- LemonBox provides American Supplements to Chinese Consumers
- Company mainly focuses on Affordability and Personalisation
- Company plans to Launch a Website and store on Tmall
LemonBox, founded in 2018, by Derek Weng to sell American health supplements to Chinese millennials like himself via online channels. The company soon attracted seed funding from Y Combinator and just this week, it announced the completion of a pre-A round of $2.5 million led by Panda Capital and followed by Y Combinator.
LemonBox tries to differentiate itself from other import businesses on two levels: affordability and personalisation.
Weng told that he’s acquainted with a lot of American supplement manufacturers and is thus able to cut middleman costs.
Personalised Supplements at Lower Cost
LemonBox designed a WeChat-based lite app, where users receive product recommendations after taking a questionnaire about their health conditions. Instead of selling by the bottle, the company customizes user needs by offering daily packs of various supplements.
“If you are a vegetarian and travel a lot, and the other person smokes a lot, [your demands] are going to be very different. I wanted to customize user prescriptions using big data,” explained Weng, who studied artificial intelligence in business school.
A monthly basket of 30 B-complex tablets, for instance, costs 35 yuan ($5) on LemonBox. Amway’s counterpart product, a bottle of 120 tablets, asks for 229 yuan on JD.com. That’s about 57 yuan ($9) for 30 tablets.
Strategies for the Future
Selling cheaper vitamins is just a means for LemonBox to attract consumers and gather health insights into Chinese millennials, with which the company hopes to widen its product range.
Weng declined to disclose the company’s customer size. But, he claimed that its user conversion rate is “higher than most e-commerce sites.”
With the new proceeds, LemonBox is opening a second fulfillment center in the Shenzhen free trade zone after its Silicon Valley-based one. That’s to provide more stability to its supply chain as the COVID-19 pandemic disrupts international flights and cross-border trade.
Moreover, the startup will spend the money on securing health-related certificates and adding Japan to its sourcing regions.
As such, LemonBox is looking to diversify beyond its WeChat store by launching a web version as well as a store through Alibaba’s Tmall marketplace.