Veronika Avvakumova runs international sales and foreign trade for Fitness SHOCK, the sugar-free dessert maker whose revenue crossed $16 million. She came in as a PR hire in 2020 and now manages the brand’s storefronts on Amazon in Germany, the UK and the United States, along with a live-commerce operation on TikTok Shop.
Fitness SHOCK reached the business press well before its product reached most people’s hands. The company makes sugar-free bars and cookies engineered to taste like ordinary confectionery, and the commercial question that trails any product like that is whether buyers beyond its home market will give it a chance. Veronika Avvakumova has spent five years answering it on three continents.
Her title is head of international sales and foreign trade, a role she grew into from a junior PR job over about two years, as the company climbed off the sports-nutrition shelf into mainstream retail and then abroad. Under her the brand opened on Amazon in Germany, added the UK and the United States, and began selling through TikTok Shop in the American market, alongside distributor networks across the Gulf.
The parts of the job she cares about are the unglamorous ones: how a market gets sized, how a distributor is talked into a first order, why one sell-through number can decide whether a product keeps its place on the shelf.
Let’s start with the arc, because it’s a strange one. You joined in June 2020 as a PR manager, moved into key account management that autumn, took over a sales direction in early 2021, and by October 2022 you were heading the international sales and foreign-trade department. People spend whole careers not making that jump. What actually happened inside the company that made it possible?
It happened mostly because the company was growing faster than its org chart, so there were always jobs that nobody owned yet, and I tended to volunteer for them. The PR role was where I came in, and in a company that size it really meant explaining the product to outsiders all day, which is a fast way to learn it inside out. By the time I moved to key accounts I could already present to a buyer, and I’d worked out that buyers care about three things — how fast the thing sells, what margin it carries, and whether you’re going to embarrass them in front of their own management.
Then international opened up because somebody had to take it. The founders had always meant to sell the brand abroad, and at some point the actual work needed an owner: the negotiations, the emails sent at midnight into other time zones, the import paperwork that nobody finds interesting. I put my hand up for it before I was qualified, and I learned it while doing it. Being willing to be visibly out of your depth for a while is underrated — you learn faster than the person who waits to feel ready.
Before we go abroad, explain the product, because it matters for everything that follows. Fitness SHOCK is sugar-free desserts — bars, cookies — and the founders have said publicly that the technical challenge was real: sugar is cheap and forgiving, and removing it usually wrecks both taste and economics. Why does that detail end up being central to the export story?
The product travels precisely because of that difficulty. Plenty of brands that try to expand find out their flagship is really a local taste that only makes sense to the palate it grew up with, and they end up rebuilding it for every market. We assumed we’d be in that position and braced for it.
As it turned out, we barely had to change anything. What sells at home sells in Germany and in the Gulf. We trim the assortment for each market — there’s no sense shipping a black-currant cookie somewhere nobody’s heard of the berry — but the recipe itself carries. A distributor in Saudi Arabia gave me a shortcut I still use: look at the flavors a chain like Dunkin’ runs in the country you’re entering, because those have already survived the local palate, and they tend to be the ones we already make — caramel, chocolate, nut, vanilla, coconut.
The hard engineering, a sugar-free dessert that still eats like a treat, doubles as the protection. It’s difficult to copy, and the appetite for it has turned up in every market we’ve tried.
The first real international move you led is now almost a piece of company folklore. In February 2022 you took the international team to Gulfood in Dubai — one of the largest food exhibitions in the world — and by your own account you didn’t even have a stand. You went in as attendees. Walk me through what that actually looked like on the ground.
We made the decision to go too late to build a proper booth, so we went as attendees and treated it as a working trip. The whole plan was to hold as many distributor conversations as the days would allow.
When you don’t have a stand, nobody comes to you, so you do the approaching. You read badges, you work out which distributor handles which category, you get the thirty-second version of who you are sharp enough that people give you the next ten minutes. Every conversation has to earn its place, which is exhausting and clarifying at the same time.
We came home with signed supply agreements with two distributors, and two more reached out to us afterward. We ran test orders into Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, the trial batches sold through, and the distributors came back for three or four more. That was the point where international sales stopped being a line in a plan and became a business with real reorder dates.
What’s interesting is that the United States was originally the company’s priority market — it’s the world’s biggest snack consumer — and yet the first real beachhead was the Arab market. That looks like a detour. Was it strategy or circumstance?
A bit of both, and I won’t pretend the circumstance wasn’t part of it. The US plan was genuine — by 2021 we were already adapting the formula to FDA requirements and reworking packaging to their norms. The events of early 2022 put that on hold.
But the Gulf was a deliberate call. We’d done the market math: volumes, competition, average marketplace prices. The same bar that goes for around a dollar in the home market sells for two to two-and-a-half times that in the Emirates. Gulf shoppers lean toward higher-protein products, which suited part of our range. And where the product came from caused no friction at all there; it was judged on taste and price.
The real constraint in that region is physical. You can’t move chocolate through that climate in a normal truck, it’s refrigerated transport the whole way, and that reshapes your unit economics. A market that pays a premium, rewards the protein angle, and shrugs at your origin was a sensible place to open.
Let’s talk numbers, carefully, because they get misquoted. The company hit roughly $6 million in revenue in 2021 and crossed about $16 million in 2022 with meaningful net profit. That figure is the whole company — mostly domestic. Where does your part actually sit inside it, and how do you think about owning a slice rather than the headline?
I’m glad you put it that way, because the big number has a habit of swallowing everything around it. The sixteen million is the entire business, and the overwhelming majority of that is the domestic market: the retail chains, the marketplaces, the gas-station shelves. A lot of very good people built that over several years, and I didn’t.
My part started close to zero and had to be invented. When I took the department, foreign markets were a low single-digit slice of sales. The fair way to grade me is whether that line went from a rounding error to a real business — named distributors, repeat orders, live storefronts — and on that score it has.
The founders set a long-horizon target of getting international up to about a third of revenue, and they mean a third of a much bigger future number, not of today’s, and that’s the mandate I’m working to. It’s early-stage work, where the structure is thin and the credit is hard to pin down, and that’s exactly the part I wanted.
The marketplace story is where it gets concrete. You’ve scaled the brand on Amazon — Germany first, then the UK and the United States. Germany is documented as the deliberate entry point. Take me through how you chose it and what you learned that surprised you.
We sized the European market country by country before committing to anything. The UK was the biggest, Germany a clear second. The UK now sits outside the EU, which loads logistics and regulatory friction onto every shipment, so Germany gave us almost the same prize with far less customs pain, and we started there.
We brought in a partner we’d met at a trade fair. In the beginning he ran the Amazon account and the in-country logistics himself and coached us on the market. As we went, we built our own German-speaking team, pulled the account and the promotion in-house, and left him with what he was best at — storage and shipping inside the country.
What caught us out was the visual side. German Amazon shoppers actively distrust heavily retouched product photos, and they don’t warm to images of very muscular bodies. We had to relearn a whole visual language that worked perfectly well at home, and we ran roughly fifty blogger integrations to find out what actually moved sales there.
And then the harder frontiers — the UK and the US. You mentioned the UK’s post-Brexit friction and the US’s FDA wall. These are the markets where most ambitious exporters quietly stall. What does the day-to-day of opening them actually involve, beyond the press-release version?
In the US, the day-to-day is compliance: lining the formulation and labeling up with FDA rules, the nutrition panel to their format, every claim to what you’re allowed to say. It moves slowly and it punishes you hard if you get a detail wrong.
The UK is a strong market with a mature appetite for better-for-you snacking, but every shipment now carries paperwork that didn’t exist a few years ago, so you’re weighing a bigger market behind a higher wall against a slightly smaller one behind a lower wall, over and over.
Almost all of the effort happens upstream, where no one sees it. By the time a customer in Manchester or Austin taps buy, the registrations, the logistics lane, the localized listing, the customs classification and the importer-of-record question have all been settled weeks earlier. The sale is the small visible tip of a long, slow process, and I’ve made my peace with the long slow part.
TikTok Shop in the United States is the newest piece, and you were quoted in Forbes discussing the way you’ve approached the US through an agency partnership. For a lot of established brands, live commerce still looks like a gimmick. Why are you treating it as a real channel?
What it really is, is the old home-shopping format rebuilt for a phone — you show the product, a real person reacts to it on camera, and the viewer can buy in the same breath. People who’d never go near a shopping channel will happily watch fifteen seconds of it.
For a food product, the demonstration is everything. The whole barrier with healthy desserts is disbelief — shoppers assume it can’t possibly taste good, and you can’t argue someone out of that with a banner ad. Put it in a creator’s mouth on camera and their face does the convincing. The format fits the exact problem we have.
We went in through a US agency on purpose. The platform mechanics, the creator economy around it and the consumer expectations are all local knowledge, and pretending you can run that from abroad is how you waste a year. We’ll take it in-house once we’ve learned it, which is the same path we walked on German Amazon.
Let’s talk recognition, because there’s a fair amount of it. In 2022 you took first place at the regional Exporter of the Year awards in the ‘Breakthrough of the Year’ category, and in 2024 you won first again, that time for ‘Product of the Year.’ Winning the same competition twice, in two different categories, two years apart — what was each award actually rewarding?
The two of them were rewarding very different things. The 2022 award, the breakthrough one, was really about proving we could go from talking about export to actually doing it — signed distributors, product shipping into four Gulf countries, a presence at the international fairs.
The 2024 award, product of the year, was a judgment on the product itself: that a specific thing we make was performing in foreign markets and was good enough to carry the brand’s name abroad, separate from the hustle that got it there.
Regional export juries watch a lot of companies promise big and then disappear. Winning twice, two years apart, with a working product in the gap between, was the part that meant something to me, because it’s the hardest kind of result to fake.
On top of the competitions, a regional export-support center put it in writing — a formal letter of thanks for your contribution to the area’s export potential. That’s an institution, not a trophy. What’s the relationship between a company like yours and that kind of regional export infrastructure?
That relationship is more important than it looks from the outside. People picture exporting as a founder with a suitcase, and in reality a lot of the connective work is done by regional export-support centers — they offset part of the cost of trade fairs, help with certification, make introductions, and take some of the terror out of the first steps for a company that has never shipped a pallet across a border.
We used that support, and we tried to be a strong case for it in return. When a center backs a company that then delivers — wins contracts, keeps exporting, comes back to the next fair — it justifies the whole program to the people who fund it.
A region’s export reputation is shared property — every company from the area that exports well makes the next one’s introductions a little easier, so I try to protect it.
You’ve also become a speaker. In July 2024 you presented at Sber Business Fest — a large business festival — and that November you were an invited speaker at the Expansio Club. What do you say to a room like that, and why make the time when you have a department to run?
What I bring to those rooms is the operational side of export that almost never makes the keynote — that a first trade fair is usually a scramble, that you’ll write off a packaging run, that one market will reject your photography and another will charge you for refrigerated trucks you never budgeted for. Founders have heard plenty of conquered-the-world talks. Far fewer have heard a clear account of where it actually hurts, and that’s the more useful thing to hand them.
I make the time for two practical reasons. The programs and the people who helped us early on are worth repaying in public with something specific. And being made to explain the work to a skeptical audience forces me to understand it better than I would on my own.
A room of operators can tell within a minute whether you really did the thing or just read about it, so I keep the talks concrete for the same reason I keep my reports concrete.
Since November 2024 you’ve held senior membership in the E-Commerce & Digital Marketing Association — an international professional body. Membership at that level isn’t something you buy at a registration desk. What did it take, and what does belonging to a peer community like that change for someone in your position?
The main thing it gives you is people to call. When you run export and cross-border e-commerce, you’re often the only person in the building doing your exact job, so there’s nobody down the hall who has wrestled with German marketplace aesthetics, or Gulf refrigerated logistics, or the mechanics of live commerce.
A senior association puts the person who has already solved your problem within reach — a colleague in another market who’s glad to compare notes because they want the same from you. The senior level matters because it filters for people who’ve done the work instead of talked about it, so the conversations run denser and nobody’s explaining what a marketplace is.
It also drops you inside a network across the markets you actually care about. When you’re deciding whether to push harder into a country, someone there who’ll tell you the truth on a call is worth more than any report you can buy.
Related to that — you’ve sat on the other side of the table as a judge, on the jury of the Armenia Digital Awards in 2024 and the ECDMA Global Awards in 2025. Evaluating other people’s work is a different muscle than doing your own. What do you actually look for, and what has judging taught you about your own work?
Judging pulls on different instincts than producing. With your own project you know every constraint and you quietly grade on effort; as a juror you only get the result, and you have to read it the way the market would, with no backstory to lean on.
I look for a real outcome underneath the storytelling. A lot of entries are beautifully narrated and, once you scrape the adjectives off, they didn’t move a number. I’ve produced that kind of deck myself, so I can smell it. The ones that win me over show the mechanism — what they changed, the data, and the honest bit where it didn’t fully work.
It’s made me harder on my own work — I now write reports as though a tired juror in another country has to get through them at the end of a long day, which keeps the padding out.
Let’s get into craft. Cross-cultural negotiation is at the center of your job — distributors in the Gulf, partners in Germany, agencies in the US. These are wildly different cultures of doing business. Is there a transferable method, or do you start from zero each time?
There is a method, and it’s less clever than people hope. You work out what the person across the table is actually afraid of, and you deal with that before you ever get to price.
A Gulf distributor is afraid of being stuck with inventory that won’t move and looking foolish to their own network, so I open with offtake data, the test-sale results, and how we’ll de-risk their first order. A German partner is afraid of a regulatory or reputational problem — is the labeling clean, will the listing embarrass them. A US agency is afraid you’re another foreign brand that’ll be impossible to work with and won’t fund the channel. The fears are different every time; leading with the fear instead of the pitch is the constant.
The other constant is being comfortable with silence. A pause means trouble in one culture and ordinary thinking in another. Early on I rushed to fill silences and gave away ground; now I let them sit.
Marketplaces are where a lot of the actual leverage lives now, and the mechanics are brutal — listings, advertising, the offtake metric that decides whether a retailer keeps you. You’ve described offtake almost as a religion. Explain why that single number governs so much of what you do.
Offtake is just how fast a product leaves the shelf — units over days — and it’s the number buyers and platforms trust most, because it’s the one thing you can’t talk your way around.
Getting placed is the easy half; retailers and platforms try new products in a small way and watch. What decides your future is whether you stay. If your offtake beats the alternatives, they expand you — more stores, more listings, better placement — because shelf space is finite and it goes to whatever sells fastest. Weak offtake gets you quietly deleted, however good the story was.
So almost everything we do comes back to making the product leave the shelf faster than the one next to it: the on-platform banners, the search optimization on the listing, the creator content, the bundles for first-time buyers. We got our domestic offtake well above most competitors, and exporting that discipline is half the international job.
You bring up failure a lot, which is unusual for someone in your seat. The company has been candid about discontinuing two product lines and eating a roughly $115,000 write-off on packaging, and about a checkout-zone promotion at a major chain that flopped because most of the registers happened to be closed that day. Why do you keep these stories close?
Because the knowledge each one bought is permanent, and forgetting what you paid for it is how you end up paying twice.
The discontinued lines are a clean example. They were perfectly decent products that sold okay, but they scored just under our internal bar on reviews, and the distributor reorders were flat — the same volume every month, which usually means it didn’t really land. We pulled them and wrote off the packaging. The rule that came out of it has saved us many times that since: start every product as a small test batch, watch the real sales, and only then commit to a big packaging run.
The closed-registers episode taught the same thing cheaply. We’d convinced ourselves that reaching the checkout zone was the finish line and that sales would follow on their own. We ran a promotion on a day when most of the lanes happened to be shut, it died, and the point finally landed: getting placed is only the start, and you still have to win the shelf every single day. I keep these examples close because if a team only ever hears about wins, it learns to hide losses.
That connects to culture. The company is known internally for a test-and-fail philosophy, for hiring people with international-company backgrounds when the market freed them up, and for running a remarkably flat structure with a lot of decision-making pushed down. You work remotely, inside that. How does that culture actually shape the export work?
The culture is most of why the export side works at all, because exporting is a long run of bets made on incomplete information. A company that punishes a failed bet will only ever do the safe, obvious thing, and the safe obvious thing has no margin left in it.
We genuinely hand people the wheel. If someone on my team is closer to a market than I am, the call is theirs, and I’m in the discussion as a resource. That only holds together if mistakes are cheap to own up to. We’ve lost real money on errors and treated it as tuition, paid while we’re small enough that the bill stays survivable.
The hires with multinational backgrounds came out of a hard period that freed up a lot of strong people. We couldn’t match the big players on benefits, but we could offer autonomy and a flat structure where a good idea doesn’t die in three layers of approval, and people with that background do their best work when you stop managing them and start trusting them. Working remotely is almost beside the point — export has always been a job you do at odd hours into other people’s time zones.
There’s a dimension we should name directly. Foreign trade, B2B, food export — these are not famously gender-balanced fields, and you’re a woman leading the function at a company that crossed $16 million in revenue. Has that shaped the work, for better or worse?
It’s a fair question, and I’ll answer it without letting it become the whole story, because day to day the job feels like being responsible for a set of numbers.
In some markets there’s an early assumption that I’m junior, or there to support someone more senior. That actually works in my favor — people show me their real posture before they’ve decided to manage me, so I get more honest information in the first ten minutes, and I’ve learned not to take it personally.
The field rewards things that have nothing to do with gender: preparation, follow-through, a tolerance for reading the dull regulations, and the patience to keep a relationship warm for a year or two before it pays anything back. Almost every deal I’ve closed came from doing homework the other side assumed I wouldn’t bother with. If that’s a useful thing for a younger woman looking at this field to see, good.
Let’s name the difficult backdrop — taking a brand global through the turbulence of 2022 and after. The company has been open that there was even a thought of launching a separate brand abroad under a neutral name, and that at trade fairs in early 2022 some counterparts didn’t want to talk to companies from your market at all. How do you navigate that reputational reality without pretending it isn’t there?
The first rule is that you don’t pretend it away. We did seriously consider launching a separate brand abroad under a neutral name to bury the origin, and we talked ourselves out of it.
At the fairs we watched the temperature change over the course of a year. Early in 2022 some partners wouldn’t engage at all, which is entirely their right. By the end of the year, for a meaningful number of them, the commercial logic came back: a strong product run by a reliable, honest operation gets worked with by the people who need a strong product.
In the Gulf, origin simply wasn’t the issue — taste, price and protein settled it. In Europe it’s more layered, and you earn the conversation by being faultless on everything you can control: clean labeling, reliable shipping, honest marketing, a product that performs. That’s the part I can move, so that’s where the effort goes.
Unit economics abroad fascinate me. You mentioned the same bar selling for two to two-and-a-half times more in the Gulf, but also that refrigerated logistics eats into that. When you model a new market, how do you separate a price that looks attractive from a market that’s actually profitable?
The headline price is where people fool themselves. A bigger number on the shelf abroad almost always sits on top of a bigger cost base, so the figure that matters is the margin left once every real cost is in.
I build the model backward from the customer. Start with the realistic shelf price the marketplace data actually shows, not the one you’re hoping for. Take out the platform’s or retailer’s cut, the marketing it takes to get that offtake, the logistics — refrigerated the whole way in the Gulf — the duties, the certification spread over volume, the importer’s margin. What’s left is the real number, and it’s often a fraction of what the shelf price promised.
Sometimes a cheaper market nets you more than a premium one, because its cost stack is so much lighter. The Gulf premium is partly just compensation for brutal logistics. The discipline is keeping the exciting figure from drowning out the margin after everything.
You’re increasingly a named voice in the business press — Forbes and the wider business media have carried the company’s story and quoted you. Public visibility is a strange asset; it can compound your reach or just create noise. How do you think about it deliberately?
I try to let visibility come out of the work on its own. The moment you start chasing quotes for their own sake, it leaks into what you say, and readers can feel it.
It is useful, though, and I won’t be falsely modest about it. When a distributor or a potential partner searches your name and finds that serious outlets took the company seriously, the trust conversation gets shorter. In cross-border deals, where the other side can’t just drive over and see your factory, that outside evidence does real work.
My rule is to only show up in public with something specific and true. A concrete account of a mistake we made is worth more than rounds of generic encouragement, and over time it builds you a reputation as someone who actually knows the operational detail.
What do you tell the younger specialists who want your path — the ones raising their hand for jobs they’re not yet qualified for, like you did?
I usually give them a few unglamorous things. The first is to be willing to look inexperienced in public for a while; the people who learn fastest are the ones who’ll ask the obvious question in the room and take the job before they feel ready for it.
The second is to make peace with the dull parts. Anyone can get excited about a deal. Building an export business is mostly reading customs regulations without your eyes glazing over, keeping the spreadsheet honest, and chasing the same email a fourth time, and that’s where the progress quietly accumulates.
And I tell them to keep a written list of their own mistakes and reread it, so each one gets paid for only once. Mine has the closed registers on it, the packaging we threw away, and the years I spent rushing to fill silences in negotiations.
The founders have set out a long-term goal of international sales reaching roughly a third of revenue — measured against a much bigger future business, not today’s. That’s your mandate. Where does the next year to eighteen months actually go?
The next stretch goes into depth. Chasing new countries keeps you busy without building much, so the work that pays is taking the markets where the product already sells and making them serious — moving the Amazon storefronts in Germany, the UK and the US from live to genuinely scaling, and getting TikTok Shop in the US from promising to dependable.
The Gulf is about deepening the distributor relationships and widening the assortment we ship now that we know which flavors travel. Europe is about running the marketplace operation tightly enough that the margin survives all those costs we just talked about. The US is the long game — the regulatory and channel work that, done right, opens the biggest snack market there is.
International is still the smaller line in the business, and a third of revenue is a long climb from here. It’s mostly building work at this stage, which is the part I like.
Last question, and a broad one. After five years, two export awards, a seat on international juries, talks at large business stages, and storefronts on three continents — what does success actually look like to you now? Not the company’s KPI. Yours.
In practical terms, it’s the export side becoming routine enough that it no longer needs me standing next to it — a distributor reordering because the product earned it, with no hand-holding, in a market I may never set foot in; a shopper abroad leaving an honest review without knowing or caring where the dessert was made.
The measurable version is the international share climbing steadily toward the number the founders set, with the operation tight enough to keep its margin as it grows.
That’s a concrete enough thing to work against for the next several years, and it’s the measure I’d actually want to be judged on.
Avvakumova’s department has carried Fitness SHOCK from a single trade-fair trip to distributor relationships across the Gulf and storefronts on Amazon in Germany, the UK and the United States, with a live-commerce operation on TikTok Shop. The credentials around that work — two regional export awards, senior membership in an international professional association, jury seats, and talks at large business events — all sit inside the same stretch of time.
She is straightforward that the international line is still the smaller part of the business and that most of her mandate is still ahead of her. The account she gives keeps coming back to specifics: what a market really costs to serve once everything is counted, how a distributor is brought to a first order, why she watches the sell-through number so closely, and the running list of expensive mistakes she keeps so each one gets paid for only once. The awards and the jury seats grew out of that.
