Sweden’s Naturalbox raises capital with Prowly

The Stockholm-based healthy food startup Naturalbox explains their successful crowdsourcing campaign on Prowly. Results: coverage in key media channels, nearly 100 investors, 212% campaign overfunding.

In order to raise capital for its operations, Naturalbox chose crowdsourcing over a traditional VC, engaging its customers, friends and fans. To make that happen, the startup decided to leverage all the advantages of social media and digital communication, and generate buzz around the campaign and the brand itself.

Naturalbox established a digital newsroom (or a brand journal) on Prowly.com, which became its communication hub. “Before we went live with our crowdfunding, we built a highly efficient PR and media room and created our ‘Brand Journal’ full of stories and news articles to make ourselves visible to the community,”says Alicja Chlebna, Founder & CEO at Naturalbox.

Alicja wrote about the campaign for Prowly:

“Our company Naturalbox.com is the first subscription service with organic snacks and health and beauty products delivered to people’s homes every month. The idea is to inspire consumers to discover new organic and eco-friendly products for their daily lives and later help them continue their shopping at our online store Ecoliving.se.

The idea of crowdfunding was first completely new to us but after some consideration we thought that, in today’s modern world, involving our customers, suppliers and fans – people with a passion for organic food and healthy lifestyle – would be a great way of raising capital. We decided to do our crowdfunding in our home base of Stockholm and went live on Fundedbyme.com.

When you decide on crowdfunding it’s crucial to have an effective and interesting way of communicating your product and your vision to the potential investors. At first, we only found some old-school marketing tools that just didn’t do the trick. Since our company is mainly based on social media marketing and communication, we wanted to continue being innovative and looking fresh. Enter Prowly.com – an online media tool for communication, PR, and brand building. We were very pleasantly surprised to learn that it allows to combine your storytelling with other content in what the company calls a ‘Brand Journal’ and embed social media features into it. On top of that, Prowly combines a very simple set-up, design and publishing process with a good deal of guidance and tuition in how to optimize your content’s appeal to your target audience. Although we came across Prowly by chance, we instantly knew this was what we needed to focus our brand message and effectively get the word out both about our product and the investment opportunity!”