Ella Mills founded Deliciously Ella in 2012.
What makes a great founder? And how do they transform their first spark of an idea into a growing business? We're talking to our customers to find out.
Sowing the Seeds of Success
Ella Mills founded Deliciously Ella, a plant-based food and wellbeing platform, on her passion for simple tools that fuel a healthier lifestyle.
Over its 10-year growth journey, Deliciously Ella has scaled across categories and grown its presence in supermarkets, maintaining “100% natural ingredients” as a unique differentiator in the food and beverage market. Today, the business sells over 50 products — from granola to trail mix to fibre-packed oat bars — in the UK and a selection of other European countries.
Mills said that as Deliciously Ella has grown, she has found that three important disciplines of a founder are:
- Be honest about the support you need and surround yourself with great people.
- Ensure you can make decisions based on robust, reliable data.
- Build your brand based on unique differentiators, that form the core your business.
Deliciously Ella founder Ella Mills gives an overview of her experience scaling the business:
Finding the Sweet Spot
Deliciously Ella started in 2012 as an online community for sharing natural, plant-based recipes, which had had an “incredibly positive” impact on Mills’s personal health. She said that at the time, consumers showed interest in eating healthier but struggled to find resources to do so.
Deliciouslyella.com soon built a community of almost 1 million individuals. So in 2015, when Mills published what became the UK’s fastest-selling debut cookbook ever, it catapulted the brand to a new level. Mills and her husband Matthew, now the company’s CEO, recognized that the surge of interest in wellbeing and plant-based food had created a white space opportunity. They followed the Deliciously Ella website and cookbook with a series of best-selling books, a #1 wellness app, a central London café, and a food products business.
“There was this huge conversation nationally around health and wellbeing, around changing the way you were eating,” she said. “And when you looked on supermarket shelves, there was really nothing fulfilling that.”
Building Transparency Across the Team
As a founder, Mills defines her role as guardian of the brand and the person who brings its vision and purpose to life. But of course, Deliciously Ella’s success has come from teamwork, she said.
“A business doesn’t succeed because a founder has a great idea; it succeeds because there’s a great way of implementing that idea day in, day out,” she said. “And that depends on great people.”
Those great people can’t drive results without tools to support them. Mills said that Deliciously Ella relies on NetSuite to provide the data insights and financial management capabilities required for smart growth.
“Decisions about growth and spending need to be made with the clearest, most up-to-date information that everybody has access to,” she said. “Data is absolutely everything in our business.”
Early on, leaders made decisions slightly more ad hoc and used more intuition, she added. Now, every decision they make — about launching new products or entering new markets, for example — stems from data analysis.
Growing Internationally
Technology, along with vision and teamwork, has also been essential to Deliciously Ella’s international growth thus far. The team uses NetSuite ERP to respond to economic changes such as inflation and currency fluctuations while managing supply chain challenges.
Deliciously Ella will also continue automating financial processes with NetSuite as it launches in the Netherlands and expands in the DACH region.
“As we grow, we need this sophisticated system and the ability to really understand the data that we have in the business,” said Matthew Mills. “NetSuite makes our growth easier to digest and understand, and it makes planning so much easier.”
See how other businesses have used NetSuite to scale like Deliciously Ella.
