Revenue in 2020 for the superfood powder startup Golde grew five times from the previous year. And then it doubled in 2021.
The company "broke seven figures profitably" in 2020, according to Golde founder and CEO Trinity Mouzon Wofford.
That type of scale couldn't have happened easily without some financial backing. While many startup founders seek funding from investors, Mouzon Wofford took another route.
She didn’t want to give away too much of her company’s equity, so instead, she says she scaled up the company by strategically leveraging debt.
Golde’s first product in 2017 was a turmeric latte powder blend. Including five new products released in 2021, the company now sells about 12 products. The products are sold through Target, Goop and Urban Outfitters, among other smaller retailers.
The Business Review spoke with Mouzon Wofford about how she leveraged debt to scale up the business and how that expansion looked.
Have you brought on investor capital to help scale growth? We've brought on a little investor capital. Not a ton. We tried to keep the business lean over these first five years or so. But that was definitely something that helped us manage inventory and marketing, things like that.
We have several different investors. A lot of them are angel investors who are individuals who just really believe in what we are doing – a lot of successful founders who are now looking to bring their expertise into the space and help other entrepreneurs rise up in their journey. That was, by far, the majority of the money that we raised. And then we did raise capital from a couple of venture funds as well. They are firms that are specializing in high-growth consumer products.
How were you able to scale up so quickly without funding from investors? A big thing that I think is really important for entrepreneurs to consider when they are looking at this kind of step, change, opportunity is leveraging debt in the right way. "Debt" kind of has a bad connotation to it: You don't want to be in debt. But as a business, you can borrow against things like your inventory or your receivables with a big retailer, like Target, to get cash faster. And as long as you're getting paid by that retailer, it's actually a really smart way to build your business, get access to more capital, without giving everything away to investors. To me, it's a much better deal for founders to take on smart debt versus raising millions and millions of dollars in investor capital. We've tried to use a balanced approach there so we can still achieve all the goals that we want, but we can grow at the pace that feels right for us.
In what ways have you been able to build up operations over the past couple of years? We have different manufacturing partners across the country that we work with. We work really closely, hand-in-hand, with those partners. The formulas are all ours. We source every raw material ourselves, but then those raw materials go to a manufacturing partner that creates it for us – blending the powder together and putting it in the packaging. Then from there, the products go to our warehouse, which is based in Texas. So that's where all of our product is inventoried and stored until a customer purchases it, and it ships out from there.
It's definitely grown a lot. We used to have our inventory in our apartment in Brooklyn. We've scaled tremendously since then.
Interview has been edited and condensed.
