Fun fact about seahorses: they don’t have stomachs. This anatomical curiosity is precisely why they inspired the name of Seahorse Snacks, Stacy Martin’s Chattanooga, Tennessee-based gourmet nuts company.
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Martin, 40, is not too shy to point out that she’s a bit like a seahorse. After discovering a rare genetic mutation that dramatically increased her risk for gastrointestinal cancer, she underwent a preventive surgical procedure in September 2019 that left her without a stomach. Once she needed smaller and more regular infusions of calories and nutrients, Martin relied on nuts and other protein-dense snacks in place of larger meals. But she quickly tired of eating the same nuts day in and out. She began experimenting with different combinations of seasonings – maple and chai, chilli and turmeric – to liven up her pistachios, cashews, pecans and almonds. They were delicious, and Martin began giving them to friends. From there, Seahorse Snacks was born.
Martin started by selling her packages at local markets. “At first, it was more of a proof-of-concept experiment,” she said. Within a year of the company’s inception, in 2021, word of mouth spread and Martin was selling Seahorse Snacks at a slew of local markets and secured a commercial kitchen to support wholesale distribution. After finalizing a pop-up contract with a major warehouse club store at the end of 2022, she left her full-time job in retail-display sales to devote her complete attention to her burgeoning business. “It was a leap of faith on my part,” Martin said.
But at the 11th hour the pop-up contract fell through, leaving Martin with 2,200 pounds of inventory and a crisis on her hands. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, what are we going to do?’” she said. Martin came up with a lemons-into-lemonade solution, which was to pack up her excess inventory and bring Seahorse Snacks to the Atlanta Market – the nation’s largest order-writing show, where retailers convene to discover new brands and products to feature in their stores. The visit paid off. Martin’s nuts are now available in 34 stores across eight states in the south-eastern US, and her business is “very close to profitability”, she said
To get there, she said, “My strategic focus for this year was growing wholesale and then expanding my direct-to-consumer distribution, driving more sales to my website.” Momentum has grown on other fronts, as well. Early this summer, the brand’s maiden TikTok video detailing Seahorse Snacks’ origin story went viral, garnering a staggering 1.4m views in a mere four days. August marked another milestone with a move to a 1,250 sq ft production space in Chattanooga, Tennessee. With this increased capacity and expanded brand recognition, Martin now hopes to secure even more retail placements and continue to grow existing distribution channels.
By targeting the south-east, she aims to create a bubble for experimentation as Seahorse Snacks continues to find its footing. Save for part-time social media support from the intern who was behind Martin’s viral TikTok, the company remains what Martin calls “a one-seahorse operation” – at least for now – and she is especially careful to avoid steep learning curves. She has been making calculated, informed decisions about how to position the brand and scale the company.
More than anything, she wants to survive. But how exactly does one go about that?
Seahorse Snacks currently fits in nicely at high-end wine and cheese stores and gift shops – the kinds of retailers where shoppers might look to stock a charcuterie board or pick up a house-warming gift. Without a robust support staff, the business is not yet poised to go up against the big-name nut brands on chain supermarket shelves.
“I would love to eventually get to that point, but that’s just not where I am right now,” Martin said.
As she figures out her next strategic move, the questions that weigh on Martin are: When should she look to pivoting toward a more aggressive retail-focused strategy? Should she expand her product offerings? And how can she make her next moves without burning herself out? The Guardian asked three experts to weigh in.
Shane Parrish
Founder of Farnam Street, a personal development newsletter and podcast, and author of Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results
The real question for Martin is not how to get what she wants but whether what she wants is worth wanting in the first place. A business that becomes all things to all people quickly finds irrelevance. Why trade what you have and want now (high-end brand with high margins) for what you don’t have and don’t want (price competition and being at the mercy of others)? More sales might sound good, until you realize those dollars get eaten up quickly by inventory, fees and price competition. The bottom line is likely to be less, not more.
My advice: double down on the high end, refuse to compromise on quality and ingredients, and slowly grow the direct-to-consumer relationship in a way that doesn’t threaten the specialty shops she finds herself in now.
Laura Fredricks
Business consultant and management trainer and author of Hard Asks Made Easy: How to Get Exactly What You Want
It takes a real entrepreneur to take what could have been a major medical setback and turn it into a thriving business. Martin’s major challenge right now is not figuring out how to pivot or to scale – it’s knowing exactly what she wants.
Whenever I encounter an entrepreneur who is facing a similar crossroads to growth in their business, I point them toward what I call my first law of hard asks: know exactly what you want, with numbers and dates. You have to be organized, structured and focused on your next move. In your case, that might be something like “By 30 June 2024 I want Seahorse Snacks to secure an eye-level shelf placement in regional Harris Teeter, Kroger, Costco and Food Lion stores.”
She needs to ask herself this question before going forward. Without numbers and dates, it becomes an exhaustive conversation in your head that results in taking on too many ambitious goals.
Puja Bhola Rios
Chief revenue officer for Frame.io, and author of Get It Together: A Winning Formula for Success From the Boss You Need.
What Martin has achieved so far is no small feat. It is time to scale gradually. Expansion happens when a business a) has enough funds and b) is on its way to profitability. To move forward, she must first look at her current operations. Now that her products are stocked in 30 stores, she should ask herself how many more stores she could handle. Five, 10, 20? Can she expand and still be profitable, or at least on the road to profitability? Answering these questions is the key to determining her expansion plans.
Digital brands like nuts.com show how white labeling – selling a product from an outside manufacturer or supplier under the auspices of one’s brand – can be a fast way to scale, for example. If you have a bestselling product, you might also ask yourself whether there are ways to test the impact of that product on potential expansion plans. Finally, before she expands, she will need additional team members with specific skill sets like marketing and delivery.
Bottom line: the business must make a profit now in order to fund any expansion in the future.
The choice
Martin said she appreciated all of the experts’ advice, but Rios’s suggestion was her hands-down favorite.
“Rios is correct about knowing my numbers,” she said. “They dictate how everything happens.” Martin has a group of business mentors whom she keeps posted about Seahorse Snacks’ progress, and said she hopes to be able to add Rios to the group.
As for next steps, Martin plans to map out a business forecast for 2024 that assigns specific targets to each month. That way, she can control the pace of growth and know if she is hitting her benchmarks. Martin recognized that staffing up and scaling production hinges on being profitable. She said that thinking about how to work toward profitability with a 2024 forecast in mind is a key step of the strategic planning ahead of her. “I’ll be able to assess strategic needs from a production perspective and ask, ‘What do we need to do to make these happen?’” Martin said. “After those plans are in place, I can work on getting staffed up.”
