How Grüns Scaled from a Stanford Dorm Room to a $200M+ Nutrition Brand on Shopify

Grüns is a daily nutrition company that packs 60 ingredients, 21 vitamins and minerals, and six grams of prebiotic fiber into a single daily gummy pack.

Founded in 2023 by Chad Janis, a former private equity investor who sat on the boards of Dr. Squatch, Brooklinen, Thuma, Ruggable, and Chubbies, Grüns launched from a Stanford dorm room and reached a $50 million run rate before Janis finished his MBA. 

The company has since expanded into a multi-brand portfolio, including Nütrops (nootropics), Immün (immunity), Jüced (pre-workout energy), and Kids. Today, Grüns ships 10 million gummies per day, employs over 120 people, sells in more than 7,000 retail locations, including Costco, Walmart, Target, and Sam's Club, and was valued at $500 million during its 2025 Series B.

The Grüns story stands out for how it was built. Janis built the entire ecommerce operation himself in the months before launch, emails, flows, landing pages, and subscriptions. The infrastructure he set up in the first week still makes up 80% of the site today.

All of it runs on Shopify.

With Shopify, Grüns has achieved:

• $50 million run rate within the first year of selling
• Over 90% of revenue from subscriptions
• 96% of subscribers consume the product at least four to six times per week, with 80% taking it daily
• 10 million gummies shipped per day across the Grüns brand portfolio
• 7,000+ retail doors
• Profitability within one year of launch (August 2024), while continuing to scale aggressively

The founder: From boardrooms to gummy molds

Before Grüns, Janis spent years in private equity at Summit Partners, where he invested in and served on the boards of some of the fastest-growing consumer brands in the country. He helped deploy $1.4 billion across companies like Dr. Squatch, Brooklinen, Ruggable, Chubbies, and Thuma. That pattern recognition from the investor seat shaped everything. He saw, from the inside, what separated the brands that scaled from the ones that stalled.

In 2022, he left finance to pursue an MBA at Stanford. The plan was to take a break. Then he tried a greens powder.

"I hated it," Janis says. The experience sparked a question: what if comprehensive nutrition, the thing people knew they needed but dreaded taking, came in a format they actually looked forward to? 

The name came from his time living in Germany and Austria in 2012. "Grün" means green in German. He knew the product would be green when packed with vegetables, and adding an "s" gave it a short, playful feel that fit the brand he wanted to build. The supplement space felt too serious, too sterile. Grüns would be different.

He spent the next year formulating. His first attempt involved Amazon molds and his mother's kitchen. That lasted two weeks. "Gummy science is highly complicated," Janis says. He contacted roughly 20 co-manufacturers. Most refused the concept because putting a gummy into individual packets was too difficult and too prone to taste issues. 

One manufacturer said yes, but even that manufacturer didn't expect much. "They thought when I placed the PO, 'We're never going to see this guy again. It's a big PO. It'll just disappear, but we'll do it for him because he's going to pay us up front,'" Janis says. "Now they constantly express gratitude for being on the journey with us. We've changed their business alongside ours."

Grüns launched in August 2023. By the time Janis graduated from Stanford, the company was doing a $50 million run rate.

The challenge: Building a high-growth ecommerce engine from day one

Grüns didn’t have the typical early-stage constraints. There was no legacy system to migrate off or a patchwork stack to untangle. The challenge was different: build an ecommerce operation capable of supporting massive growth from the start.

That meant launching with subscriptions as the core business model, managing high order volume, and creating a customer experience strong enough to drive daily usage. All while the company was scaling quickly and still operating with a lean team.

Janis built the entire system himself in the months leading up to launch. Emails, flows, landing pages, subscriptions. It all had to work immediately and hold as the business scaled.

The Solution: Building the ecommerce engine on Shopify

Janis didn't hire an agency or a development team to build the storefront. He did it himself.

Janis’s years evaluating DTC brands at Summit Partners meant he was already familiar with the ecosystem. He'd worked with Klaviyo, Instapage, ActiveCampaign, and subscription tools across the companies he invested in. In the six months before launch, he personally set up every email flow, every cancellation sequence, every landing page, all within Shopify's ecosystem.

The stack

What Janis built before launch became the foundation for everything that followed. Shopify Plus serves as the foundation, with tools like Replo for landing pages, Skio for subscriptions, Klaviyo for email, Postscript for SMS, and Gladly for customer support layered on top. 

As the business grew, the team expanded the stack to support scale, adding Junip for reviews, Fulfil as an ERP, KnoCommerce for post-purchase surveys, Loop for returns, Chargeflow for chargebacks, Social Snowball for referrals, and Passport for international expansion. 

The setup remained intentionally simple. Shopify’s flexibility, combined with a working knowledge of code, was enough to scale the business past $100 million before bringing on a dedicated development team. 

Shopify Flow was critical as the company grew, particularly for fraud protection. “One of the biggest things I got out of Flow is when we would get attacked by Amazon resellers or fraudulent stuff,” Janis says. “This was the entire hub for protecting us. We’d set up flows that would hit our Slack channel and let us know when something happened.” 

The team also runs Shop App Campaigns as an always-on acquisition channel, which Janis describes as profitable and consistent over time.

His first hire, about six weeks in, was a customer experience manager, not a developer, not a designer. Janis kept building the ecommerce side alone while finishing his MBA and running a company that was already growing faster than most of the businesses he'd invested in.

The subscription engine

Grüns is built for repeat consumption. Subscriptions account for over 90% of revenue, and the retention numbers reflect a product that has become a daily habit: 94-96% of subscribers take Grüns at least four to six times per week, and 80% take it every day.

Janis’s approach to retention is rooted in product quality. “If people genuinely want to take it, they stay,” he says. That habit is reinforced through a “surprise and delight” subscriber experience, including limited-time flavor drops every one to two months, sometimes through licensed partnerships.

That experience is built on Shopify and extended through its ecosystem, giving the team the flexibility to design a subscription journey with minimal friction at every step.

Here’s one example: Grüns custom-built a feature with Skio and Postscript that lets subscribers swap their upcoming shipment to a limited-time flavor by replying to a text message. A subscriber gets a text, replies "yes," and their next box ships with the new flavor. It removes every barrier between interest and action.

Skio has publicly credited Grüns as a key partner in their growth. "They've told people multiple times that we mostly just build what Grüns tells us to build," Janis says. "They have a transparent culture, they'll tell us when it sucks, they'll tell us what needs to be fixed or built, and they have a really strong filter for business case."

That partnership mindset extends across the Shopify ecosystem. As the business crossed $100 million in revenue, Grüns transitioned to a hybrid approach, a custom-coded, headless subscriber experience layered on top of Shopify. But the foundation remains the same. The out-of-the-box Shopify ecosystem, Janis says, can support brands "far beyond the point they think they need it."

Ecosystem collaboration

For a subscription business built on daily use, keeping the product experience fresh is critical. At Grüns, that need shows up as a limited-time offer (LTO) strategy designed to drive more than retention.

Shopify and its ecosystem give the team the flexibility to launch new flavors quickly, support collaborations, and scale those experiences without adding complexity.

In December, Grüns launched a Grinch-branded limited-time flavor through a licensed partnership, complete with custom packaging and gummy shapes. At the time of this interview, another collaboration with a major Shopify brand was set to launch within two weeks, a co-branded product where the partner would send its customers to gruns.co.

"We are trying to ideally get to a place where a consumer could have 12 different versions and flavors of Grüns in a year for each of their 12 subscriptions," Janis says.

The LTO cadence keeps the product fresh, gives subscribers something to look forward to, and creates organic marketing moments that drive new acquisition through partner audiences.

A CPG conglomerate

Most brands expand by adding products. Janis is building a CPG portfolio.

Rather than launching nootropics, immunity, and energy products under the Grüns name, the company created distinct sister brands: Nütrops, Immün, Jüced, and Kids. Each has its own Shopify Plus storefront, its own identity, and its own subscriber base, all operating under Grüns Nutrition, Inc.

That model only works with the right infrastructure. Shopify made it possible to launch and manage multiple brands in parallel, without rebuilding systems each time

"A brand should represent one very clear concept to the consumer," Janis says. “Grüns is comprehensive daily nutrition. Nütrops is cognitive support. Immün is immune support. Each brand has room to develop a distinct personality and mission without diluting the others.”

The storefronts are separate. The email lists are separate. And subscribers sign up independently. It’s more complex operationally, but it creates stronger, more focused brands that can each scale on their own.

Crucially, the system is repeatable. The same Shopify ecosystem, Skio for subscriptions, Klaviyo for email, Postscript for SMS, Replo for landing pages, has been replicated across all five brands with minimal friction.

That repeatability has turned brand launches into a scalable process. The company has 12 additional product innovations planned over the next two years, supported by a team of four R&D scientists. “Under the FAFO model,” Janis says. “F*** around, find out. That’s what they do every day, try to figure out how to make this work and push gummy science forward.”

Expanding into retail without tradeoffs

While ecommerce subscriptions are the core of the business, Grüns can co-exist in retail locations without cannibalizing its online channel. In fact, Grüns is now in over 7,000 retail locations, including Costco, Sam's Club, Walmart, Target, and Sprouts.

The retail strategy is designed to complement, not compete with, DTC. Retail carries a limited product assortment and tailored pack sizes for each channel, while the full experience, limited-time flavors, subscriber perks, and the complete product range live exclusively on gruns.co.

"We meet consumers where they shop," Janis says. Some customers discover Grüns at Target and eventually subscribe online. Others become repeat buyers in-store. Both channels sustain their own repeat purchase behavior. "Grüns has the highest repeat rates in retail in the category," Janis says.

The data supports the strategy. Grüns has seen no meaningful deterioration of ecommerce economics due to retail, or vice versa. Consumers largely stick to the channel they started in. The two coexist without cannibalization. And the retail business alone has become substantial. "If you just stripped retail out of our business and said this is your business," Janis says, "it is a very large nine-figure retail business this year."

The Shopify commerce layer

Grüns processes over 90% of its transactions through Shopify Payments, with Shop Pay active as the accelerated checkout option. At an average order value of nearly $100 and thousands of orders per day, the volume flowing through Shopify's payment infrastructure is substantial.

The Shop App has also become part of the stack. Grüns has been running Shop App Campaigns for over two years, using them as a discovery and acquisition channel. Janis describes the campaigns as profitable, a low-effort, always-on channel that compounds alongside the brand's primary paid media mix on Meta.

For subscription brands, the Shop App presents a unique dynamic. Consumers can discover Grüns in the app, but the full subscription experience still lives on gruns.co. Janis sees the app as another surface for meeting consumers where they already are, similar to the retail strategy.

AI as an operational advantage

Grüns' internal use of AI is best-in-class. The team uses Shopify Sidekick for operational insights, builds in Claude daily to automate their workflows, and the development team uses Claude to code in Liquid and rebuild the website natively on Shopify's theme architecture, moving away from Replo to a more scalable, templatized infrastructure without adding engineering headcount.

The foundation is data integrity. Grüns built its database and data infrastructure with Fivetran, giving the data and finance teams the reliability layer that enables AI automation across the organization.

At Grüns, AI is built into how the company operates. This week, every employee at Grüns built a personal AI roadmap to automate their own job. Not a manager's directive for someone else's role. Each person mapped what they do, identified what can be automated, and is now executing against that roadmap.

His framing of why this matters is about people. "Anybody coming from Grüns will be at the absolute peak of perceived value in the workforce," he says, "given the tools, education, enablement, and data infrastructure we're providing. They'll go to a different org and probably be shocked with just how years behind other orgs are in implementing AI in a very scalable way."

For a company with over 120 employees that's barely three years old, the ambition signals how Janis thinks about operational leverage, the same way he evaluated it from the boardroom.

The Results: Rapid growth, built on a subscription-first model

With Shopify and its ecosystem as the foundation, Grüns has scaled quickly while building a durable, subscription-first business. Here are the most notable results so far:

• $50M run rate within the first year, built entirely on Shopify Plus
• 90%+ of revenue from subscriptions
• 94–96% of subscribers use the product 4–6 times per week; 80% daily
• 10 million gummies shipped per day
• 7,000+ retail locations, including Costco, Walmart, Target, and Sam’s Club
• Five brands launched on Shopify Plus under one organization
• Profitable within one year of launch 

The portfolio strategy is already paying off. Nütrops, launched in late 2024, has already scaled to a meaningful revenue stream. The portfolio strategy was a central part of the investor narrative during Grüns’s $500 million Series B in 2025 and has since caught the attention of larger players, with Grüns recently being acquired by Unilever.

What's Next

Grüns isn’t slowing down. The multi-brand portfolio continues to expand, with 12 additional product categories in development. International markets are next, with Passport already onboarding for global shipping. Retail distribution is growing as well, with drug retailers and additional grocery chains launching this year. Meanwhile, the subscription engine continues to compound.

Janis is also focused on what comes next in commerce. When Shopify introduced direct purchasing through ChatGPT, Janis immediately saw the opportunity. “We love to be on the forefront of AI use cases,” he says. For a subscription business where over 90% of revenue is recurring, the ability for an AI agent to recommend and initiate a subscription opens a new acquisition surface.

His long-term vision reflects that ambition. “If somebody were to see a Notion doc where I’ve laid out what a 10-year vision looks like for this business, they would literally think this is psycho,” he says. “But there’s a world in which we go after that. And we’re one of the biggest out there at some point.”

What matters most, though, is the team. “Building a team of over 120 people in two and a half years who live, breathe, eat the Grüns culture—that’s the biggest moat,” Janis says. “The product is great. The growth is great. But the team is what makes it all work.”

“You don’t celebrate six miles into a marathon,” he adds. “We’re like six miles in. It’s cool. There’s a marathon in front of us. Let’s keep sprinting.”