#13 | 2020 Business Excellence Award Winners Miniseries: Viva Naturals

Next in our awards miniseries is Viva Naturals, Silver winner in the Outstanding Member category. This episode features Sarah Kutulakos’ conversation with Candice Yin, who handles China e-commerce for Viva Naturals, a Toronto-based provider of vitamins, supplements, and wellness products. Viva was established in 2011 and started exporting to China via cross-border e-commerce in 2017. The company’s growth has been amazing.

Key takeaways from Candice:

• A successful Chinese e-commerce strategy can allow a small Canadian company to compete on a global scale. Viva’s China growth has spurred new co-manufacturing in Mexico for organic food for the Chinese market, an expanded fish oil processing plant in Canada to meet growing demand, and doubling of Viva’s headquarters staff.
• Since the 2017 China launch, annual sales growth ranged between 56% to 300% per year.
• How they knew it was the right time to go to China.
• How cross-border ecommerce can truly be a “China light” strategy. Pre-pandemic, Candice was only traveling to China 1-2 times/year and Viva’s CEO would go only once every two years. Their third party TP handles all the in-China details for Viva’s flagship stores on both TMall and JD. Because they are on the cross-border platform, packaging is exactly the same as in the US and Canada.
• Promoting product, using stars and influencers using livestream, including their criteria for choosing, and how a particular influencer sold >10,000 units in five minutes!
• Although they sell many products, fish oil and chia seeds are their leading products to drive traffic.  
• They plan to diversify to other countries. The US is Viva’s largest market (60% of revenue). China is #2 and surpassed Canada in 2020. Europe is next followed both other Asian countries, including Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore.
• Recommendation: CCTV National Treasure, found here. 

This multi-part miniseries is sponsored by SnapPay.