1. Emphasize High-Touch in CE: Luis’s strategy for Meat N’ Bone centers on delivering a luxury retail experience by emphasizing high-touch, personalized service, education, and trust. This approach has helped the company build strong, lasting customer relationships.
2. Leverage AI: Luis sees AI as an essential tool that E-Commerce companies should integrate into their customer service strategies. Meat N’ Bone has made AI a core part of its operations, using it to enhance customer service by delivering instant, in-depth cooking advice and efficiently handling highly specific questions.
3. Value Customer Feedback: Luis emphasizes that true innovation stems from deeply understanding and anticipating customer needs, often driven by feedback and data. At Meat N’ Bone, this mindset fuels continuous improvement - from small operational changes to bold new ventures.
4. Prioritize Customer Retention: Luis highlights that in today’s competitive market, customer retention is more valuable than acquisition. For Meat N’ Bone, sustained growth has come from consistently delivering quality and service that keeps customers coming back.
5. Proactive CS Builds Trust: Meat N’ Bone’s customer service evolved to a proactive, metrics-driven approach focused on building trust and loyalty. For Luis, success lies in consistently showing customers they’re valued - turning great service into lasting relationships and repeat business.
Luis Mata had an idea to sell premium-quality meats online, providing customers with the same personalized, high-touch service they would expect when purchasing a luxury watch. Meat N’ Bone launched in 2018 with revenue growing from $100k to $11 million over the last 6+ years. Be inspired by how Luis successfully scaled a bootstrapped E-Commerce company by prioritizing customer experience, communication, and brand transparency.
Meet Luis Mata, Founder of Meat N’ Bone!
Meat N’ Bone is an onmichannel purveyor of Premium Quality Meats for the consumer market. We focus on quality and consistency. Every product we offer has been curated by our expert team and meets the highest standards for quality. We have curated a list of premium products from the best suppliers in the world to offer the customer the best Beef, Poultry, Pork and Fish.
Luis opens his entrepreneurial story with a direct statement, “We like to eat, and we like to cook.” But it was Luis’s belief that high quality food, specifically meat should not be a luxury enjoyed by only a select few that drove him to enter the E-Commerce space. Leveraging his logistics background, he developed a business plan that skipped the traditional butcher shop model, focusing instead on sourcing top programs and passionate professionals in their trade to deliver fresh products directly to customers. In 2018, Luis founded Meat N’ Bone, a D2C (direct-to-consumer) company built on core values of flexibility, transparency, and quality. “My mission was to create an experience that treats buying proteins, be it meats, seafood, or game with the same reverence that people have for fine wine or watches,” he concludes.
Like many who enter the E-Commerce space, Luis was motivated by the opportunity to scale a successful online company. But he is also interested in how D2C E-Commerce operates on a more intimate level with customers. From NPS and conversion rates to emails, their feedback is an invaluable source of information about a company’s product and its overall performance. “The Internet has created this world where people are free to speak their mind and quite often,” he says, noting that anonymity often brings out honest, unfiltered opinions. “I want you to tell me because I’m doing it because I love it and I’m doing it because I want to be the best at what I do. But if I don’t get the feedback, I can’t improve.”
Meat N’ Bone, a bootstrapped company, began with only Luis and his Co-Founder and has grown into a global team of 30 members with a remote/in-office work structure taking place across 8 shopping boutiques that also house both the offices and fulfillment centers. Luis points out that operations and logistics of the industry require employees to be on site. “If we want to ship the best proteins in the world, we can’t just offload them to a third party. We are one of the few purveyors who do everything. We inspect every product that comes in to make sure that it meets our quality standards.”
Luis modeled the business after luxury retail, drawing parallels to high-end watches and the Apple store – he points out how the tech giant makes every customer feel valued whether purchasing a simple cable or the latest iPhone. He elaborates, “that’s the experience we’re looking to provide – democratizing quality meats and luxury service. Every customer interaction we have is about education, trust, and quality.” This commitment to high-touch and transparency has enabled Meat N’ Bone to build strong, lasting relationships with its customers.
The Evolution of Customer Service
Meat N’ Bone’s customer service has evolved drastically from when Luis was the only person on deck, answering calls and addressing issues. Changes aren’t so much a result the company scaling, Luis points out, but a shift in CS approach. “We’ve grown from just reactive support to trying to be as proactive as possible,” he says.” Metrics are a great indicator to how the company is living up to its promise – delivering fresh, premium meat at affordable prices around the world. “It’s always about getting that customer back, and it’s always about the customer knowing how much we care,” he adds.
Optimizing AI in CS
“AI has been a game changer for us. We’re implementing it in every aspect of the business,” discloses Luis. One unique way that Meat N’ Bone has optimized AI is creating ‘bot butchers’ to answer questions about how to cook and use a protein in a recipe. Customers can get really detailed, Luis says, and automation helps with “questions that are out of the blue and too specific for the regular CS representative. These bots are trained to provide a response immediately.”
When Going the Extra Mile Pays Off
To illustrate his company’s ‘going the extra mile’ ethos, Luis tells a story about a high-profile customer whose $800 order of beef cheeks to San Juan, Puerto Rico was delayed by UPS. Covering all costs, they overnight shipped the order again only to be met by the same fate. The next move was to coordinate with UPS directly using premium customer support and hire a private driver to deliver the order to the customer’s residence. A month later, the customer showed up at a Meat N’ Bone steakhouse, bottle of wine in hand, to personally thank the company for how it treated the situation with urgent care so he could enjoy an “amazing” dinner at home. “The story is not so much about logistics,” Luis explains. “It’s that follow-through, building relationships, and delivering on the promise of quality, whatever the cost is, as long as it’s reasonable and humanly possible.”
Customer Feedback Leads to Innovation
“Innovation comes from understanding a customer’s needs and wants, as well as anticipating it,” states Luis, emphasizing that many ideas come from customer feedback and margin optimization data. He’s quick to point out that innovation can happen at every level, from simply cutting steaks differently to opening a steakhouse in a Meat N’ Bone boutique in Miami. “We’re constantly rethinking how we can get better at what we do,” he finishes.
Reinvesting For Future Business
Luis admits that he didn’t have much knowledge about raising capital when he was preparing a business plan. Being a bootstrapped company has meant that every dollar made is reinvested with Luis saying, “we’re thinking about the future.” Since launching in 2018, Meat N’ Bone’s revenue has increased from $100,000 to $11 million.
The Role of Customer Retention at Meat N’ Bone
“Acquiring customers is getting more expensive and more complex by the day. So, the best customers are the ones you acquired, kept, and are happy,” Luis maintains. Meat N’ Bone does not offer a subscription service – people make repeat purchases because the product, service, and overall experience meets expectations. Luis goes on to explain that for a bootstrapped company like his, customer retention played a pivotal role in Meat N’ Bone’s business model and continued growth.
Luis’s Peak Season Strategies
Meat N’ Bone’s peak season starts at Thanksgiving and continues through the holidays. Having its own fulfillment spaces allows team members to manage logistics and packaging, helping to reduce the chance of delay or other issues. Extensive planning, customer communication, and flexible staffing are also key, says Luis.
Looking Forward: Key Priorities and Goals
At the beginning of 2025, Meat N’ Bone built a new, “bigger and better” fulfillment center to replace one that had burned down during the holidays. “It gives us many more opportunities to be stronger. Now we can really flex our shipping game and say, ‘we’re really good at it,’” Luis remarks revealing plans on a national expansion via E-Commerce. Key priorities also include continued focus streamlining operations and scaling Meat N’ Bone’s boutique network, which is currently based in Florida with 8 locations.
Luis’s Advice to Aspiring E-Commerce Entrepreneurs
Starting an E-Commerce company demands a lot, and Luis warns aspiring entrepreneurs to be prepared to make sacrifices. “Am I willing to sacrifice my time and sleep, eat, drink whatever your business is for the next 5 to 10 years of your life?” he asks. “If the answer is no, don’t go into it.”
Can’t-live-without-tool? Besides a good steak, I would say, funnily enough today is AI. It’s amazing how much more efficient we have become overnight.
Key hiring trait? They’ve got to have the skillset, but beyond that, if you are hiring a whole array of people that are amazing at their job, then it’s communication. What I’ve learned is that effective communication is the most important skill a leader can have.
Recent book or podcast? I’ll be frank, reading is where I go to decompress. I love reading sci-fi histories. But recently, a GM told me about the book Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business by Danny Meyer, is an amazing read—I highly recommend it. The book tells the story of how they built a three-star Michelin restaurant in New York, but more importantly, it’s about what true hospitality means and how exceptional customer service can transform a business.
Sure, we run a steakhouse, but I wouldn’t necessarily say I work in “hospitality.” What I love about this book is how the concept of hospitality is reframed—it’s something that can (and should) apply to every aspect of business, no matter the industry. Even your personal life.
It’s the little things that make the biggest difference. In our case, working in e-commerce, it might be a handwritten birthday note or a thoughtful follow-up text. That level of candor and care is rare—and powerful.
Meyer’s philosophy emphasizes creating a positive work environment, putting your team first, and finding the right balance to build something meaningful and sustainable.
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