I’m the fifth-generation owner and the second family to own Merz Apothecary. In 1972, the business was about to close down, when my dad, a 27-year-old pharmacist burnt out on big-box retail, went to look at the shop out of an obligation to a friend. Within 20 minutes of walking in, he was completely struck by the smells and jars of traditional herbs; it instantly reminded him of a pharmacy his family owned back in Karachi, Pakistan. He fell in love and agreed to buy it on the spot.
We call it the “magic of Merz” because the business has always been filled with divine interventions. Within about seven months of taking over, my dad did 120% of the shop’s previous volume, setting the stage for this tiny neighborhood pharmacy to become a Chicago landmark.
I grew up stocking shelves and ringing registers but more than that, Merz was just in the ether while I was growing up, from the tea I drank when I got sick to the toner I used for teenage acne. I attended a small liberal arts college, where I caught the tech bug and went on to work at an early internet startup. I kept telling my dad someone should put Merz online. Eventually, after I spent a brief stint in publishing in New York, we decided I’d build our website.
Launching our website in 1998 meant computerizing an old-fashioned business, where pharmacists still wrote everything by hand in notebooks. Once Google rolled out to the wider world, our online orders jumped from one or two a day to twenty with Google Search. Today, about 75% of our entire business is online.
Managing an online product feed of 11,000 SKUs is a massive undertaking. As a small business, we can't do everything, but we have a great story to tell, and content goes really far for us. Our sales team members are real experts—they are incredibly charismatic and have no problem getting in front of the camera to talk authentically about our products.
To get the right products in front of the right customer at the right time, we use Google Ads Performance Max. The feedback loop is lightning fast. It’s so fun to get an email from Google Search Console flagging a sudden 72% bump on an old-school product like drawing salves. Our team can quickly push out fresh content around that trend, and the AI instantly serves it to shoppers searching for it.
We joke that we are a 151-year-old startup because we love technology and have reinvented this business so many times.
We haven’t replaced a single person with AI; our bandwidth from a time and dollar standpoint has just grown so much that we don't have to choose between competing ideas anymore. We’re having more fun and being more ambitious about everything we do.
For instance, a couple months ago, we were trying to pitch a major retailer on a product that we only have in a prototype form. Our communications director took a snapshot of the prototype in her laundry room over the weekend, used Google Gemini’s image generator, Nano Banana, to mock up a retail-ready visual deck, and successfully secured the contract.
We’ve also scaled from 30 to 60 employees across two locations, which brought new management hurdles.
Without a dedicated HR department, we used Gemini to help us build a manager training program. We plugged in our core values, employee handbook, and a rough outline, and it helped us build a complete presentation deck with framework philosophies on how to deliver constructive feedback.
Ultimately, we're highly technology-forward, but our business is one of old-fashioned values, touching and smelling products and talking to people. In our physical store, we speak around 10 different languages, and we have a pharmacist, a makeup artist, a certified herbalist, and fragrance experts on staff. Having people with so much knowledge alongside products that are so deeply sensorial is the true magic of what we do. We use AI on the backend so our team can deliver a better human experience when people come into the store.
As the steward of this business, my vision is to build tight, documented systems so that this complex operation runs seamlessly. By using AI to minimize backend friction, I can focus on the big picture, preserving our old-world human connection and setting up Merz with a profitable foundation for the next generation to take the reins.