Why Ritual is launching its first new category in 6 years, with CEO Kat Schneider

0:07Kat Schneider: Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the Glossy Beauty Podcast, a show about the business of beauty and wellness. I'm your host, Glossy's West Coast correspondent, Lexi Lebsack. Chances are you've probably heard of Ritual. The supplement company launched direct-to-consumer back in 2016. Ritual is based on a transparent supply chain and science-backed formulations. It has this very striking yellow branding, and it sells through most major US retailers like Target, Walmart, Costco, Whole Foods, Amazon, et cetera. Ritual is probably best known today for its prenatal supplements, but last month, the brand took a big swing on its first new category in six years.

0:51Kat Schneider: two products launched in quick succession for women in perimenopause. Perimenopause is, of course, the hormonal precursor to menopause that can last a decade. This market has been largely underserved, but is experiencing a massive wave of awareness today. So Ritual first launched a capsule supplement called Perimenopause Health, and then a supplement powder called Creatine Greens. My guest today is Ritual's CEO and founder, Kat Schneider, and she's here to share an insider's look into what it took to launch into this new category, including the multi-million dollar marketing push that included hiring actress Jackie Tone, star of Nobody Wants This, as a spokesperson and star of a TV spot that I'm going to say is very funny and you should definitely watch it.

1:43It's on social media, but let's get right into it.

1:46Kat Schneider: Here's my conversation with CEO and founder of Ritual, Kat Schneider.

1:55Hi, Kat.

1:56Kat Schneider: Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to chat again. I know. It's truly my pleasure. We talked a little while back. You were launching, you were sort of in the midst of launching your first new category in six years, launching into the perimenopause space. Talk to me a little bit about sort of why, The why between going out on a limb, launching this new category, it must have been so work. You must have been so busy. Yeah, I would say we're still incredibly busy. It's so hard to launch a new category, but maybe slightly easier for us because what we saw as having the number one prenatal in the US, only leading one backed by a human clinical study, and now two peer-reviewed and published studies on that product, is is that we saw 40 % of our customers were in or entering perimenopause.

2:48And so I started the company a decade ago, and we've had millions of customers. And the response to the launch after launching this category for them, for me, for us, after six years was unlike anything I ever felt with any product launch, any marketing campaign. I think it was, it was, you know, we always try to make women feel seen and heard through our creative, through our products and leading with science. But I think we really kind of hit the nail on the head with this one.

3:24Kat Schneider: Talk a little bit about sort of what that sort of early days looked like in deciding to launch into perimenopause. What was sort of the data? What was sort of the sort of the inspiration, the goal? And how long ago were you sort of starting to think about this? Well, we've been thinking about it really, I would say even a decade ago. So our vision is to be the most trusted brand for women's health and forming lifelong relationships with her. I started the company a decade ago. I was four months pregnant. I couldn't find a prenatal vitamin that I trusted. I wanted something that was scientifically backed, had clinical studies and where I knew where the ingredients were coming from and I felt like was actually safe.

4:10And so that was the impetus for starting Ritual. But as we started developing more products for women's health, whether it's the postnatal or the fertility product and getting into longevity and eat healthy aging, what I saw was that women were continually just tossed aside and didn't really have products that had science as well for them as the category went from 4 ,000 to over 100 ,000 supplements in the last 30 years without any major updates to regulation. I think what was really shocking was that women were excluded from clinical studies until 1993. And so when you see those two forces, right, it's these two forces together, this meteoric rise of supplements, and the science catching up.

5:01What I saw was just so many products that weren't actually created for women at the center. And that was truly important as we went from, you know, trying to conceive pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause, menopause, and beyond, and really being this clinically backed and clinically studied solution for her across all the life stages. So that was really important to me. And I would say that evolution, to answer your question, started really since day one.

5:32Kat Schneider: And when you decided to launch into perimenopause, when did the retailers get involved? And when did you start sort of plotting this big, splashy marketing campaign? This is our first launch that off the bat, a retailer is taking the product. Oh, great. That's also really exciting because it will be available in Target nationwide. And it's really clear that this is a category that has been completely underserved. And we see 2 million women enter perimenopause every year. And the industry just treats them as an entire footnote. So there's just been a lot of demand for science-backed supplements in the space.

6:20And I would say, why did it take us, I'm asking my own question, but why did it take us 10 years to get into this space when our customer has been asking us for it? And we knew that someone might be pregnant with us 10 years ago, and now they're in their 40s, they're going through perimenopause. The problem for us was we don't launch products that don't have clinical evidence behind the ingredients. That's fundamentally one of the most important things about our products at Ritual. So the science on the ingredient side, on the supplement side, hadn't caught up yet. And so when we saw the recent evidence for Shaktivari in particular, which was the ingredient that was around, you know, for decades in India, and we saw the impact that it had where the clinical evidence had actually caught up from Ayurveda.

7:15and it wasn't this one symptom fix it, but it actually was studied across estrogen, progesterone, FSH, LH, and cortisol. It wasn't just a mood fixer. We looked at the system as a whole.

7:33Kat Schneider: What lessons did you learn from launching the prenatal, from having so much success over the last decade that you sort of brought into the perimenopause health supplement? it. When you zoom out and look at our value proposition as a business, it's been the same for 10 years, which I always question. I'm like, is that okay that we're the same way we were 10 years ago? And I actually think that's never been more important and never been more important to be crystal clear on what makes you different and what you stand for as a brand. And so for us, it was really around safety and efficacy. When I was pregnant and I was walking up and down the supplement aisles or, you know, looking, being prescribed supplements from my doctor, I was asking myself two questions, is it safe and does it work?

8:27And so those are the two lines that, those are the two lanes that we really focus on at Ritual was safety and efficacy. So around the, on the efficacy side, we committed to having human clinical studies on all of our products by 2030. This is double-blind placebo-controlled studies. We work with leading universities. On the safety side, we third-party certify all of our products. We have a clean label project on all of our products. Not only that, but we have the Purity Award, which tests for over 500 environmental toxins and contaminants. We have NSF, USP, and other certifications across various products.

9:05And it's just important, you know, we, it's important evolution from, from this trust me era of wellness to approve it, you know, wellness, which we're in today, which was important to establish 10 years ago. So this kind of two factor mission vision system has been with us since day one. And it's really helping us get into this category that hasn't had a lot of science around it. Yeah.

9:35Kat Schneider: Why do you think that the perimenopause customer has been so underserved? That's a really complicated question. I would say that, you know, there's been a lot of, it's actually not that complicated. It's complicated and it's not complicated. Part of it is, is again, going back to the science, the science is only recently catching up. And, And my grandmother just turned 100 and I was visiting her the other week. Oh, my God. Congrats to her. That's amazing. Thank you. And spending time with my grandmother and my mom. And I realized that our generation is very different. And I would say their generation, it was really rare to talk about your symptoms in public.

10:23And you kind of just, you were like the resilience and the strength to just bear and grin through all these symptoms was fine. And the recognition that all the symptoms are part of an ecosystem of perimenopause was just non-existent. It was non-existent with, you know, their generation, but it was also not something that was studied in the clinical space, in the medical space. and that is what's catching up now. And people are realizing, hey, you know, these hot flashes, my mood, sleep, these are a string of symptoms that are connected to perimenopause and they're not isolated. And I would say similar to pregnancy or postpartum, what we've seen is just women often get dismissed.

11:16Their symptoms often get dismissed and really just tossed aside. And I think what's changed is that, you know, bless the internet, I would say in some ways we're, you know, every other post I see is around perimenopause. And I think you look at our TV spot as well. It's, it adds humor, not unnecessary humor, but we're adding like levity to, to being open that we're even having symptoms.

11:47Kat Schneider: You've had such success with the prenatal, with the company in general for 10 years. You know, when you launched the perimenopause product, was there anything that you learned is very unique about this customer, about what they want, about what they're looking for, about how they want to be marketed to?

12:06yeah i would say yes yes and no it's interesting because there's actually some eerie similarities to the postpartum customer as well where you know we have a problem in this country with postpartum treatment around so many things. I've had three kids since starting this business. And I can tell you that after I gave birth, I felt like I was tossed aside. And then only six weeks later, I had my first medical visit and no one cared how I was doing. People only cared how the baby was doing, which is great, but mom and baby are one single unit. And what was really interesting for us is we recently received the results of our human clinical study on our postnatal supplement.

13:07And what we saw was that we actually impacted the quality of human breast milk. And so how mom and her nutrition status directly impact the food that the baby is eating. And these things are interconnected, whether it was biotin or omega-3, we were actually able to show something groundbreaking, which is the increase in HMO, which is a human oligosaccharide prebiotic fiber, which was never shown before. so it's really interesting I think similar to to perimenopause I feel like this is something our scientists and I talk about a lot you met her, Dr. Mastanay she calls the mom you know, the candy wrapper after the baby is born the candy wrapper is tossed aside that's a little heartbreaking it's heartbreaking but you know, people said hey, why are you designing something in postpartum?

14:07can't people just take their prenatal after they give birth. It's not a really big market. But when we looked at, it was one of the most nutrient depleted stages of a woman's life. We said, Hey, we want to create products that are designed for this life stage. We did the same thing with choline. And to me, perimenopause was really similar where women were having, you know, so many different symptoms and you've had a lot of products, whether they had science backed or not, they were addressing individual symptoms, but not looking at the women as a whole. And I think from a scientific perspective, that's always something we look at.

14:45And that's what was different here.

14:48Kat Schneider: What's been the most successful way that you've reached to this customer? You know, we're really lucky because I started this company as a digitally native brand, subscription only. Like that's a crazy story. We actually started with one single product, multivitamin for women, 18 plus. We didn't launch a prenatal, even though, you know, a lot of people think of us as a prenatal brand because we have the number one prenatal, only one backed by, you know, human clinical study available in Costco, Target, whatever, Amazon. And people think of us as a, you know, a pregnancy brand, but for two years, we had a multivitamin for women, 18 plus.

15:26And we waited two years to earn her trust on the internet, which was not a place that women were buying their supplements really directly from brands. We were one of few brands 10 years ago that did that, but it was incredible because it allowed us to deeply tell our story online. We shared where the ingredients came from in the world down to the supplier, vital destination of manufacturing or certification and the why behind what was included. And so what was really exciting is we have a massive digital business, direct-to-consumer business, that's entirely subscription-based. And so we had hundreds of thousands of people that really trust us with their health.

16:07So the most successful way that we launch products, especially people that have been with us for 10 years, is directly to this loyal customer base. You know, 92 % of our purchases are from people that have bought before. So it's really exciting. I think this existing base that trusted us for their pregnancy, for their postpartum, for their foundational nutrition is now like, oh my gosh, I've been feeling all these symptoms. Maybe I'm not quite ready to go on HRT or maybe I can't. And I want a hormone-free option to help manage what I'm going through. And that's where the solution, that's what we're offering and has been really successful really to the existing customer base.

16:56Kat Schneider: I think it's very clever that you launched Perimenopause Health, so the supplement for women in perimenopause, and then you very quickly launched Creatine Greens, which isn't specifically for them, but it's kind of for them. talk to me about the sort of the strategy of pairing these two launches together yeah so it was always in the works but I would say we've been busy let's just say that we've been very busy with the you know national tv spot which we've never done before for a product launch it's like a bull's move where you're investing a lot and you're just making a big bold bet and here I am wearing the hot and hormonal hat to represent the life stage personally, but we've been really busy.

17:45And so the perimenopause product, which is really a foundational hormone balancing product, we launched first. Creatine has always been in the works and we know how important it is for women over 40. And what we see, creatine in particular, I think this kind of mirrors a lot of thinking across other supplements. It's like been part of wellness bro supplement culture for decades. The reason being it hadn't really had that many studies on women until recently. And what we're finding in the studies for women is just how important this is. And what we know is women hold 70 to 80 % less creatine than men.

18:28And as we age, we lose muscle. And so, you know, I think people think of creatine as, hey, just for the, you know, it's only for massive muscles and gains, but it has so many, so many different other benefits. It has so many other benefits. And it's so responsible for the energy in your cells, which really, it does help with muscle metabolism. And we went through it, we went into it in a really unique approach looking at metabolism as a whole, which is why we layered in greens like spirulina, chlorella, and leafy greens and really made it something that was not only important for metabolism overall, but really made it an enjoyable experience.

19:20Like I had such a hard time, you know, loading the creatine powder and I don't like it in my water. I don't want to add anything to my coffee or matcha. And we were like, how do we actually, how do we, you know, I want to like, how do you create like a healthy, lean green juice that just tastes like a healthy green juice and it has a creatine in it. And that's what we did. And it's also, you know, just launched a week ago.

19:47Kat Schneider: I know it's very early. I assume you've had some luck in marketing the creatine greens to the perimenopause customer with some success? Exactly. So for us, it's been a, we've actually just launched this idea of starter kits. So previously we were still selling individual products, but now we've seen our customers are really actively bundling many products. And so with the starter kit, we were including several products and the greens is one of the main products that we include in the perimenopause starter kit bundle. Smart. Okay. I want to talk a little bit more about the campaign. Jackie Tone from Nobody Wants This.

20:32Kat Schneider: She's 46 years old. She's starring in the perimenopause campaign for you guys. It's so funny. Tell me about the ad. It's so incredible that she said yes. I sent her an email. We were thinking like, what talent do we want to represent us for this category? I'd been following her for a while, love the show. And it's about to air, I think like a week or two, which is really exciting. The timing is great. And I sent her an email and we had been working with a friend's creative agency, John Haber at Giant Spoon. They're incredible. By the way, we rarely work with outside creative agencies. We have one in-house, but this felt like a really big moment for us.

21:13And, you know, him and I are really close friends. Our teams work really well together. And our teams came up with this idea of take the men out of perimenopause and just how men always have an opinion on women's health. they're always the first ones to raise their hand and say, you know, have you tried this? Have you, have you read this? And, and just, you know, I had that own experience myself when I was entering perimenopause, my doctor told me that it's fertile and I couldn't be both fertile and entering perimenopause, which is not even accurate. You know, my, so many voices around me saying no, no, no, like, and, and just dismissing my symptoms.

21:55And so this was really personal. So we had this brief of Take the Men Out of Pre-Menopause. I sent an email to Jackie and she said, I'm literally screaming right now.

22:06Kat Schneider: Oh my gosh. So she was in, I think, from that first email. And what was exciting about that, you know, and I've learned so much over a decade of partnering with talent. If they're not fully in it and if they don't truly care about the life stage, the product, and the campaign, it doesn't really work. And she was in it from day one. And the reason we liked her so much was she's been so vocal about her own women's health journey. She's been so honest. And even on the show, she has this way where even just her look says everything you need to know. and my style of marketing and creative has always been say less and show more and so it fit really nicely into the spot where I would love everyone to see it but you know we have a women's health men's choir and it's just the way she even you know the way she even looks at them with all their advice is priceless yeah she's standing in her bathroom googling perimenopause symptoms thinks oh my gosh, I'm dying.

23:11Kat Schneider: What's happening? And then this men's choir pops out of nowhere and is giving her all this information. It's really, it's really funny. Can you give us any teasers as to the budget or the time or sort of what it took to create a massive TV spot with a big celebrity? You know, it was, it was challenging at first. I would say from my experience, the hardest thing is getting a celebrity that is really engaged and is co-creating in the work with you. It's really obvious when you pay somebody and you give them some lines to read and they're good actors, but it's an energetic thing. It's like people need to feel it.

23:57And the fact that Jackie was all in from day one saved us a lot of time because she was co-creating the content with us. And so she, so we, we sent her an early script, which actually took us a long time to get to. And I'll tell you why, um, because you know, what's interesting with perimenopause is I think a lot of people that are not in perimenopause only associate perimenopause with hot flashes.

24:30Kat Schneider: I agree. And so we kind of learned that early on when we had a bunch of creatives on this, a bunch of men, a bunch of younger women and other. And the script was entirely focused on hot flashes. And then a few of us who had actually been in perimenopause and why I think it's so obvious when perimenopausal products are created for women by women going through the life stage, we were like, whoa, wait, this is only a really small part of my experience. And it was, it had such a strong impact on the script because we were like, no, we're going to start all over again because this is not funny to us.

25:14It doesn't reflect what we're going through. And we were like, let's bring in even more perimenopausal women to, before we send this to Jackie, let's bring in as many voices as we can so that women feel seen and heard in this. And, you know, I was like, well, my hair is itchy. I always feel like I have lice. My kids have lice all the time, but I always feel like I have lice with them, but I don't. Or one of us really hates the sound of our husband's chewing. It's like nails on a chalkboard or throat clearing. And it's these nuanced symptoms that only you would know if you were going through it.

25:50And so I think that that was such an important part for us to lay this foundation of who is the team around us, who's working on this and like kind of also educating the men who are part of this, that this is happening. And, um, but they came up, you know, with this brilliant concept of take the men out of perimenopause. We also have a lot of men working on the, on the campaign and the script. So it was, it was, it was a very inclusive effort.

26:18Kat Schneider: I mean, that really, you're speaking to just the power of you as a founder being a proxy for your customer. And I think that industry oftentimes forgets how important that is. It's so important. It's the reason we've launched products when I've been told it's too niche. You know, when I started the company and I was fundraising, we did raise venture capital monies day one because we wanted to invest in clinical studies and build a scientific team. I'm not a scientist, even though I would love to be one. And we needed to raise millions of to do that. And so when I was raising money early on, I was told pregnancy was niche, postpartum was niche, perimenopause was niche.

27:00This was a decade plus ago. Now women's health has never been obviously hotter, but it's these individual life stages that were just perceived as like, why would you create a brand around this? That that's not a big market and that's thinking too small. And so, you know, I was like, no way. Like I, women need, need these life stages and they need, I mean, they need brands to trust in these inflection points and their health. These are actually the inflection points that women come into this category for. And so let's provide the highest quality products and also through our marketing, make women feel seen and heard.

27:43And so, you know, this is the reason we have a choline product and a number one natal choline on Amazon. We were, if you just were, you know, doing an MBA and you did some market sizing, a lot of these things don't exist. There's no market, there's like almost no market sizing here. And so you have to have a lot of conviction when you're going into something earlier, ahead of the time than people see it. Choline was an interesting one for us because we work with a leading scientist from Cornell, Dr. Maria Caudill, and we saw her research from moms taking choline from, you know, the fourth trimester.

28:22And it was, and they tracked the child development until the age of seven. And what they saw were faster processing speeds and mental development of children. And so we were like, we want to put this product out, like in that dose and form in that study, because it impacts future generations, but there was no market for it. And I think similar to Perry, I think people are trying to size up the perimenopause and menopause market. There's a lot of, you know, there was an article about the kind of industrial

28:51Kat Schneider: complex of this category, which I feel see, but I think specifically like products need to exist in the world. Creative needs to exist in the world that's never been seen before because it reflects what women are actually going through. And that's the most important thing to do. So wait, going back to budget question, just for one moment here. I'm curious, was it a big investment in doing the TV spot? Yeah, TV has been a big investment for us this year. I would say, you know, it's obviously the millions of dollars. And, you know, the creative is one part, but the media costs are what was really driving the cost for us and for other brands.

29:41I would say we're at a scale where we're doing hundreds of millions of revenue. We're launching, you know, we just launched Walmart, 1900 doors. We just launched Costco, chain wide for the prenatal. We're everywhere in Target and with perimenopause. And it's really important at this scale business to start building or even earlier to build that demand. And so, and that's top of funnel. As a digitally native brand, a lot of companies get lost and just focus on bottom funnel, bottom funnel, bottom funnel until it kind of dries out and your caps go up really high. And it's an exciting time because we get to focus on really amazing creative that stands, you know, that shows what we stand for as a brand.

30:27And this year was our biggest TV investment to date, even predating the Jackie perimenopause spot. But this spot we're going to be running for a while. This isn't just a moment in time. And I think the thing that we've seen a lot of success with on the TV side has actually been on Linear. So big moments like March Madness, a lot of these athletic, big spiky moments where we run TV have had a massive lift for us. And that's what we're looking for. A brand is still, when you look at it from an awareness perspective, we might have the number one prenatal, we might have other number one products across categories, but our big opportunity is really to drive more brand awareness.

31:16Kat Schneider: I think it's very clever that you have this new category. You have all of the science to support it. You've really thought about things holistically, but then you're leading with this sort of comedy, with this sort of levity here. What do you think that says about what consumers are experiencing right now and how noisy things are?

31:39yeah it is it is quite noisy the brand has always been provocative and it has the right and freedom to you know be a bit contrarian everything that i want us to put out in the world has a wink to it so it doesn't look like every other brand but that's that's been intentional since day one. It was always, you know, have the science, have the traceability on the sourcing side, but then it's like this really unusual ritual wink. And it's always been around shaping culture and not following it. You know, we did the same thing for the real bodybuilders. We had an amazing insight. We saw that most women, 70 % of women didn't feel seen or heard when they were trying to conceive.

32:29It was kind of this underground situation. Women weren't sharing their stories because they were hard and painful. And 4 % felt like companies or media was even portraying what was happening to them. So we took that and we showed what it was actually like for a variety of women when they were trying to get pregnant. And it's just created this really powerful spot. And so we're never trying to follow culture. We're always trying to make women feel seen and heard. And I think adding the levity during this moment brought a lot of awareness to what women were going through during an emotional time, especially with their symptoms.

33:14And we weren't making fun of the women, if anything. We weren't making fun of the men. Just kidding. but I think it was something that, that women could really relate to. I mean, I saw someone posted a comment on the, on the video, like the doctor has a really punchable face. I was like, Oh my God, this just like started this like stream of stream of perimenopausal women and, you know, kind of the rage that you feel during, during, um, during some of the symptoms started to come out and I would say our feed.

33:52Kat Schneider: Kat, I love what you said about perimenopause sort of being this white space, which seems so crazy or sort of a market that you can't really measure. What's next for ritual? Are you going to go into full menopause care? Are you going to go into other white space that maybe exists? What's on your mind? Yeah, for us, it's always going deeper in the categories that we play. I would say even though we have established leadership in reproductive health, we want to go deeper. There's more products to launch in that space. We recently launched a natal biotic. We launched the choline product. We have a prenatal protein.

34:34I just want women to feel wrapped in all their needs covered during these key inflection points. So that goes from her first period all the way to menopause. And just staying narrowly focused and deepening what we've created is really, from a product perspective, the focus. On the flip side, we are doing a lot of work in the advocacy space and the impact space in both on the state and federal level. So a lot of my time and the team's time is also spent there because we don't cover every single supplement that exists in the world, but we want to make sure that the supplements out there are safe and effective for ourselves, for our families, for our children.

35:22So we were actually the only company that was involved in here in California passing SB 646, which advocated for heavy metal transparency and prenatal vitamins. This is something we're excited to continue pushing through on a federal level, including heavy metal, transparency across other need states and products, across establishing an agreed-upon definition on the term clinically studied, and transparency on ingredients. And the clinically studied piece is particularly something we're spending a lot of time on. We've invested$5 million around clinical studies, having finished clinical studies on all of our products by 2030.

36:08But the problem right now in the marketing landscape is we've gone from natural to clean to clinically studied with these things meaning nothing. There's no clear definitions. And that's something that kind of fighting day in and day out to figure out across the industry.

36:27Kat Schneider: Yeah, man, Kat, you are busy. Oh, yeah. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. And yeah, big congrats on the new launch and all of the great work you guys are doing. Thanks so much for having me. It was so fun.

36:51Kat Schneider: And thank you for listening to this episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. If you enjoyed it, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening. And for even more coverage on the beauty industry and more, please visit glossy.co slash beauty.

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