About the business: Founder Najee Ellerbe describes Everybody’s Juice as a nutrition company, one that has expanded over just a few years from cold-pressed juices made in his kitchen to wellness shots, nutrition coaching, cookbooks and a podcast.
It’s a business with a healthy goal, Ellerbe said: to provide nutritious food products to Black and brown people of underserved communities, especially the food deserts of D.C.’s wards 7 and 8.
How it started: Ellerbe was moving up the career ladder of a branding company until he was fired in 2019. He wasn’t given a specific reason, he said, just “not a good fit.”
It was a blessing in disguise, he said. “I always wanted to start my own juicing company, but I was too comfortable,” he said. “I was making good money. I bought a house. I had my feet kicked up too much. I didn’t really have that extra gear of drive and hustle that I would have had if I didn’t have a job.”
The interest in juice dates back to a bout with the flu, Ellerbe said. It was a terribly slow recovery and nothing was working until he came across juicing as a potential natural fix. He ordered a flimsy juicer off of Amazon while his mom ran out to pick up produce: lemons, kale, cucumber and green apples. He cleansed for five days and, he said, it worked.
Ellerbe cashed out his 401(k) and emptied his savings, about $40,000 in all, and put it all into his new business, which was based initially out of his home in 2019. He’s since moved to a commercial kitchen in Northeast D.C., backed by a team of four, in addition to himself in the CEO role — two to make the juice, two in marketing.
The pandemic effect: At the start, Ellerbe worked every angle to get his juice products in front of potential customers. He offered tastes at pop-ups and farmers markets, recreation centers and office buildings.
It paid off from the beginning. He’s not exactly sure where it caught their attention, but just a couple of months after launching Everybody’s Juice, Ellerbe received an email from the director of operations for Capital One Cafe, asking about the potential for a partnership. He went through an interview process and eventually got his juices into local Capital One Cafe locations — first in Georgetown, then Chinatown and now Anacostia.
When the pandemic struck, those in-person tasting sessions came to a halt. That didn’t stop the growth of Everybody’s Juice, but it did make the outreach more challenging.
“Entrepreneurship is not easy,” he said. “It’s going to challenge your soul more than anything.”
The pandemic pivot: Covid-19 led Ellerbe into expansion mode. He became a certified nutritionist and added online nutrition classes. He started offering cookbooks and fat-loss guides, launched his “Do Something Good Today” podcast and, perhaps most importantly, started shipping his products outside of the D.C. area through an affiliate marketing program.
The company, Ellerbe said, made $30,000 its first year, $75,000 in 2020 and $120,000 in 2021.
The challenge: The supply chain, not surprisingly. Not on the produce side — Ellerbe said he works with local farms for those needs, whether the fruits and veggies are grown locally or are imported, like pineapples.
It’s the bottles.
“We usually have to order in crazy bulk because we just don’t know how long that next order will be,” he said.
And there’s the added challenge, he said, of being a business owner of color: “We don’t have the opportunity to make mistakes.”
What’s next: Ellerbe said he is in talks with a big PR agency to grow the brand, with plans to continue widening his shipping radius to the West Coast. He landed on the Forbes Next 1000 list for 2021, and his business was recently featured in a Season 4 episode of “Start Small, Dream Big,” a podcast from the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream.
“We just didn’t want to get into this to be a local company,” Ellerbe said, “or a regional company, for that matter.”
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