about what’s different between Arden’s Garden and Odwalla and I knew we had incredible customer loyalty. I wrote an email to a handful of customers asking them to support our small business by contacting Publix. That email was forwarded many times and those customers called Publix who listened. Within three weeks, Publix contacted us and decided to not only keep us in their stores but to also bring us into their warehouse, which expanded our reach by about 200 stores.
We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process and how that transitioned into retail stores.
At first, we didn’t have a storefront. My mom, my brother, and I would drive door-to-door in Buckhead — from offices to hair salons — bringing health and wellness to anyone in need. My brother knew how to set up the manufacturing process and that’s how we began to scale the business. We started to cold press our juice and build our own squeezing facility while also getting into retail chains like Kroger. A great benefit is that we have our own retail stores, so that has helped us determine what sells and what doesn’t sell. That direct customer contact is how we research and develop our juices. And if that juice is a hit in our retail stores, then we can manufacture it for wholesale.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.ardensgarden.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ardensgardenatl/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ardensgardenatl/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/arden’s-garden
- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ardensgardenatl
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ardensgardenatl
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUxWpVNi4cVPOxHs5Ya2-3Q/featured
Image Credits
Images courtesy of Arden’s Garden