Last week, wellness brand The Nue Co. launched its biggest campaign to date via both online and offline activations.
The brand is promoting a new collection called The One Daily, which is its attempt to unbundle the multivitamin category from a single product, to seven. Compared to its first out-of-home campaign in October 2019, the new campaign budget is 400% larger, said Jules Miller, The Nue Co. founder and CEO. It consists of wild postings, subway ads and billboards, influencer marketing and a pop-up store in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood. The Nue Co. has grown steadily since its launch in 2017 — it raised $9 million in a Series A round in June 2019 — and e-commerce sales increased by 250% in 2019.
The basket size of The Nue Co. customers is typically 2.8 products, meaning the uncoupling of a multivitamin into seven products that target issues like joint pain and metabolism is a ripe upsell opportunity. The Nue Co. expects 20% of 2020 revenue to be driven by the One Daily collection, said Miller.
Its core customer demographic is between 40 and 55 years old; 60% are women and 40% men. Products like an ingestible called Skin Filter have helped acquire Gen-Z and young millennials, who have an understanding of beauty-wellness products, but the One Daily line will target shoppers between 30 and 60 years old who are less familiar with the wellness world. According to the National Institutes of Health, multivitamins account for almost one-sixth of all purchases of dietary supplements in the U.S. and 40% of all sales of vitamin and mineral supplements.
“We’ve previously targeted people who’ve driven to wellness through a need, such as having a demanding job and suffering from stress,” said Miller. “But it’s time to acquire a younger customer.”
The Nue Co.’s targeting of the casual wellness consumer with more segmented products demonstrates a larger industry opportunity; wellness laymen, formerly driven by the convenience and value of a single multivitamin, are now looking for personalization. It is a similar personalized approach that direct-to-consumer vitamin brands like Care/of and Ritual have attempted to bring to customers through online quizzes. The Nue Co. hopes to become a brand that fits somewhere between the legacy vitamin brand Centrum and the more new-age holistic Moon Juice, said Miller.
The seven-week-long campaign will focus on a different product each week, starting with the joint-focused vitamin. Similar to its last out-of-home campaign, the brand is posing questions in its new advertising. In this case, the tagline asks viewers if they know what their multivitamin is doing for them. The October campaign resulted in a 200% increase in organic traffic and a 20% increase in stress-related sales, said Miller.
“There is so much confusion about what to take, what not to take, when to take it and how much to take, so we are trying to cut through the noise,” said Flo Glendenning, Nue Co. vp of product.
One-hundred paid and unpaid influencers, including makeup artist Gucci Westman, will also be posting throughout the seven weeks, and there will be a pop-up store in SoHo, where customers can purchase products. For The Nue Co.’s existing undisclosed customer base, they will receive three dedicated emails per product per week, with the focuses on what the product is, its ingredients, clinical trials and customer reviews. Nue Co. currently has a repeat purchase rate of 65%, an increase from 50% in October. Miller said she is bullish on these types of offline-online hybrid campaigns and thinks they can foster more brand affinity than digital paid acquisition methods.
