Name: Treatsie
One-Liner Pitch: Satisfy your sweet tooth and help out some small businesses. It's a win-win.
Why It's Taking Off: Treatsie curates and introduces the best artisan sweets to people who love great food.
We've seen monthly makeup subscription boxes and healthy treat subscription boxes, but why did it take so long for a monthly chocolate box to come along and stave off our cacao longings?
Treatsie, founded in February 2013 and based in Little Rock, Arkansas, is helping chocolate and candy lovers get by with its monthly artisan treat boxes. It also has an accompanying online shop, where addicts can stock up on their favorite featured goods and extended collections from vendors featured in the monthly boxes.
Keith Hoelzeman, co-founder of Treatsie, says the idea for the startup came about when he was looking to purchase some sweets for his wife. He found limited options in his local community and turned to e-commerce to find the right snacks. What he thought would be a fairly quick search turned into a massive hunt for quality cocoa that ended in defeat. As he sat at his computer, he glanced over at one of his wife's subscription boxes and the idea for an artisan sweets business based on that model was born.
My personal favorite from the box I received was the six-ounce bag of Hot Cakes Peanut Butter Bites, featuring a handful of organic peanut butter balls covered in semi-sweet chocolate and tidbits of sea salt. The box also featured a healthy-sized bag of Grey Ghost Bakery Lemon Sugar Cookies â€" an item exclusively supplied to Treatsie â€" and Hot Cakes Bling Bling dark chocolate, an artisan version of the Hostess Ding Dong. I felt like my childhood had been robbed for having eaten so many regular Hostess cakes.
For chocolatiers and artisan treat chefs, Treatsie is an opportunity to expand sales nationwide.
"Most of the vendors we work with, if they sell online, have sites that are so small they’ll never make it past the 48th page on a Google search for high-end sweets," says Walden. With 2,500 users and counting, Treatsie ships to and has customers in all 50 states in the U.S.
Subscriptions start at $15 per month. Those not quite up for grabbing a monthly subscription, Walden can shop on the online store for products ranging from $3.50 for small items to $50-$100 for specialty boxes like the Deluxe I Love You Box and the Deluxe Bacon Box.
Treatsie closed a $300,000 seed round in October 2013 to continue growing its business across the U.S. and into Canada.
"We believe that once people get a taste of how much better chef-created, artisan sweets are, they realize what they’ve been missing out on and become small-batch believers," Walden says. "Treatsie is all about building a community of people who love great food by connecting them with people who make great food."
No comments:
Post a Comment