The Million Dollar Olive Oil Project

The backstory

In October 2020, I had joined a small venture studio as an Entrepreneur in Residence, tasked with developing an incubation and acceleration division. I was tasked with General Managing a really incredible startup based in a small village outside of Rome in Italy (Palombara Sabina). I’ll detail that business in another post, but here’s the quick story about them. Chiara Nicolanti was a young Italian actress from this particular village in Italy, traveling across the world to act in plays and productions. When she became pregnant with her first child, she was let go from her job. She returned home to her village uncertain what the future would hold. Her grandmother (nonna) told her to come over her apartment where she would make her something special. Her nonna started making homemade pasta for her. Chiara took a picture of her nonna’s hands kneading the dough and posted it on Facebook with the caption, “who would like to learn to make pasta with my grandmother?” By the power of the internet, her post went viral…she then created an Airbnb experience where travelers from all over the world would make the short trip from Rome to her village to make pasta with her grandmother.

This all changed when Covid hit in the spring of 2020. The lockdowns kept tourists from reaching their village, and her budding business was completely leveled. Enter Brent Freeman from Stealth Venture Labs. Once a traveler to the Chiara’s Airbnb experience who would become close friends with the family after multiple pasta-making experiences. He saw the magic in Chiara and Palombara Sabina. Chiara partnered with Brent to bring their handmade pasta experience virtual, and soon began teaching online class to people all over the world; even big companies like Shopify, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and so many more, were using Chiara’s pasta making classes for team building exercises while the workforce was stuck at home.

liquid gold

In December 2020, Brent explained his and Chiara’s vision for creating an olive oil brand with Chiara’s grandmother, Nonna Nerina, being the inspiration and face (literally) of the brand. Palombara Sabina had a unique position in the olive oil world. Its olive trees are among the oldest in Europe, and their olive oil production pre-dates the Roman civilization. The olive oil is just plain excellent. 100% Italian, non-blended, extra-virgin olive oil.

The real magic to this olive oil is how it’s harvested. Chiara’s grandmother, and whole family really, climbs old wooden ladders to hand-pluck the olives from the branches as they land on nets on the ground. Did I mention Chiara’s grandmother is 86 years old? The olive oil enjoyed by a special select group of people is literally hand-picked by Chiara’s grandmother. When people talk about food being made with love- this is it. When you drizzle that golden oil on your fresh bruschetta, you can’t help but think- Nonna Nerina made this happen. If you’ve taken a pasta class with them virtually, or better yet been to Palombara Sabina to cook with them in-person, you can’t help but get goosebumps when you think about it. How many olive oils can you say that about?

Since the olive oil isn’t blended with other regions and countries, like so many grocery store olive oils are, there’s only a limited supply of their “gold”. This isn’t about making several millions of dollars scaling up an olive oil business. This is about Chiara, Nonna Nerina, and their family making a living doing what they love- giving the love to others by physically and mentally working hard on your behalf. Again, the stuff fairytales are made of.

Figure It Out

In December 2020, Brent asked me to bring this concept to life and drive the business from start to finish; create the branding in Chiara’s vision, figure out everything that needed to be done to legally import a high-volume of olive oil into the US, store it at a third-party fulfillment center (3PL), and set up an automated subscription business that connected Shopify to the 3PL, market the olive oil to past and new customers of the handmade pasta business, and everything in between.

I was very familiar with the 3PL world as I was among the first to use Fulfillment By Amazon when it launched. I had toured 2 of their facilities, and connected 2 eCommerce businesses to them previously. Importing a perishable food from Italy was something I had not had experience with…however, in the role of EIR, you need to “figure it out.”

I leveraged my network to get in touch with the Director of International Procurement from NYC’s leading Specialty Food Distribution company. She shared her labeling consultant which would help us be sure we were FDA compliant, and that we had all the necessary paperwork in place for import.

Chiara’s family had been selling their olive yield to a distributer previously, but had never ventured down the path of selling direct to someone’s doorstep- let alone exporting to the US. Luckily, their distributor shared their freight forwarder contact with me and I started down the path of setting up export/import for their business.

Next, I needed packaging. I called the guy who did all my custom packaging during my SportsMemorabilia.com days. He had sold his packaging business to a larger corporation, much like I had experienced with my business, SportsMemorabilia.com, being sold to Fanatics. When I told him about the project he was all-in on helping. He makes homemade pizza in a make-shift mobile oven attached to a truck, and was a consumer of high-end olive oil. Most times good people just want to see good people succeed, and he was captured by Chiara and Nonna Nerina’s story and had a history of helping me solve packaging challenges. So, our custom box creative was designed by the Creative Director at the venture studio, and the box specs were created by my packaging guy Bruce.

We now had packaging ready to be shipped to the 3PL and assembled there once the olive oil bottles arrived. After about 30 days on a freight ship on the water, our bottles arrived in Ft Lauderdale, Florida and were transported to Shipmonk’s fulfillment facility for a “kitting” project that would place the bottles into the boxes along with a custom insert message from Nonna Nerina.

Shopify and Shipmonk were synced up, and the automated process of fulfilling the subscription for “Nonna’s Gold” olive oil began. But next is when the real fun (and challenges) started…

a million dollar Purchase order

In the winter of 2021, Shopify became aware of Chiara and Nonna’s story and reached out to do an interview with Chiara, as they were scouting Shopify merchants to produce a feature-length documentary for their annual company “Summit”, that would be live-streamed to all 12,000 Shopify employees all over the world.

I sat on the video call with Chiara and Shopify’s executive producers as Chiara told them the story of her business with her grandmother. Both Shopify producers were in tears about 2 minutes into the story, and I knew right away Chiara was their golden child of Shopify. They emailed us about a week later to let us know they picked Nonna’s Gold to be the feature documentary, and their production team would fly out Rome the following week to document Chiara’s daily life and the olive oil production, which was in full-swing in December 2021.

Not only would Shopify produce a heartwarming feature of Chiara’s business, they wanted to gift a bottle of Nonna’s Gold to all 12,000+ Shopify employees. Once again, Brent and Chiara had another “figure it out” task for me. We needed to rush production on more bottles of olive oil, expedite import into the US, then send directly to each Shopify employee in over 60 countries across the world. It was a $1 million purchase order for the business barely 1 year into its operation.

So…I worked with Chiara’s and her producer to air freight more bottles into the US to be packed and reshipped out to the rest of the world.

something doesn’t look right…

It’s during projects like this where consultants and advisors come in handy. With a low budget for staff and analytics, you need eyes on a project to spot any cracks in the foundation. When reviewing their financials, I noticed inconsistencies with the reporting and high-costs associated to a particular country. Something just didn’t look right…

As I drilled into the data reports, I noticed that Ireland has a Duties/Tax charge that wasn’t consistent with other countries, and it was growing by the day. Ultimately, I identified there was a billing error happening with DHL that was causing Duties/Tax to charge hundreds of dollars per shipment. You might think, “just tell them there’s an error and to stop it, and refund what was already paid.” Not so fast my friend…this is where you need pressure, network, and speed to solve this problem and stop the bleeding- and demand your lost blood back as soon as possible. The billing errors were exceeding $15,000. For a small bootstrapped business, this type of cashflow loss could be life or death.

I used LinkedIn to find the DHL representative responsible for the Shipmonk account, because I wasn’t getting the support needed to fix the issue. I also made the Shipmonk CEO aware of the issue to get higher-level executives involved. Luckily, after weeks of digging and gathering data/reports, we were able to pin-point the coding error from DHL International and make sure future shipments weren’t being assessed huge duties/tax rates, and a credit back to our Shipmonk account was on the way.

Nonna’s Gold is global

Soon, we noticed Shopify employees around the world posting and tagging Nonna’s Gold on their social accounts. India, Turkey, Japan, Australia- it was all happening. Successful deliveries with incredibly minimal breakage, way under our expectations. From the hands of Nonna Nerina, with vision of Chiara and Brent, into the hands of many all over the world. This project was something truly special. I’ve worked with legendary professional athletes and celebrities in my previous roles, but delivering for Chiara and Nonna Nerina was the most fulfilling work of my life. Never before had I felt what I felt in my heart. Thank you, Chiara and Nonna Nerina, for trusting me with your gold.

-MG