We recently connected with Zoe Sakoutis and have shared our conversation below.

Zoe , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

My first business, BluePrint Cleanse was a major success — we bootstrapped, scaled and sold it within 5 years. We were category leaders and creators. It was a huge success by every measure, but it wasn’t easy by any stretch. I kind of got the impression that every entrepreneurial endeavor would be as successful as BluePrint, and maybe even better. I was wrong. My second business attempt did not end well. After about a year and a half of pushing a boulder up a hill, we realized that there really wasn’t a strong enough need in the market for what we had created, and in order to scale it properly, we’d need to raise a ridiculous amount of money. So, we called it quits and humbly ate the loss. While that experience was a very expensive lesson in business, I learned a tremendous amount. You learn so much more from your failures than your successes. Fast forward a few years and I find myself in a similar situation. I started Earth & Star — a functional mushroom and adaptogen company, a few years ago, and it’s been a wild ride full of problem solving and pivots. Launching a company during covid was challenge number one. Today, the challenge is the classic chicken-and-egg situation around raising capital; once you’ve proven your concept, investors will support you, but it’s very difficult to prove your concept without capital. Sigh.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’ve been in the wellness space before wellness was a space…, which makes me feel quite old. When I was about 20 years old, I learned about raw foods and juice fasting — I never looked back. “Let food by thy medicine” became my obsession — the idea that we could heal ourselves with food was a mind-blowing concept at the time. I created a juice cleanse back in 2006, called BluePrint Cleanse, which eventually grew into a huge grab-and-go juice company that we scaled nationally and was acquired 5 years later. Today, I’m back at it with a new company called Earth & Star. I guess you could say I moved from the plant kingdom to the fungi kingdom:) Just like plants, we believe in mushrooms as medicine. We also believe in delicious ways to make that medicine go down. We focus on the habitual products you already know and love, like coffee and chocolate. Instead of asking you to choke down one more supplement or clumpy coffee substitute, we’ve simply infused your daily rituals with adaptogens, nootropics, and functional mushroom extracts for mental and physical performance, immunity, anti-inflammation, and overall health. Functional mushrooms have been around for thousands of years and we’re finally wising up to the ways in which we can harness their incredible health benefits. The Shroom Boom is real and I’m so excited to be a part of it. Mushrooms are changing the paradigm to a more preventative approach to health, which is long overdue.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I think of life as a long series of pivots and business isn’t any different. With my current business, Earth & Star, we’ve had to make so many sharp turns. We spent almost two years formulating the most incredible, premium line of ready-to-drink mushroom lattes — it was true white space and mushrooms were on the make. Unfortunately, Covid hit, and our plans changed drastically. We spent about a year and a half swimming against the current. Retail was decimated and we couldn’t raise additional capital. Beverage is an incredibly difficult category to begin with and if you want to win at retail you have to have major funding. After spending years of time and money on the beverage line, we had to cut our losses and pivot to other, more economical products that could deliver the benefits of functional mushrooms and adaptogens, like ground coffee, chocolate, gummies, etc. We remained in the category, but our business looks very different today from how we imagined it out of the gate — and that’s ok! I honestly believe it was a blessing in disguise. That was a huge pivot and I know there are more to come. Business is about evolving, adapting and not clinging to any one idea too tightly, especially if it isn’t working. There’s not a ton of room for ego start-up land.

We’d appreciate any insights you can share with us about selling a business.

I sold my first business, BluePrint Cleanse to Hain Celestial.  It was sort of a unicorn in that we never took on outside investment — we bootstrapped and were profitable very early and therefore were able to grow at a pretty good organic clip. It was only when Starbucks came knocking that we knew we were about to run into major competition — the Coke and Pepsi’s of the world. We weren’t looking to sell or even raise money at the time, but when Howard Schlutz tells you he’s interested in getting into the juice space and wants to buy your company, you’re basically put in play, whether you like it or not! We did not end up selling to Starbucks and continued to shop around for a similar size partner. We entertained so many different deal structures: minority investment, majority investment, full acquisition…. Eventually, for a few different reasons, we went with an acquisition and sold to Hain Celestial. The competition was getting too crazy, and we didn’t feel like we wanted to take the risk of continuing to grow for a second bit of the apple; It was time. Looking back, it was the right decision, as a lot of cold-pressed juice companies did not make it out alive.

Contact Info:

• Website: earthandstar.com
• Instagram: @earthandstarco
• Facebook: earth & star
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zo%C3%AB-sakoutis/

Image Credits
earth & star