Leema

Leema is an online marketplace for handcrafted and unique treats delivered direct to your doorstep. All across the United States, there are entrepreneurial food makers brimming with excitement about their products. Food is their art form and Leema’s mission is to help them share their products and their stories.

Working nights and weekends with my two co-founders, we conceptualized and launched Leema over the course of about 6 months. Our goal was to create a marketplace and discovery platform for small-batch and unique treats that might otherwise go undiscovered as an individual brand/website. I was primarily responsible for the design and front-end of the site while also helping to recruit new sellers to the platform, prioritize and define requirements for our next features and develop the overall marketing strategy for the product.

We spent hours interviewing our vendors trying to understand their current pain points, how we could shape our product to make life easier for our customers and what features were critical to them. Leveraging the security and convenience of Stripe and Easypost, we were able to provide our customers with an easy and secure way to purchase via credit card and we were able to generate easily downloadable shipping labels for each purchase our vendors received.

Over the course of working on Leema, I gained experience setting up the front-end architecture for our site, performing calculations to determine the lifetime value of a customer and customer acquisition costs, pitching at a startup competition, providing attentive customer service to our users, social media marketing, writing press releases and tabling at the New York City Wine and Food Festival.

At this point in time, I’m no longer working on Leema but I certainly learned a lot along the way. With over 100 products listed on our site from over 20 different vendors, we were truly able to take an idea and turn it into a functioning product.