This story is part of Glossy and Modern Retail’s series breaking down the big conversations and innovations at NRF 2024: Retail’s Big Show. Click here for more stories in this series.
The NRF conference was in swing early this week, giving retail and consumer companies more opportunity to reflect on recent big shifts and upcoming marketplace opportunities.
Kat Schneider, founder and CEO of supplements brand Ritual, is among the executives who took advantage of the opportunity. On Tuesday, alongside the founders and CEOs of fashion brands Bombas and Clare V., Schneider spoke on a panel covering the DTC market, including digitally-native brands’ expansion into wholesale channels. Ritual has been busy over the past two years, expanding its distribution beyond DTC e-commerce to include Whole Foods, Target and Amazon. Since launching in 2016, Ritual has amassed over a million customers and earned over $100 million in sales in 2021. It also became a certified B-Corp and committed to reaching 100% sustainable packaging by 2025 by transitioning to a mix of post-consumer recycled materials and refillable or recyclable packaging.
Glossy and Schneider connected before her session to discuss her thoughts on how the DTC market is evolving, what’s in store for Ritual in 2024 and why the FDA should be more involved in the supplements industry.
How has Ritual responded to changes in the DTC landscape?
“I’ve never loved calling ourselves a DTC [business]. And now the connotation for DTC has changed as the markets have changed. I’ve always called ourselves a ‘digitally-native’ brand because we started our business online, allowing us to go super deep on brand storytelling and what made us different. Had we launched in retail first, we would have had less space to showcase what makes the brand different. Over the last year, we launched in Whole Foods, Target and Amazon. What’s interesting about our brand and the origins of being digitally native is that we are now using our information and relationships with hundreds of thousands of customers to talk to them and evolve. We call our community a ‘think tank,’ and it allowed us to launch over the last two years our Synbiotic+ [product], which is a combination of probiotic, prebiotic and postbiotic in a single capsule. It was our most successful launch to date, and more than 90% of our customers wanted that product.”
Can you elaborate on the ‘think tank’ concept?
“Our online site, Ritual.com, [sells via] subscription only. What we’ve seen is that subscribers are willing to talk to us. Anytime we want to do a panel or a quantitative or qualitative study, we have thousands of participants. The think tank helps with product roadmap and innovation. We have a robust internal team and process around that. At any time we want to see reactions to campaign ideas or marketing messaging, we have [the think tank] for that. But where it’s been most helpful is understanding what products [people want] and how to serve the customer best. For our BioSeries Melatonin, which we launched in September [2023], we saw [from think tank research] that, since the pandemic, our customers have had difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep. There’s been a rise in sleep health issues; many are taking melatonin, but it isn’t getting the job done. … After the launch of Synbiotic+, we created a 97-page report that showed how we should evolve [other] messaging, packaging and marketing [based on its success]. This continuous process makes our brand unique and will always be a key part [of the brand], especially as its success is [based] almost entirely on online subscriptions.”
What does Ritual have planned for 2024?
“This year, we’re going deeper, not wider. Our broader vision is to be the most trusted brand for everyday health and the No.1 brand for pregnancy [health]. We now have sleep health, and it fits within the mental wellness space, which we’re going to go deeper into, plus digestive health, a skin-care category and reproductive health. Reproductive health is a focus, so we just launched a new Choline supplement product. We’ll have another big launch [for reproductive health] and a big launch in the mental health space, and we’ll launch a few single nutrients products, as well. Several of these items are launching in the next few months.
A charge we’ve led since the beginning is around traceability. There’s a deeper understanding now that what people put in their bodies matters and where those ingredients come from matters. Heavy metals are a big focus area of ours. In the past year, we launched advocacy around the industry setting health protective measures for heavy metals. We’ve also invested in double-blind placebo-controlled clinical studies, which we [plan to have] published amongst the scientific community. ‘Clinically studied’ is often misused in this industry. That’s an area that we’re passionate about building advocacy around and doubling down on.”
What are your thoughts on more FDA regulation of the supplement industry?
“We want the FDA to have even more oversight than they currently do. It’s exciting to have more products, but Ritual will not create every single product in every category. And I want to ensure that the supplements we take and future generations take are safe and effective. I welcome more oversight by the FDA, and I think they want more oversight, but it’s about pushing Congress to give them that oversight. I don’t think specific [regulation] over heavy metals or clinical studies will stifle innovation. They’ll protect people’s health, safety and the efficacy of products.”
