Dewi van de Waeter, founder of The Lekker Company, went from creating cosmetics on her kitchen table to distributing through major retailers such as Albert Heijn, Etos, Holland & Barrett, and DA, as well as hundreds of retailers and concept stores across Europe.

Introduction: The Lekker Company

The Lekker Company is a Dutch personal care brand based in Utrecht that makes natural deodorants and lip balms with cardboard packaging. The brand started 12 years ago when Dewi began experimenting in her kitchen, making body butters, deodorants and lip balms, taking inspiration from Pinterest. The goal was to use only natural ingredients that you could ‘basically eat’.

She started selling on Etsy and at local markets, and stores quickly fell in love with the handcrafted, natural products.

From there, The Lekker Company moved into concept stores, then into gift shops, learning the ropes of retail pricing and margins along the way.

A few years later, there was a pivotal moment when Dewi pitched the brand to Albert Heijn, the largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands – and they got in.

Things started to move quickly, and that’s when The Lekker Company had to pick up the pace to keep up with bigger distribution rules. Sales went through the roof.

I was making my own products in a mixing bowl at the time, and I didn’t even have a barcode yet.

The Lekker Company is currently a team of four in Utrecht, with production done by certified partners. They serve big retailers, independent concept stores, boutiques, hotels, and smaller specialty shops across Europe.

They will now be serving the majority of their retailer and distributor network through Orderchamp Cloud, where they recently added the B2B Portal, to serve buyers with specific needs, which also gives them access to the mobile Sales App.

The challenge: different buyers, different expectations

As The Lekker Company grew, their B2B reality became more complex to manage.

Apart from the mass retailers like Albert Heijn and Holland & Barret who have their own systems (and usually EDI processes which they currently still manage separately), they work with distributors and larger wholesale buyers: higher volumes, more personal contact, but tougher negotiations on prices, and smaller margins. They didn’t have a solution to manage this properly.

Then there are concept stores, the real ambassadors of the brand, who love to take the time to tell the full brand story. The interesting part, one small shop currently still sells more per store than one mass retail location, but the smaller shops are also more manual to serve and require more relationship-building as you speak with every shop-owner. It's a very different ball-game.

They were already part of the Orderchamp Marketplace, where they found a lot of new relationships and build a connection with retailers. "We work with retailers in Romania, Lithuania and Estonia, it's incredible how these retailers find us through Orderchamp" - says Dewi. It’s easy to manage your longtail customer base via one channel.

With more and more visibility in stores, their inbound requests also started to grow, and more and more retailers began reaching out to buy directly from them. Some of these had specific needs, or required an account manager, and forwarding them to their Marketplace listing didn't always make sense.

This is when they realised they needed their own branded B2B environment – and they chose the Orderchamp B2B Portal, because it's already fully integrated into their current flows.

The solution: choosing a platform that enables every buyer journey

When choosing the right B2B e-commerce platform, Daan was looking at three key things:

1. A buying experience that retailers actually enjoy

2. A solution that requires as little manual work as possible

3. A much better price point than other players in the market

Strong B2B wholesale buying experience

In many companies, B2B purchasing still happens via Excel sheets or PDFs. But why shouldn’t it be enjoyable for retailers as well? This was the same for The Lekker Company.

Dewi and Daan used to work with manual catalog & price lists shared by email, but this didn't make their team or their customers happy — a better buying experience is a must in B2B too.

Their B2B sales also grew in complexity, they started implementing different pricing for different customers, bulk discount mechanisms and more advanced shipping rules.

With Orderchamp’s B2B Portal, these B2B complexities are simplified by design. They now:

• Display their products and variants clearly in one overview

• Setup price lists for different customer tiers and update it dynamically

• Created volume-based incentives to drive larger orders

• Manage complex international weight-based shipping rules from one place

Do as little manual work as possible

Processing manual orders eats into margins.

When they received an order by email, phone call, PDF or is taken at a tradeshow, they had to check their stock file manually to see if the product was available, find the right product, calculate totals, add VAT, maybe create a quote, and then update the stock level if the order goes through.

This whole process is a cost in time, focus and money.

With the new B2B Portal, orders come in already structured, prices and VAT are applied automatically, and stock levels can be kept in sync. Now, the team spends less time on admin and more time on building relationships with the right customers.

Orderchamp B2B Portal vs Shopify Plus: 10x cheaper

Daan and Dewi checked different software alternatives, and ultimately made the decision to go for the Orderchamp Cloud solution, not only because it's powerful, but also because it's priced at an attractive rate.

To compare: Shopify Plus starts at around €2,500+ per month. It often feels like an enterprise plan being pushed to mid-size companies. Orderchamp's B2B Portal starts at €249.

Owning your own B2B distribution software doesn’t have to eat up all of your margins.

Lessons from the entrepreneurial journey

We always ask brand founders to share some lessons learned along the way. Dewi and Daan shared two very great ones.

1. Confidence is key

“Confidence is key. It took me four years before a friend told me, ‘You can pitch to Albert Heijn.’ If I could go back, I would think bigger from the start.”

2. You can’t copy-paste success from one retailer to another

“After things worked out with Albert Heijn, we had another opportunity with a big retailer. It was easy to think we could replicate that success.
But when we started that collaboration, we realised the purchasing dynamics and the marketing budget needed were very different. In the end it didn’t work out. It took a lot of resources, and for a small team that was a hard hit. Looking back, we would do that differently.”

Daan told us that it was one of those moments where they learned they needed to innovate more in their product portfolio. You need to develop products that fit your company values but can also find their place in larger distribution.

Every retailer has its own dynamics. If something works with one retailer, you cannot simply copy-paste that success.

What’s next for The Lekker Company

When they started their journey, sustainability on the shelves wasn’t as big as it is now. Having brown, paper-like packaging was a good way to be distinctive and stand out as a handcrafted product made with sustainable ingredients.

That’s not the case anymore. As sustainability has grown, more and more brands have adopted that look and feel.

The Lekker Company went the opposite way and made a bold choice. They rebranded with bright colours and bold headlines, keeping sustainability at their core. Now they’re building on that to go beyond the eco-only niche and stay true to what they do best: developing simple and effective products with ingredients you can trust.

Thank you for your trust, Dewi and Daan. We'll keep improving our software to help you grow your business!

Find The Lekker Company here:

Website
Instagram

Interested to stock some Lekker products for your store? They have an automatic 5% off your first order until February 28th 2026:

Orderchamp Marketplace
B2B Portal