Brands on the Rise is a regular Ad Age feature spotlighting the marketing and business tactics of successful challenger brands. Read other installments here.

When Craig Elbert’s wife was pregnant with the couple’s first child in 2015, he went on a shopping trip for prenatal vitamins and was quickly confronted with a dizzying array of choices.

He encountered “prenatal vitamins for my wife, vitamins for myself—and it was a feeling of standing in the aisle being overwhelmed,” he said. “What is everything here? Where do I start being skeptical? … What brand should I trust?”

Flash forward to 2016, when Elbert got some of these questions answered by founding and becoming CEO of Care/of, a direct-to-consumer vitamin brand, alongside co-founder Akash Shah as chief technology and product officer. 

When Care/of started it was a subscription-based product built partially around an online quiz. Users could log onto the brand’s website and answer questions about their lifestyle, health goals and more to find out what combination of vitamins they should be taking. From there, a set of vitamins in muted millennial pink packaging with that customer’s name in sans serif font would appear on their doorstep. 

By November 2020, Care/of had sold a majority stake to Bayer that valued the startup at $225 million. And in 2021, its products hit retail shelves, entering Target stores—and thereby following a trend of DTC brands heading to physical shelves as the U.S. emerged slowly from lockdown.

Below, more on Care/of’s origin story, its marketing strategy and what’s next for the brand. 

How it started

“My background was in building direct consumer businesses,” said Elbert, who is the former VP of marketing for e-commerce apparel brand Bonobos. “Akash had built a couple of companies already—he was a serial entrepreneur passionate about building in the healthcare space.”

But, according to Elbert, the co-founders “knew nothing” about vitamins and supplements. So they spent a year meeting with experts to figure out how to build the company. The pair did everything from recruiting strangers on Craigslist to talk about vitamins and supplements, to cold emailing Harvard Medical doctors asking them to chat. 

Care/of also worked with startup investment firm Juxtapose from the early days to the initial launch (Elbert said it helped with seed funding but did not provide exact figures). The company went on to raise its $12 million Series A in 2017.

Elbert described branding as “very important” to Care/of’s initial success. But the company didn’t initially invest in any paid advertising. Instead, it relied on word-of-mouth.

“We’ve always viewed our products as our best marketing campaign—both digital and physical products,” he said, noting that it built products that customers were likely to share—whether that’s through photos on social media or word of mouth. Putting each customer’s name on their vitamin packages was intentional user-generated content bait. 

In 2015, Elbert said, supplement and vitamin branding played into stereotypes: It was either masculine-looking protein powder or softer, yoga-and-nature-themed brands. “We felt there was room for a modern brand that was simple,” he said.

After the business’s first few months of growing organically, the team put more money into advertising to fuel growth.

Rather than working with an agency, marketing came from Care/of’s in-house team of designers, copywriters, and other creatives. The brand hasn’t done much work with external ad agencies, opting to hire an internal team early instead, Elbert said. 

Tipping point

Care/of’s “second origin story” happened during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Elbert, who suggested that by 2020, Care/of’s customers felt like they were doing all the right things for their health—until the pandemic hit. 

Elbert felt the same pressure: He, like a lot of people, was juggling the care of two small children and working from home, while still trying to take care of himself. These pandemic stressors presented a new challenge for the co-founders. Their business needed to provide simple things that overwhelmed customers could use to take care of themselves from a health perspective. 

At that point, Care/of was DTC-only: You couldn’t find the vitamins in a physical store during your once-every-two-weeks pandemic grocery excursion. But Bayer’s investment, and its big box retail connections, catapulted Care/of to its next phase of physical, in-store business. Elbert said not much else has changed about Care/of’s day-to-day—it runs fairly independently. 

Marketing strategies

Care/of’s most recent marketing campaign is a common practice in health and wellness: The New Year’s campaign … with a twist. 

The effort, which started running the week after Christmas and will run through the first part of 2023, is about doing less rather than more. Care/of is trying to subvert the normalized New Year’s resolutions that encourage people to do more of something such as working out or eating healthier.

For instance, one Instagram post from the campaign shows a 2023 “to don’t” list rather than a to-do list. “Don’ts” include “overdoing it” and “overloading my schedule.” 

Care/of's customers (who are primarily women) often tell Care/of Chief Customer Officer Brittany Izrailov that they get “wellness advice from every direction,” she said.

“We feel like our customers—and women more broadly—have about enough pressure to improve themselves already. The last thing they need is another brand piling on and pressure building,” especially during January when that noise from brands “gets louder,” Izrailov continued.

The new campaign uses those insights for paid and organic Meta and TikTok messaging aimed at helping Care/of’s target audience “get the most out of doing less,” she said. The effort also uses influencers and promotes an “anti-planner,” which is a PDF that anyone can print out if they plan on doing less this year, Izrailov said.

Additionally, Care/of ran a giveaway in which it sent a free, year-long Care/of subscription to the winner. To enter, people had to share a page of anti-planner on TikTok or Instagram and tag the brand. 

“The campaign was largely done in-house, dreamed up by our brand, creative, and revenue teams. We did some early concepting work with a boutique creative agency, Mouse,” Elbert said. Izrailov declined to share the campaign's cost. 

What the experts say

Experts wonder about what will happen to Care/of’s personalization push as it establishes itself on more retail shelves.

“Appealing to the masses and offering non-personalized vitamins as an ‘intro’ to the brand is a good place to start,” said Simon Wool, managing partner at Wool Ventures Growth Consulting who has worked with DTC supplement brands such as TheJellyBee. However, he added that this could be hurtful in the sense that “they lose some of their value/brand equity by not being able to offer the personalization they have been known for.” 

Andrew Lipsman, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, said supplements and vitamins are a “growth area” in the DTC space “in large part because there’s strong underlying margins.” He said many DTC brands are experiencing profitability issues due to increasing digital advertising costs—and “when you have healthy margins to work with, it makes a lot more sense.”

The online vitamin and supplement sales industry in the U.S. grew 17.3% per year on average between 2018 and 2023, according to IBIS World.

Lipsman is also bullish on the subscription model often deployed by DTC supplements. “When you can get consumers to automate that purchase cycle, it makes the numbers … make a lot more sense,” particularly in terms of customer acquisition cost.

“A big reason why a lot of DTC brands have succeeded is just modernizing the branding experience for large segments of retail that had gotten stale or just didn't speak to modern consumers. If you think about what's the status quo in the supplements and vitamins arena, it is horribly branded products on the shelves in Walgreens,” Lipsman said. “Care/of obviously fits that bill in terms of providing strong modern branding.” 

What’s next

Care/of has a plan for making sure people who find the brand on physical shelves have a path back toward its digital community.  

“We think that we can be direct-consumer and be in retail,” Elbert said, noting that Care/of’s app can help with that. “Over the next three to six months, there’s going to be significant evolution in our post-purchase experience within the app,” he continued, noting that the team plans on adding tools that provide a “feedback loop” for ongoing personalized guidance. 

The brand wants customers to have feedback so they know what they’re doing is working, and can adjust as needed. “Those are things that are not delivered in a bottle,” he said. “Those are things that are delivered via an experience, and the means of delivering that experience for us is an app.”

“That's the next chapter of what we're building … really evolving how people think about Care/of as a brand and as a product experience,” Elbert said.