In Bioniwel at ul. Spółdzielcza you can buy organic food, including fresh produce from local suppliers, herbs, natural cosmetics and eco-friendly cleaning products (circa 2 thousand various products in total). You can obtain dietetic advice, drink a cup of coffee or a green cocktail while reading a book about holistic nutrition, or take part in a workshop about healthy lifestyle.

 

Ewa Bohdanowicz and Edyta Cygan have been interested in holistic healing and healthy eating for years. They believe that organic food favourably affects our bodies. “We were looking for natural ways to help our family and friends with their health problems, and in July 2014 we decided to set up our own company,” says Ewa Bohdanowicz. Both women were working in the finance and administration department of a large insurance company at the time. “After a dozen or so years of our corporate life we craved for a change. Someone said to us: If you want to establish your own firm, why not do it now,” she recollects. They registered Bioniwel as a company in December 2014, but before that they tested the waters. “The green market seems to be on the rise – according to forecasts, the sales of eco-friendly food will be improving up to the year 2020,” she says. They visited many food fairs all over Poland looking for the right products to finally open the shop at the end of August 2015. The launch was financed from their own savings and a low-interest “Klon” loan for the start-up (from the Polish Entrepreneurs Foundation) of PLN 40,000. “The Foundation provided us with professional support - the help of a lawyer, business plan and marketing specialists. We took part in very useful training courses on running our own business,” says Edyta Cygan. They also attended the state-certified dietetic training course.

 

At first they intended to start operations in January 2015. “It proved not that easy, because we needed to officially change the purpose of our premises. All the formal procedures lasted nine months, and the shop was finally opened at the end of August,” she recollects.

 

The owners assure us that their business does not make a loss and even earns some profit.    “Nonetheless, it is not the amount we included in our business plan,” she admits.  “We prepared contingency plans B, C and D in case the organic shop did not work out. After all, we had to pay for our upkeep before the shop started to bring profit,” she adds. That is why they began selling multifunctional equipment and organic dietary supplements.  Even today these activities are their extra source of income.

 

The owners of Bioniwel also treat their online shop bioniwel.pl only as an addition. “Selling organic food on the Internet is difficult. We are not able to compete against the stores offering lower prices than what we have paid for our products wholesale,” observes Edyta Cygan.

 

Both women find it most difficult to win customers and they admit that marketing and advertising consumes a lot of their energy.  To reach their customers, they pay for Facebook campaigns. They also hired a professional film-maker to produce a short film about their shop (until today the film has amassed 10 thousand views on their Facebook profile www.facebook.com/Bioniwel).  They also frequently take part in events and fairs and they run their own blog.

 

“In the future we plan to organize workshops with specialists from all over Poland.   We realize that the first year of running business is hard and requires a lot of patience, but the truth is that we have created a magical place for ourselves and every day we come to work with real pleasure,” summarizes Ewa Bohdanowicz.

 

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