Meet Moritz Braatz, co-founder of noah

Founded in 2018, noah provides a collection of perfectly curated ‘Starter Kits’, packed with tried and tested, high-quality tools, utensils and essentials, delivered directly to your door. From kitchen boxes, to a home movers box, baking kits and student essentials, noah provides all the essentials needed to take your first step of every new endeavour; all the while costing you less time and saving money at the same time. Following a recent £1.4 million seed-round raise, which was led by Fuel Venture and supported by additional angel investors, we sat down with noah’s CEO and co-founder Moritz Braatz to talk about more the brands’ recent raise, expansion plans and the launch of a content-driven app.

What inspired you to launch noah and what is the end goal for the business?

I'm Moritz Braatz - I founded noah together with my co-founder Harvey. We both have worked in various eCommerce Startups here in London, where often an incredible amount of capital and effort is spent on performance marketing, branding, and packaging. Instead of providing a truly innovative product, or trying to deliver genuine value, and a memorable customer experience, they focus on optimising their excessive marketing spend. We asked ourselves ‘which products haven’t been covered by other Direct-to-Consumer brands and why’ and we came to the conclusion that selling essential items online has been a completely overlooked category. We examined the unit economics of this category and it became clear why this is the case.  Often, selling essentials online doesn’t work for the merchant, as fix costs such as, delivery and returns eat heavily into margins. However, by bundling items into Starter Kits, we are able to improve those economics and transfer the savings to the end-consumer - a true win-win situation. 

We founded noah with the vision to become the first Starter Kit focused brand. One which empowers customers to start something new, and helps them navigate the First Steps of any new endeavour. The aim is to offer a large variety of Kits and expand into sectors outside the homeware category.

What’s the most common problem your customers approach you with?

It normally comes down to 3 things: price, time, and missing information. A student moving to university often has a tighter budget and needs longlasting products without spending too much in their first weeks at uni. Whereas, a soon to be budding baker doesn’t often know which items they need to get started and hence never pick baking up as a new hobby. Our curated kits make it easy to just skip the entire ‘research’ stage of ‘what item do I need’ or ‘which quality should a garlic press have’ and also save you heaps of time which our customers can then spend on the more important things in life.

With all the success stories around entrepreneurship and how innovative people have to be to take the leap. How do you think you’ve innovated your sector and why?

It's easy to fall into the trap of using buzzwords such as ‘revolutionise’ or ‘disruptive’ when founding a new startup - but that's just not us. Those phrases might be applicable in high-tech startups but they're often overused in the DTC world: Creating a slightly better sofa or saucepan is most of the time not revolutionary. Those are still great products and businesses but it’s not truly innovative as it doesn’t change consumer behaviour in any significant way. There are other factors that can make a brand stand out from the crowd e.g. crafting a perfect customer experience or offering genuine value for the end-consumer. Having said all this, I believe that noah will evolve into an international household brand for Starter Kits and maybe in a few years, when we offer 30+ Starter Kits, we might look back and say ‘we created a completely new category here and buying Starter Kits became the new normal’. However, I reckon we are still a few years away from changing consumer-behaviour in such a significant way that we can call it ‘truly innovative or disruptive’.

What plans do you have for noah over the next two years?

At noah, we currently equip our customer with all the essentials to get started, however, we want to help you navigate your first steps and beyond. To give you an example, imagine you just bought a Baking Box but you’re as hopeless as I am in the kitchen. It’s great to have all those essentials covered, but it’s still a long way to go before you master your first cake. This is where Beyond the Box, our content-driven app, comes in: we have an awesome opportunity to engage with our customers long after their purchase to help guide them through the beginning of their new endeavours by offering tips on recipes and how to improve their technique.

This new app is not meant to become the main selling point for our kits. We are aiming to heavily extend our product portfolio and conquer more categories outside the homeware space and win customers with a simple yet appealing product proposition: We save you time & money, without compromising on quality.

What does the recent investment mean for the business? 

Until now noah has been more or less completely bootstrapped, which was great because we were able to put the right foundation in place without having to ‘force’ short-term, artificial growth to meet the expectations from institutional investors. However, launching new products in eCommerce, without any external capital is a very lengthy process so the injection of fresh capital allows us to expand our product range and secure noah as the first Starter Kit brand out there. Our recent investment has also allowed us to ensure we are prepared for the next phase of growth by expanding our team from 4 to 12 people within a few weeks.

How important is company culture and what is your top tip to get it right?

A tough question, as we have only just started assembling out All-Star team here at noah. I would say giving everyone the opportunity to really be in charge of their respective area without micromanaging them is the key to establishing a healthy culture. However, a culture is a bit like a house plant - if it’s not nurtured on a regular basis it will wilt. 

Therefore, it’s important to foster it by keeping everyone engaged and informed about any business decisions - even if it’s as small as getting everyone’s opinion on how to kit out a new office space. In the end, it’s the team that is building the company and hence the team should have a say on how to shape the culture.

Any new product launches we should know about?

We have just hired a very experienced Head of Buying - so product launches are in the forefront of our mind at all times! In the coming months, we plan to extend our product portfolio with event-driven & hobby-focused Starter Kits, encouraging our growing community to discover exciting hobbies and new interests. I don’t want to give away too much but we've seen tremendous growth in individuals taking up new hobbies through the pandemic and this is something we believe we'll continue to see as restrictions ease up. By offering curated kits with incredible value for money we aim to make ‘collaborative events’ e.g. pottery at home with friends, much more accessible and encourage people to pick up new hobbies or interests at a faster pace.

What would be your top marketing tip, to grow a business that is niche?

I don’t necessarily think of noah as a ‘niche’ brand in the traditional sense. The beauty of being a brand that is product-agnostic is that we don’t have to focus on just one single product segment, but are able to develop new products across a variety of categories without diluting our brand vision or mission. 

However, each Starter Kit can be seen as its own ‘niche and I reckon one of the most important things is to model your unit economics before starting any marketing activities. At noah, we compared Click-Through-Rates, Cost-Per-Clicks and average Conversion Rates before we have launched any Starter Kit to make sure it's a viable product to bootstrap. Today's Marketing-Stack allows you to easily analyse general data points even before launching your very first campaign.

What’s the single most important decision that you made, that contributed to your business?

Partnering up with my Co-Founder, Harvey. Smartest-cookie in town! We are two rather different characters but work and balance each other out perfectly well. In addition, we have complementary skill sets but still, understand each other's work enough to bounce ideas off or help with complicated decision making. I’m unsure if I would have had the resilience of bootstrapping a business into 7-figures for 2 years without a partner in crime that I would get along with this well. And now as we are scaling noah even quicker, its good to have a trusted partner in crime to tackle all those new and exciting challenges.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learnt so far as an entrepreneur?

That it’s often better to fully commit to a plan rather than doing something half-heartedly. As we were bootstrapping the business for quite some time we were rather careful with launching any new products or overcommitting to purchase too much stock. However, this led to us being out of stock so many times that I stopped counting - and this then slows down growth. Sometimes it’s better to be a little more confident in one's abilities to make something work and just fully commit.

What are your top tips for entrepreneurs wanting to get their business out there?

The key is to start early and get the learnings in as soon as possible, and start your business even before you have that one ‘brilliant idea’ - whether it’s just a small Shopify store or another side-hustle. It’s much harder to learn the admin basics when a business is scaling quickly. At noah, we initially wasted too much time learning the basics of running a business such as accounting.