The founders sit in the sun in front of their minimalist shop, sipping iced coffees and cold-pressed juices while looking healthy and happy. rightly so! It’s obviously going well, her café here in Berlin-Mitte. It’s not even lunchtime and all the seats are already taken, queue in front of the counter – what more could you ask for? Well: a lot.
What the owners of the Daluma do not want, however, is that their location in Berlin-Mitte be called a café. Café is a “forbidden word”. This is what it says in a briefing paper for new employees.
“We have always seen ourselves as a health place and self-care place,” explains David Kugler, one of the founders. Even back then, when he and Lukas Bossert opened the shop in Berlin-Mitte in 2014. The local newspapers reported a lot about it, since chia seeds, bowls and cold-pressed juices were a novelty in Berlin at the time.
In a report by “Zeit Magazin”, the author described the Daluma as the “magic mountain of green smoothies”. Since then, the store has been listed as a “Superfood Mecca” in international travel guides and is accordingly well frequented.
But the brand no longer only appears on the juices and bowsl in the light-flooded room at the Weinbergspark. Daluma is a “360 degree self-care brand,” he says. A brand that aims to touch different areas of the customer’s life with a wide variety of products, from nutrition to personal care and leisure.
“And that’s actually always been the case.” He and Bossert now run two more shops in Berlin – not far from Kurfürstendamm and in the luxury department store Kadewe – and a rapidly growing online business.
To tell more about it, the founders invite you to the small office in the back building of their hip restaurant. Some young employees first have to fold up their laptops and leave the room so that four people can be seated, it’s that small.
Then the Daluma bosses report: One is Oleg Isakov. He came on board a year and a half ago as Chief Commercial Officer and took over the areas of e-commerce and retail, and has been responsible for sales and marketing ever since. In an interview with “Gründerszene”, Isakov mentions impressive numbers: the company currently has annual sales in the mid-single-digit million range. The growth rate from last year to this year is 170 percent. CEO Kugler adds that it is even more interesting that sales in e-commerce are growing by 500 to 600 percent. Net.
Surprised. Daluma’s business is apparently bigger than expected. It’s not just about a few Instagram-pretty shops with Instagram-pretty customers.
“The secondary healthcare market, the self-care market, is one of the best markets around,” says Oleg Isakov. “There is a consensus among the major analysts, investment banks and management consultancies that growth there is six percent per year.”
The target group of the Berlin brand are primarily millennials – like the founders themselves: “They prioritize health and wellbeing much more.” The generation pays attention to both their fitness and their mind, and knows that this also influences their external appearance, according to Isakov . The pandemic has reinforced this trend.
Self-Care describes a wide range of services and products. The management consultancy McKinsey, for example, includes companies that deal with the topics of health, sport, nutrition and beauty, but also sleep and “mindfulness”, i.e. mindfulness.
And she did a study that covers what Isakov says: In 2021, more than 7,500 people from six countries were surveyed. 79 percent said wellness is important to them, with 42 percent even citing it as a top priority. As a result, McKinsey estimates the global wellness market at $1.5 trillion with annual growth of 5 to 10 percent.
Daluma is now entering this market with products from different categories: On the one hand, there are the so-called “liquids”, i.e. cold-pressed fruit and vegetable juices, which are offered in the company’s online shop as different juice cures in a package at prices from 84 to 190 euros . Customers buy juices for three to seven days and consume nothing else – accompanied by an app that guides users through the fast with tips and drinking plans.
The second major area of ??online business is “skincare”. This ranges from the peeling hand soap for 30 euros to face masks and the anti-aging vitamin serum for 90 euros. Here, too, the company offers packages, some combinations of juice cures and matching body care products (340 to 495 euros), which are also to be used over a certain period of time with the support of the Daluma app.
Under “Supplements” Daluma sells dietary supplements, i.e. vitamins, nutrients, minerals in capsules (from 40 euros) – and also packages for app-controlled wellness treatments. “Those are the three categories that are very scalable,” says Isakov.
Although they are of course not alone in a billion-dollar market, the men behind Damula are unconcerned when it comes to competition. “For us as a 360-degree brand, there is no real competition,” says Kugler. No other company thinks so “holistically” that it offers products from Kombucha Shot to Body Mist.
Nevertheless, there are of course competitors in every single category. “But the fact that the big players are now also taking this step, like one of our partners Flaconi, who is moving from beauty to self-care – that shows us that we were ahead of the time.”
The strongest sales channel is your own online shop – but also the retail business. For example, Daluma has sales partnerships with the delivery services Gorillas as well as with Arive. But Daluma also works with fitness clubs (such as Barry’s Bootcamp) and hotels (Amano Group) by placing Daluma products at the bar or in the bathroom.
All this sounds like strategic, technically well-founded planning for a young company. Founder David Kugler received his master’s degree from the London School of Economics in 2007. But then his first job took him away from being an entrepreneur: for three years he worked as a consultant for the federal chairman of the FDP, Guido Westerwelle.
In 2011 he switched to strategy consulting for six years. At that time, while visiting his then-boyfriend in New York, he observed a new movement: juice shops were opening everywhere, promising health and well-being. Kugler was fascinated by the idea and convinced by the products.
“I asked myself why this doesn’t exist in Germany.” He was 32 at the time and began to write a business plan and then to start implementing a holistic self-care concept in Berlin carefully and alongside his consulting work.
But then there was this “triggering event”, as he says: “That was when Guido died. That got me very upset and shocked. And at the same time I thought to myself: If I don’t do what I’m passionate about now – when will I do it,” says Kugler. “I have decided that I want to live in such a way that if I die tomorrow, I can be content.”
At this time, Kugler’s and Bossert’s paths crossed. Bossert traveled internationally as a model for years, lived in the USA and Sydney. Like Kugler, he too encountered the emerging health food movement, he too was fascinated – but had a different motivation for aligning his diet and lifestyle with it: “When I arrived in Milan at the age of 18, the first sentence from my model agency was: ‘Yours Legs are too fat to walk for Prada, Jil Sander and Yves Saint Laurent’.” At that time, skinny jeans came into fashion and with them the size-zero trend, which shaped the entire fashion industry for both men and women.
He then ran for well-known luxury brands for years, Bossert says, but during this time he constantly kept an eye on his diet: “I’ve tried practically every diet, from low carb to high carb to keto and vegan.” He started doing it himself cook, managed major events in the USA as a vegan raw food chef.
“In addition, I always juiced a lot,” as he says – i.e. mainly fed on cold-pressed juices. After training as a yoga teacher in India, he returned to Berlin, studied architecture for a semester – and then founded Daluma with David Kugler in order to implement his belief in holistic self-care in a start-up.
So the café, which shouldn’t be called that, is the starting point. Kugler describes it as a kind of “test laboratory”, important for the first phase, the proof of concept. “We had a vertical integration of 100 percent here.” That means: They would have produced everything here by hand, the juices – for this the founders bought an extremely luxurious machine early on, which made it into the media as Berlin’s most expensive juicer – but also first care products.
They always experimented a lot and for a long time. Keep being perfectionists. The development of her company took a corresponding amount of time. A very long time, if you compare it with recent start-ups that are geared towards scaling as quickly as possible.
“From about year three to year five we then went through the proof of scale phase,” says Kugler, “in which we asked ourselves: how do we scale the business?” Certainly not by making juices, dietary supplements and care products ourselves manufacture.
So they externalized production. Daluma now works with different manufacturers in the European Union – the founders don’t want to be more specific. “Now we’re going into the accelerated growth phase, so to speak,” says the CEO.
To this end, the entrepreneurs are planning a round of financing for the first time, in which they want to approach institutional investors. This is new: Kugler and Bossert founded it with savings from their previous lives as management consultants and models. In between, they received a sum from family and friends, “but that was really a ridiculously small amount and most of it went towards buying the juicer,” says the CEO.
A few angel investors later came on board. Now they are planning the first “substantial round of financing”, as Kugler says: “I don’t want capital at any price, but an investor who shares and supports the vision of the company.”
With this vision, says Oleg Isakov, the founders of Daluma are “the spearhead of those who think holistically and new about self-care”. “We left a wave that many others are now following,” says David Kugler. “It’s an incredibly positive feeling.”
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