How yogurt brand Sourmilk is making its mark on- and offline

It’s not often a brand touts a “drug deal” model in its marketing.

But that’s exactly what the founders of Greek-yogurt company Sourmilk were doing in the lead-up to and after the product’s November in-store launch date, having delivered more than 8,000 pre-ordered yogurts to customers from coolers across NYC on Citi Bikes.

“We have a product that has an eight-week shelf life, and so we also can’t sell DTC online and have that as our testing ground,” founder Kiki Couchman told us. “We knew we had to build up demand before we were ever on grocery-store shelves.”

Since then, Couchman—also known by her social media moniker, @Couchwoman, and her co-founder, Elan Halpern, have pulled other stunts, like offering celebrities yogurt, to help draw attention to their brand in person and online. Overall, Couchman said Sourmilk’s marketing strategy has been “a lot of IRL things paired with a good social strategy capturing the moment.”

We spoke with Couchman and Halpern about how that approach has grown the brand’s (and Couchman’s) social following as Sourmilk continues to expand its retail presence nationally.

Up close and personal

Sourmilk, which contains probiotics from fermentation, was born out of the idea that yogurt has a high household penetration in the US, yet many consumers continue to deal with gut health issues. Hoping to reach a more health-conscious consumer, Halpern and Couchman set out to make their presence known both online and offline, starting with Couchman’s personal founder story.

“People want to follow a person and not just a brand,” Couchman said. “When we launched this, it was clear that we wanted to start with a founder-led brand.”

Sourmilk also has its own brand social presence, and Couchman and Halpern use it for customer feedback, event information, and more generic posts. The @Couchwoman account, on the other hand, is for behind-the-scenes and founder-specific content, Couchman said. Her personal accounts have more than 30,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok, more than double the brand’s accounts’ followers.

“There’s a lot out there on much bigger founders,” Couchman said. “I felt that there was a gap in the content creation market where there are far fewer people who are talking about the nitty-gritty, up-and-down of what’s going on [at the start of a business].”

Couchman said her personal account has been a gateway for obtaining customer contact information, in which she provides people early access to mailing lists and test demos in exchange for contact info. Sourmilk currently has about 5,000 subscribers to its email list and zip-code information for those subscribers, which helps the founders decide where to expand the brand next, she said. In exchange, Halpern said the founders have given out their personal phone numbers to customers to share product feedback directly.

Couchman’s social presence has provided a top-of-funnel way to grow Sourmilk’s following, she said, and she typically cross-posts between the two accounts at least once a week. Differentiating @Couchwoman from Sourmilk’s social presence creates a two-pronged discovery mechanism online, which may allow the brand to reach different audiences, she said.

“You might like Sourmilk, and you may not want to hear me yap all the time,” Couchman said. “So there’s that reason for keeping them separate, as well.”

Not-so-illicit deals

On both the @Couchwoman and Sourmilk accounts, much of the content comes from IRL activations. One of the brand’s most viral moments happened in March, when Harry Styles walked by during a “guerilla grocery” event where the brand gives cases of yogurt to its customers to bring to their neighborhood grocery stores, Couchman said.

Sourmilk has also partnered with other brands in NYC on pop-up events and limited-edition products made for social sharing, including the salad shop Eden’s and the pie shop Fillings. Halpern said the brand has also seen success with pop-ups at more nontraditional locations, like SoulCycle locations and Pilates studios.

In the case of the IRL “drug deal” product drops, the name itself was a marketing decision to help “blow it up” on social media, Couchman said. Calling it “passing out yogurt on the street to people who pre-ordered,” she said, just wasn’t as fun.

“It really was our way to get on the map and get in front of customers last summer, but then we’ve almost seen it as a tenet, a representation of a value of ours,” she said, “which is being really close to customers and us really on the ground.”