When Rebecca “Beck” Williams took the CEO job at Seed & Sprout in 2022, she inherited a Byron Bay sustainability brand in decline. Covid had drained the tank, the Northern Rivers floods had rattled the team, and there was a warehouse quietly filling up with bread boxes nobody wanted. Four years on, the plastic-free lifestyle brand founded by Sophie Kovic is turning over $30 million, and in this episode of Add To Cart, Nathan Bush unpacks exactly how Williams pulled it off. It is a masterclass in turnaround discipline, product testing and treating customers like adults.
Beck came from corporate, with an apprenticeship at GM Holden and a transformation role at Mercedes-Benz where the business doubled in five years. That background shaped everything about how she approached the rebuild, and it shows in the detail.
Start With People, Not a Spreadsheet
Most turnaround playbooks start with the numbers. Beck started with the team. In her first 48 hours she ran a one-on-one with every single person in the business, top to bottom, half an hour each. The brief was simple: what do you need from me, how can I help, and what does success look like in the next six months.
She’s firm that these only work individually, never in a group and never as an anonymous survey. Dropping a survey into someone’s inbox, as she sees it, signals you’re not sure their opinion is worth your time.
We live in a problem-rich environment. As people keep creating problems for us to fix, that excites our design team.
Rebecca Williams, CEO, Seed & Sprout
For any operator inheriting a team or a new function, the lesson is that the fastest way to find the real problems is to ask the people closest to them, then fix what surfaces together rather than arriving with a fixed agenda.
Empower the Team That Already Has the Ideas
The product team wasn’t short of ideas. It had decks of them. What it lacked was permission, because a declining business kept saying no. Beck’s first big unlock was simply releasing the shackles on a team that already knew what to build.
The second unlock was physical. A new warehouse in late 2024 lifted capacity fivefold, which meant the brand could finally meet demand rather than choke on it. A lot of what looked like a growth problem was actually a fulfilment problem, and once the constraint moved, the growth followed.
Test Small, Fail Fast
The clean-up came first. “Bread box gate” was a warehouse of aged stock that had sat for around 18 months. Rather than slashing prices, the team cleared it in roughly six weeks by turning the boxes into outer packaging for bundled sale events and an evergreen gift with purchase.
Then came the discipline that keeps it from happening again. Instead of committing to large minimum order quantities, Seed & Sprout tests new products in pilot runs of about 500 units, often on pre-order, leaning on long supplier relationships to keep the volumes low while it learns. Every product that graduates to a full launch does so on the back of a proper post-campaign analysis, where product and marketing pressure-test whether an item failed on merit or on execution.
Not everything wins, and that’s the point. A wine cooler launched mostly so the team had cold wine for a photoshoot didn’t fly. Failing fast on a small run beats being buried in stock.
Treat Customers Like Adults
Underneath all of it is a focus on customer quality, not just volume. New customer numbers are up around 300% since FY22 and average order value has doubled, but Beck measures a genuinely valuable customer on AOV, the timing of their second purchase, and whether they cross categories, all tracked through Lifetimely and Klaviyo.
Even the discount ladder is deliberate. Those seemingly random 8, 9 and 11 percent offers are a product “walk-up” borrowed from her Mercedes-Benz days, engineered to guide customers through the range rather than picked at random.
I agree they probably do look a little bit random, but I’m okay with that.
Rebecca Williams, CEO, Seed & Sprout
Where the brand really separates itself is honesty. When a $2 fuel surcharge landed, Seed & Sprout flagged it openly on every product page and had founder Sophie Kovic explain the decision on social, rather than burying it at checkout. It didn’t cost them customers. If anything it deepened the community. The same candour applies to AI, which the team adopted deliberately, with clear guardrails and transparent flagging in customer care.
The Takeaway
Seed & Sprout is proof a purpose-led brand can scale without losing its head or its margin. Beck paired corporate rigour with a founder’s mission, and the through-line is that none of the growth levers were flashy. Start with people, de-risk product before you scale it, and treat transparency as a growth lever rather than a liability. The turnaround, on the evidence, was only the warm-up.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Rebecca Williams? Rebecca “Beck” Williams is the CEO of Seed & Sprout, the Byron Bay-based plastic-free lifestyle brand. She joined in 2022 to lead a turnaround, bringing a corporate background that includes GM Holden, Mercedes-Benz and Thermomix, and works alongside founder Sophie Kovic.
How did Seed & Sprout turn its business around? Beck started with people, running individual interviews with every employee in her first 48 hours, then unlocked a product team that had ideas but no permission to execute. A new warehouse lifted capacity fivefold, aged stock was cleared without discounting, and the range was rebuilt through disciplined, low-risk product testing.
What is “bread box gate”? It’s the nickname for a warehouse full of bread boxes that had sat as dead stock for around 18 months. Rather than slashing prices, Seed & Sprout cleared it in roughly six weeks by using the boxes as outer packaging for bundled sales and as an evergreen gift with purchase.
How does Seed & Sprout test new products? In pilot runs of around 500 units, frequently on pre-order, using long-standing supplier relationships to keep minimum order quantities low. The brand tests demand before committing to larger volumes, and runs a proper post-campaign analysis to decide what graduates to a full launch.
How does Seed & Sprout measure a quality customer? By average order value, the timing of a customer’s second purchase, and whether they buy across more than one category, tracked in Lifetimely with retention managed through Klaviyo. New customer numbers are up around 300% since FY22, with AOV doubled.
Based on Episode #650 of the Add To Cart podcast with Rebecca Williams, Chief Executive officer of Seed & Sprout. Join the Add To Cart community for free
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