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It's a story as old as time: ex-agency guys gaze into the marketplace and notice something peculiar. Collagen, as presented to the world, has an image problem. Or it did when Ron Shah met it.
This building block protein (which makes up—by some accounts—25% of our dry body mass) was, frankly, bland.
Shah, CEO and CoFounder of Obvi, went to work. His team set about reimagining collagen, and with it, unlocked a fountain of youth style revolution for those looking for a way back to themselves. They injected flavor into the product and the conversation. And discovered a bustling community ready to thrive.
Turns out, some of these questions had simply never been asked.
We started Obvi after asking ourselves, “Why do all the products that are supposed to help us look and feel youthful, feel so old, cold and clinical?” Come on, practical is great, but these dusty-looking things made getting better seem like some awful chore. No wonder it’s hard to get started. It’s no fun.
When we were going down the path of creating Obvi, we initially thought well stick with unflavored like the rest of the market. But when we forced ourselves to innovate, be patient with the 6 month long R+D process, we really hit the Aha Moment because we finally believed in what we always preached to others “patience will lead to success”. What took 6 months to ideate truly was the aha moment of understanding things don’t happen overnight.
We even got tricked a little — we thought we were making super-high quality, crazy-researched products for younger people. Turned out, we were helping all kinds of people express a younger mindset. 200,000 people and counting — 36,000 of whom find massive support and encouragement in the Obvi Community on Facebook.
With passion for health and wellness almost all my life, supplementation has always intrigued me but also puzzled me why something so important was always created to look so boring and unexciting. My co-founders and I set out on a journey to build Obvi, a brand that normalizes collagen as part of our daily diets without sacrificing taste and convenience. Upon our launch on June 1, 2019, we told ourselves one thing, “no matter the growth or revenue, we want to educate first, empower second, and provide third.” Fast forward 39 months, Obvi has broken through the stigma in 250,000+ households and shattered $38 Million in sales across 75+ countries globally, with major distribution in countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Philippines, and China. With over 30 million servings sold, we’ve been able to educate our customer base on why collagen is as important as any other protein source. With a growing community, ranking in the top 2 largest communities for collagen on Facebook, our Obvi Community has empowered 56,000+ customers and fans to converse in real time about their results with Obvi, both good and bad, making a true social impact.
Staying patient is always difficult. Rome wasn’t built in a day and overnight successes are hard to come by. The first year was a real struggle for us as it was literally just 3 of us trying to do everything. For many parts of the business we were learning as we went, and we ended up hitting our fair share of setbacks. It’s easy to get discouraged when situations get tough and your business isn’t thriving the way you had anticipated. We kept our heads up and stayed the course until eventually we started seeing the progress we were hoping for. Looking back at it now that initial climb to the first million ended up instilling so many valuable life lessons in each of us, I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.
Hitting the 8 figure mark definitely requires a lot of patience and a lot of creativity. One thing that we have always prided ourselves on is our knowledge of the advertising space. This is where a lot of brands will simply outsource to marketing agencies. Many people are familiar with the concept of influencer marketing. Brands will send their product to popular influencers just to have them post on their Instagram stories in hopes that it will drive revenue. This strategy is outdated and often consumers are blinded by these posts now a days because it’s simply not genuine. What we do differently is build a proper relationship with influencers who we feel fit our brand. We only work with influencers who love our product, not just a paycheck. We simply use influencers as a source of content creation and work out partnerships where we can whitelist their social pages to run advertisements from. This allows us to control where our money is being spent and relieves influencers from any heavy lifting whatsoever. This single strategy is what took us from a 6-figure brand to almost 8 figures this year alone.
Our branding is very unique to the space. We knew we wanted to be very different from what was out there already in the collagen space, which was more or less a lot of boring, medicinal looking brands. To truly disrupt we went the complete opposite and decided to not only make the packaging fun and colorful but we also paired that with flavors that brought the consumer a sense of nostalgia.
Hitting the 7 figure mark definitely requires a lot of patience and a lot of creativity. One thing that we have always prided ourselves on is our knowledge of the advertising space. This is where a lot of brands will simply outsource to marketing agencies. Many people are familiar with the concept of influencer marketing. Brands will send their product to popular influencers just to have them post on their Instagram stories in hopes that it will drive revenue. This strategy is outdated and often consumers are blinded by these posts now a days because it’s simply not genuine.
What we do differently is build a proper relationship with influencers who we feel fit our brand. We only work with influencers who love our product, not just a paycheck. We simply use influencers as a source of content creation and work out partnerships where we can whitelist their social pages to run advertisements from. This allows us to control where our money is being spent and relieves influencers from any heavy lifting whatsoever. This single strategy is what took us from a 6-figure brand to almost 8 figures this year alone.
Don’t do one and then the other. If you truly want to feel excited about what you’re going to startup, your vision needs to be executed through your business plan. Don’t create a business plan and then search for a vision within.
Many people get started without truly understanding what it’s going to take financially. Secure the funds you need whether you have to raise capital or use some of your savings, make sure you get started with at the very least what you need.
This is extremely crucial because you can’t do it alone so getting the right people around you will help get you to the finish line.
all secured as soon as you have made the decision of what your brand name will be. This step gets you excited to call it your own.
The road will not be a straight path, nor will it be smooth but as long as you are prepared for it you won’t fail.
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