Byron Bay's Loco Love: How $1000 became a $15m chocolate empire

Success doesn’t always begin with a five-year plan — as Byron Bay chocolate-maker and accidental entrepreneur Emica Penklis discovered.

Former model Emica Penklis started making chocolate to heal herself.

Many of the self-help books and CEO-led podcasts would have you believe that to run a highly successful business, you have to have clear goals and ambitions.

A concrete five-year-plan you can take to investors.

After all, if you can’t dream it, you can’t achieve it, right?

However the path to success isn’t always as set in stone as that.

In fact, many entrepreneurs seemingly fell into their business life. Or at least that is the case for Emica Penklis, the founder of health-conscious chocolate brand Loco Love; Danielle Holloway, the founder of gumboot brand Merry People; and Matilda Brown, one half of health conscious, ready meal company The Good Farm Shop.

That’s not to say that they haven’t worked hard, or spent many sleepless nights stressing about their profit and loss statements.

Emica Penklis, who is the founder of chocolate Loco Love.

But for these three highly successful women, there were no grand plans for world dominance. Instead, they all had an idea. And the courage to follow it through.

As Brown says, “Sometimes, if you think you have to have everything figured out from the get go, it can stop you from starting.”

LOCO LOVE CHOCOLATE

Model, turned naturopath, turned chocolatier Emica Penklis believes her business idea found her.

As a model, she’d worked with some of the biggest brands in the world. Levi’s, Stella McCartney, Clinique and Burberry.

But years in the industry left her battling a chronic eating disorder, so she turned her attention to naturopathy to help heal herself, and others.

“Through my own personal healing journey I had gotten to the point where it was beyond what I ate and the supplements I took.

“I didn’t feel healthy or healed, until I started meditating and weirdly started using my hands to make chocolate.

“I realise this sounds pretty out there and woo woo, but as I continued to make chocolate, life became more in flow.

“My previous depression lifted and never came back,” says the mother-of-two who lives in Byron Bay, NSW.

“My purpose revealed itself and that was to spread love through chocolate.”

So that’s what she did. She started making health conscious chocolate which was infused with organic ingredients, tonic herbs and healing spices all from her apartment kitchen at night. And she would deliver them to customers on her day off.

Loco Love was born in 2013.

“I started the company on a $1000 tax return, with a food processor and some organic ingredients. So my investment was small and I had no pressure to make it work.

“One of the best things about it was I would get paid when I delivered the chocolate, so it allowed me to reinvest into the business from the beginning,” she says.

“Confidence came from the reaction I was getting from customers. The chocolates were selling out and we have been trying to keep up with demand since.”

Today, Loco Love is one of Byron’s biggest employers, with over 70 team members. They turn over $15m in revenue and Radek Sali, the former CEO of Swisse, has a strategic stake in Loco Love.

Byron Bay local Emica Penklis started chocolate company Loco Love.

“Mid last year I recognised that in order to continue growing Loco Love sustainably in a way that felt aligned with our vision and capacity, we needed a partner. Loco Love had been growing rapidly for years and so had my children, so I needed support,” Penklis says.

“Ultimately, we weren’t looking for just capital. We wanted partners who could support us operationally, strategically and spiritually.

“The partnership felt right from the initial coffee that Radek and I shared. I knew what I was looking for and luckily Radek and I were seeking each other.”

Penklis adds that coming from a family of artists and creatives, and someone who never had a corporate career, when it came to business she initially resisted anything that felt like authority or structure.

“I thought rules meant rigidity. But building Loco Love taught me otherwise,” she says.

“We’ve had to create frameworks, culture plans, business plans, budgets, forecasts and so many systems, not just to keep things running, but to make it a great place to work.

“Structure, I’ve come to realise, can actually be the container for creativity, not the cage!

“I think I can be more mindful when things are organised and it’s not just reactive chaos.”

Penklis adds her friends and family like to remind her constantly about the early days of her making chocolate in the studio apartment.

“I don’t think anyone can believe how far we have come,” she says.

“When I started the company I didn’t really know what was in store for me! I started purely out of passion and not to raise money, grow globally or even to have a business.

“I believe that when something is born of pure passion and determination it has more chance of success. Loco Love hasn’t been an easy path, but it was my passion for it that kept me going in the hard times.”

MERRY PEOPLE

Danielle Holloway started her gumboot brand Merry People in 2014, but the idea to create stylish yet practical gumboots started well before that.

Growing up on a farm in Victoria, she was well versed in work that got her feet dirty. And then, as she started attending musical festivals in her 20s, she also discovered a need for gumboots, but couldn’t find ones that were fashionable and practical. But she “always thought someone else would do it”, she says.

So she climbed the corporate ladder at ANZ, working in their business team.

However, the more time she spent in that corporate world, the more she realised she wanted more. And still, no one had created fun pairs of gumboots.

“I wanted to be more creative, so I wondered if I could bring to life my idea,” she says.

So she started. But slowly. The aim was to make fashionable and functional gumboots that bring a sense of “merriness” to rainy days.

Her product wasn’t just for people who lived on farms, but those travelling to work on public transport on rainy mornings or who need them to play with their kids in parks.

From her couch at home, with a pen in hand, she started designing her own gumboots. She then flew to China to find a factory and with the savings she’d put aside to buy a house, she got samples made that she was happy with. This whole process took a year.

Then she literally hit the pavement herself, walking the boots into retailers in Victoria and selling them at farmers markets before creating an online store.

“In my mind, I didn’t start Merry People with this goal that it would become a huge business. I just wanted to prove something to myself,” she says.

But she could see the demand was there. And when ANZ was offering redundancies, she decided to take one.

Merry People’s Danielle Holloway with her husband Nick Pearce. Picture: David Caird

“I feel like I could have stayed at ANZ forever. It was a little scary to lose that regular income but it gave me fuel to go, ‘OK, I have to make this work now.’ It was an exhilarating feeling,” she says. “And if it failed, my mentality was like, ‘at least you gave it a go’. The biggest risk for me was getting to 50 or 60 and kicking myself for having an idea that I didn’t try.”

Today, Merry People has sold over 500,000 pairs of gumboots globally.

This year they will open their first bricks and mortar store in Melbourne and also focus on an expansion in the US and UK.

Holloway, who is a mum-of-two, privately owns the company. She doesn’t have investors. She doesn’t have shareholders who hold her to certain returns and growth levels.

“It means my focus is always on the product, the customers, and the team,” she says.

Holloway believes her career has come full circle because, in fact, while she was at university she did a cadetship at a fashion magazine but decided not to go through with it because of the lack of jobs available.

“Gumboots have been around since the 1800s. We aren’t doing anything revolutionary. Our brand is not cool or sexy. It’s accessible. And timeless,” she says.

“It’s about putting a joyful twist on life when the unexpected, like rain, happens.”

THE GOOD FARM SHOP

Matilda Brown is often referred to as an actor, writer and director but, for the
38-year-old, the part of her career that is most interesting is that of entrepreneur.

However, to understand how she got there, you have to join the dots of her past.

For over 15 years, Brown poured her heart and soul into the entertainment industry, believing it was her purpose in life.

As an actor, Brown had appeared in shows like Offspring, Rake and Underbelly: The Golden Mile.

She also starred in Lessons from the Grave, opposite her father, Bryan Brown.

However, as she approached 30, a feeling began to simmer. That was, she “could work my arse off and give and give and give, but no matter how talented I was, (acting) was never going to give back what I was giving it.”

The simmering feeling really bubbled when, at 30, she welcomed her first baby with partner Scott Gooding, a chef who had appeared on reality series My Kitchen Rules.

“After four months, I started going back to auditions, learning lines to parts I wasn’t inspired by and I probably wouldn’t get,” she says.

“I would be spending time away from my child, not getting paid and not even getting a thank you. It was a complete waste of time. And once something starts to bubble, it’s hard to turn off.”

Matilda Brown and husband Scott Gooding, who own The Good Farm Shop. Picture: Cath Muscat.

Brown wanted a new career path and spent the next four years trying to find it.

“I was throwing stuff at walls, to see what would stick,” she describes.

“I had realised I wanted something different. I wanted to be empowered. I wanted to feel financially secure, which I wasn’t.

“I was listening to podcasts where people had done a similar thing and said goodbye to a chapter of their life and started something new without knowing exactly what they were doing which gave me the confidence to try it for myself.”

Then she and Gooding “stumbled” into a business, which eventually became The Good Farm Shop.

Brown’s mum, actor Rachel Ward, was in the process of rebuilding their family farm regeneratively after fire had destroyed it. The regenerative moment felt exciting to the couple, and with a pocket of time and some savings to try something new, they started with a cow share and grew into an online butchery.

“This wasn’t a side hustle. We weren’t making a regular income, so we needed the business to work which I think served us because we threw everything at it,” says Brown, who at this stage had welcomed a second child.

“At the beginning, everything was hard because we’d never done it before. We weren’t business people. We weren’t numbers people. We had a passion. We started accidentally but we wanted to make it work.”

And initially it wasn’t working.

“We were haemorrhaging money. A sinking ship,” she admits. But then they brought in someone to help with the finances and decided to turn the direction of the business around, to make ready-made meals using produce from regenerative farms and ingredients that are good for the body and the planet.

That’s when things changed. In their second year under this new business model, trading increased nine-fold. In their third year, it increased 100 per cent.

What started out as cooking meals in a tiny corner of a commercial kitchen in Sydney’s Northern Beaches has grown into the couple taking over the entire kitchen.

“We look back on the hard chapters and I’m grateful for them. Because if it was easy from the get-go, we wouldn’t appreciate these moments now,” she says.

For Brown, who has also grown the company’s social media presence to over 115,000 followers, this new career has fulfilled her in a way acting didn’t.

“I always feel restricted as an actor,” she says.

“What I love about business is there isn’t anyone stopping me. I am a worker, I love working, I’m ambitious, I love being busy but this time I feel like the amount of work I put in equates to output.”

Her advice for anyone considering a career change?

“Jump in the deep end,” she says. “You either sink or swim. There is no one right way to do anything. Often, you have to work out your own way. And it’s possible.

“However, you have to put the work in, there is no way around that.”

Originally published as Byron Bay's Loco Love: How $1000 became a $15m chocolate empire