Click here for Part I & Part II

Promoting happiness and wellness with natural health and beauty products

Sam Wolf is the founder and “Chief Wellness Spreader” of LuckyVitamin, an online retailer of health, wellness, bath, and beauty products. The company’s origins date back to 1956, when Sam’s grandfather Ed Wolf opened a pharmacy outside of Philadelphia. Driven by a passion for alternative medicine, and under Sam’s direction, the Wolf family business has evolved since then into a global destination for consumers seeking natural, non-pharmaceutical remedies for health concerns such as anxiety, diabetes, acne, joint pain, and high blood pressure.

EDWIN WARFIELD: Your business plan paid off and LuckyVitamin has grown exponentially in the years since you relaunched the company. What do you attribute to your success?

SAM WOLF: I’ll give a lot of credit to the team that we’ve built over the years because they’ve been instrumental in enabling us to do even more and more across the digital landscape, and new and exciting things in competitive ways. We believe in bringing value add to the consumer. We think we can offer them great products and great services, but we can also help them. Our consumers are sponges for information—they love to learn and know more about the latest and greatest products in the category, whether those be new formulations that have been found to help with certain ailments or health concerns, or new foods and new and exciting developments. For consumers, we want to be not just a destination for products but also a destination for where they can learn about those products, become educated, explore new things, and really partner with us. We think we’ve got a brand that our consumers have started to trust, and we’re very appreciative of that and respectful of that.

We have our own YouTube channel that we’re doing production on now through a studio internally where we’re bringing content to our consumers. We run our blog where we’re constantly releasing new articles and information. And there’s a host of other avenues that we look to reach consumers and provide value add.

Giving back in philanthropy has always been a big thing to me and a big thing to what we do in the business, but we never really had it connected in a straightforward way to our brand and our mission. Every year, we’ve done volunteering events at the office, community service events—that’s always been something that we’ve donated employee time to, to give back to the community—and a few years ago, we took a step back and said, “let’s figure out what we can do that we can really rally the whole team around.”

We got a lot of key members of the company together and we asked, “What’s important to you? What do you like outside of work?” The one recurring theme we kept hearing was family and kids and how important that was to everyone’s work–life balance. So, we said, “let’s do something philanthropic that ties to kids,” and we launched our LuckyKids initiative, where we take 1% of all proceeds from all of our own branded products and we put those into a foundation, and then every year we use the money from that foundation to sponsor and donate and give back through various means to organizations that support the education, nutrition, and fitness and wellness of kids. Two years ago, we went and we cleaned up and donated materials to build a playground. This past year, we went to a local outdoor conservatory that hosts events to educate kids on nature and the environment, and we helped them plant trees and clean up their parks for further events for the fall. And we put together a wellness coloring book and packet that we donated to various kids’ organizations and camps that is both fun and educational.

That’s something that is really exciting and feels good that we’re doing right now. Every year we have a team of people that get together—and it’s a different team each year—that sits around and figures out what we are going to do with the money we have raised in the prior year to give back. I’m proud of that and excited about where that’s going.

Connect with Sam on LinkedIn

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ABOUT NEWMARK KNIGHT FRANK

Newmark Knight Frank (NKF) is one of the world's leading commercial real estate advisory firms. Together with London-based partner Knight Frank and independently-owned offices, NKF's 15,000 professionals operate from more than 400 offices in established and emerging property markets on six continents.

With roots dating back to 1929, NKF's strong foundation makes it one of the most trusted names in commercial real estate. NKF's full-service platform comprises BGC's real estate services segment, offering commercial real estate tenants, landlords, investors and developers a wide range of services including leasing; capital markets services, including investment sales, debt placement, appraisal, and valuation services; commercial mortgage brokerage services; as well as corporate advisory services, consulting, project and development management, and property and corporate facilities management services. For further information, visit www.ngkf.com.

NKF is a part of BGC Partners, Inc., a leading global brokerage company servicing the financial and real estate markets. BGC's common stock trades on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the ticker symbol (NASDAQ: BGCP). BGC also has an outstanding bond issuance of Senior Notes due June 15, 2042, which trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol (NYSE: BGCA). BGC Partners is led by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer  Howard W. Lutnick. For more information, please visit www.bgcpartners.com.

Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

If you're interested in reaching CEOs, please contact edwin.warfield@citybuzz.co

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https://www.luckyvitamin.com/