MZ Store: How a Polish Supplement Maker Sells in Over 30 Markets, From the US to Australia

In this episode of Rozmowy Logistyków, Adam Sobolewski talks with Łukasz Szostko, founder and CEO of MZ Store, about scaling e-commerce with global reach. They discuss 20 years of expansion by a company with its own supplement manufacturing plant into markets like the US and Australia.

WHY EXOTIC MARKETS INSTEAD OF THE OBVIOUS NEIGHBORS

Contrary to the typical expansion path (neighboring markets first — Germany, Czechia), MZ Store has for years deliberately entered markets seen as non-obvious: the US, Australia, Japan, Iraq, and Kuwait. The reasoning: the product (dietary supplements) is inherently replicable globally, so it's easier to find a niche where local competition is weaker than to fight in a saturated Western European market. An added strategic motive was reducing dependence on the geopolitics of a single region — experience from the Tricity area showed how a single parliamentary decision (restricting cross-border traffic with Kaliningrad) can immediately hit the revenue of border-region companies.

FDA APPROVAL IN TWO WEEKS, BECAUSE EUROPEAN CERTIFICATIONS ARE CLOSE TO AMERICAN ONES

Entering the US market required FDA certification for the manufacturing plant — a process many companies fear, but which in practice took two weeks, because the European HACCP and GMP certifications the company already held differ from their American counterparts mainly in procedural layers (reporting returns and incidents), not fundamental quality requirements. The US market (over 300 million consumers, high disposable income, large distances naturally favoring e-commerce) turned out to be one of the company's three key markets alongside the EU and Australia.

TRANSLATING THE WEBSITE INTO 24 LANGUAGES IN A WEEK INSTEAD OF MONTHS

A decade ago, translating a website into three languages (Italian, German, English) cost as much as an average apartment in Warsaw. Thanks to AI tools (DeepL and similar, chosen for contextual translation and avoiding prohibited health claims in the supplement industry), the company translated its website into every EU language within a week — and the effect was immediate: orders started coming in from markets the company hadn't even deliberately targeted operationally yet (matching payment methods or shipping to a given country still requires extra work — e.g. Bulgarians prefer cash on delivery).

SCALING WITH YOUR HEAD, NOT YOUR WALLET

A key rule for entering a new market: you don't have to build full logistics and marketing infrastructure right away. A simple market test — checking price competition in a given category and launching paid campaigns in the local language — lets you verify a market's potential without a large investment. Growth in new markets was usually slow and incremental, not a sudden jump, but it accumulated into a real share of revenue. The negative exception: France, where despite a translated website, demand for the health-supplement category turned out much lower than in Germany or the Scandinavian countries — proof that even a well-executed expansion can hit a market with different cultural habits.

A LONG LAST MILE AS A CHEAP WAY TO VALIDATE A MARKET

Instead of building local infrastructure right away, MZ Store repeatedly started by shipping directly from Poland (a long last mile) into a new market — a slower model than local e-commerce, but sufficient to verify demand before investing in a warehouse. Customers willing to wait for a unique product unavailable locally accept a longer delivery time — the key is the product being perceived as unique, not as a commodity available from just anyone on a marketplace.

AIR HUB GEOGRAPHY DECIDES DELIVERY SPEED MORE THAN CARRIER CHOICE

A concrete example: a parcel shipped on a Friday from a warehouse in Gdynia (where FedEx had one of its origin points) to New York arrived faster than some domestic US shipments — because it went straight to the carrier's air hub. The takeaway for companies building their own distribution network: what really decides global delivery speed is mainly the warehouse's location relative to a given carrier's air hub, not marginal punctuality differences between courier companies.

THE LOGISTICS MODEL: FULFILLMENT INSTEAD OF OWN WAREHOUSES

MZ Store gave up its own warehouses in favor of external fulfillment (two warehouses in Poland, a third being built in the Netherlands) — a decision preceded by a year of deliberation, driven by wanting to focus on growing the business instead of day-to-day management of warehouse staff. In the US, Japanese, and Australian markets, the company uses Amazon fulfillment, shipping stock directly from Poland or via Germany — the practical entry threshold for local fulfillment is usually a few hundred orders a month, below which operators are reluctant to take on the relationship.

SUPPLY CHAIN RISK MANAGEMENT: THREE LAYERS OF PROTECTION

Asked about the risk of key transport routes being blocked (the Panama Canal, routes from China), the recommended approach includes: identifying critical components (not always the main raw material — sometimes it's packaging with a single supplier) and keeping a higher safety stock on them; a pre-prepared contingency plan with a list of alternative suppliers, their minimum orders, and response times, ready before a crisis hits; and real-time risk monitoring and prediction tools (Resilinc, Project44), which enable "opportunity buying" — switching from ocean to air freight ahead of the curve, before competitors catch on and drive up prices. MZ Store practices a simplified version of this model with eight raw-material suppliers holding a quarter's worth of stock in advance — knowingly accepting that global-scale crises (like COVID, which hit ocean and air transport simultaneously) remain a scenario you can't fully prepare for.