Nourished Market, a family-run business out of Houston, Texas, was created to connect their community with local farmers. Nicole and her husband, Craig, launched Nourished Market together two years ago, evolving naturally from their experience of working with local farmers to obtain farm-fresh goods to nourish their family.
Nicole has always been entrepreneurial-minded and when she saw the need to bridge the gap between local farmers and other busy families, Nourished Market was born. Initially, it began as a co-op but has since evolved into a thriving membership and home-based grocery store.
Nourished Market vets and sources local farmers and then provides customers with an easy way to obtain products like raw milk, fresh eggs, pasture-raised meat, organic butter, and organic cheese through their online ordering and pick-up system. Nourished Market handles the logistics of placing orders with local farmers, and picking up and delivering items to pre-set pickup locations so members can easily pick them up.
Nicole explains, “We are giving people access to things that we as a family have enjoyed for the last 10 years. These items tend to be harder to access unless you want to jump through hoops. We only offer items that are truly nourishing. The goal is to remove the hoops to fuel people’s nourishment.”
As a lifelong entrepreneur, Nicole is used to wearing many hats and flexing her creative muscles but she struggled to find the right tool to make a membership component and custom ordering pages for Nourished Market possible.
The membership was complicated because Nicole and Craig worked with different farmers in different areas and each farm offered different products at different times. They needed an easy way to customize their ordering pages. After all, they didn’t want a customer placing an order to pick up in the Jersey Village location but ordering an item only available in the Houston location.
Additionally, Nourished Market has paid and free tiers and Nicole and Craig wanted to offer different discounts and content based on the membership tier.
Before using Shogun, Nourished Market customers had to choose a specific location on the ordering page and this caused some confusion as customers were often choosing the wrong location. “It was madness, for both myself and our customers,” Nicole says.
They needed an affordable way to offer a high degree of personalization to avoid complicating business operations and the shopping experience.
Luckily, the solution was found as many are: with a simple Google search.
After searching for the right tool for flexible customizations, Nicole installed Shogun to explore its personalization options. Shogun’s Personalized Experiences enables merchants to customize website content for different audience segments.
Shogun has a variety of segmenting options available and one of those ways is by customizing content based on the referral URL. That unlocked the ability for Nicole to personalize the Nourished Market website exactly how they needed to.
With the help of the Shogun team, Nicole began building the personalization process. Here’s how it works today:
Additionally, Nicole can offer unique shopping experiences for different membership tiers. This is particularly helpful because she offers different purchasing options on raw milk for paid members.
For members, it’s a smooth process where they only need to navigate to one page to see the most up-to-date information for their particular pick-up location and they don’t need to sift through irrelevant options to find what’s available.
For Nicole, it’s easy to manage and update the variants and provides peace of mind that they have reduced the risk of order errors or shopper confusion.
The bottom line is that it’s a smoother experience for all parties.
With a full membership and a growing waitlist, Nicole and Craig continue to find ways to expand. They are currently beginning a partnership with a regenerative farm to provide grass-fed beef shares to their community. After that is set up, Nourished Market will be offering a herbal product line and essential oils, as well as additional products like grass-fed whey and more. In the future, they hope for the possibility of opening up a brick-and-mortar storefront.
Nicole and Craig can achieve their goal of helping families stay nourished while supporting local farmers. And they can do it all while being present with their family of four children.
With the help of the right tools, like Shogun, they can grow and continue helping other families in their area without increasing their screen time.
As Nicole says, “We would not have been able to expand the way we have without Shogun.”
[Editor’s note: If you’re interested in learning more about raw milk or how to obtain it in your area, Nicole recommends researching more at Realmilk.com]
