807 Joey Zwillinger: Co-Founder & CEO of Biologica

0:00Kara Goldin:I am unwilling to give up, but I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. You just want to make sure you will get knocked down, but just make sure you don't get knocked out. So your only choice should be, go focus on what you can control. Hi everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world's greatest leaders. We'll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can't wait to get started. Let's go. Okay, quick question. Have you ever wished you could build something just by thinking it through?

0:47Kara Goldin:Well, that's basically what Wix has done. With Wix's new Harmony editor, creating a website feels incredibly intuitive, almost like you're thinking out loud. You describe what you want, type in a prompt, and within minutes, you've got a polished professional site up and running. And here's what really sets it apart and why I love it. You can move seamlessly between AI-powered creation and hands-on editing whenever you want. That means you get the speed of AI without giving up control. Your site actually ends up looking the way you imagined it. Let me say that again. You choose how you build fast when you want it, detailed when you need it.

1:35Kara Goldin:I've personally used Wix. I love it. And this new Harmony experience takes it to a whole new level. You even get your own personal AI agent named Aria to help you build your site and manage your business along the way. Check out what everyone's calling the new way to create websites. Try Wix Harmony for free at wix.com slash harmony. That's wix.com slash harmony. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Kara Golden Show. Today, I am super excited to be joined by Joey Zwillinge, co-founder and CEO of Biologica. That's a mouthful today. Yes, yes, sorry. For the morning. No, I love it. Only half of that is my fault.

2:23My mom is responsible for the other part.

2:26Kara Goldin:I love it. So Joey is the co-founder and CEO of Biologica, created with his incredible co-founder who happens to be his spouse, Liz. And Biologica is a science-backed wellness brand redefining hormonal health for women at every life stage. So many of you may know Joey as the co-founder of another incredible brand, a very different brand, physical goods brand as well, but not in the health space, sort of. I guess it is kind of in the health and wellness space. Gets you moving around. Exactly. Allbirds. So and if you have not heard of Allbirds, you must be living under a rock. But he helped build one of the most iconic direct to consumer brands of the last decade.

3:15Kara Goldin:Now he's stepping into an entirely new category with Liz with a mission to create supplements that truly understand women's biology. So very, very excited to hear a lot more about Biologica and also just his journey and being an incredible founder and leader in multiple spaces now. So welcome, Joey. So super, super excited to meet you and to have you here. You too. And thank you for such a flattering intro. Mutual admiration club here. So I'm thrilled to be on the show and talk with you and just have a great conversation. And hopefully one of us says something interesting for the people who listen.

3:56Kara Goldin:Okay, quick question. Have you ever wished you could build something just by thinking it through? Well, that's basically what Wix has done. With Wix's new Harmony editor, creating a website feels incredibly intuitive, almost like you're thinking out loud. You describe what you want, type in a prompt, and within minutes, you've got a polished professional site up and running. And here's what really sets it apart and why I love it. You can move seamlessly between AI-powered creation and hands-on editing whenever you want. That means you get the speed of AI without giving up control. Your site actually ends up looking the way you imagined it.

4:42Kara Goldin:Let me say that again. You choose how you build, fast when you want it, detailed when you need it. I've personally used Wix. I love it. And this new Harmony experience takes it to a whole new level. You even get your own personal AI agent named Aria to help you build your site and manage your business along the way. Check out what everyone's calling the new way to create websites. Try Wix Harmony for free at wix.com slash harmony. That's wix.com slash harmony. Oh, that's awesome. Well, for listeners just discovering Biologica, how do you describe the brand? Yeah, it's extraordinarily focused on supporting women's overall health.

5:35And I think we've found in this journey that hormones, the word hormones, is very tightly associated with mood when it comes to a description of women. And that is something that needs to be broken because the symphony that is working inside a woman's body between estrogen, progesterone, and other hormones is incredible and so sophisticated. And it drives so much of a woman's overall health. And we did a bunch of work to figure out what we wanted to do with this company as we were narrowing it down. And as we learned these insights of how instrumental and how consistent the interaction between hormones and its effect on a woman's overall health is, like the light bulbs started going off.

6:24And so we are really focused on both the longevity aspect of women's health, making sure women are healthier for much longer, and also really understanding where women are in their journey and treating the most acute symptoms, the most prevalent issues that really are disruptive in a woman's day and doing that in a very simple, easy to take and very consistently used product, which is what we've come up with.

6:52Kara Goldin:Okay, quick question. Have you ever wished you could build something just by thinking it through? Well, that's basically what Wix has done. With Wix's new Harmony editor, creating a website feels incredibly intuitive, almost like you're thinking out loud. You describe what you want, type in a prompt, and within minutes, you've got a polished professional site up and running. And here's what really sets it apart and why I love it. You can move seamlessly between AI-powered creation and hands-on editing whenever you want. That means you get the speed of AI without giving up control. Your site actually ends up looking the way you imagined it.

7:38Kara Goldin:Let me say that again. You choose how you build, fast when you want it, detailed when you need it. I've personally used Wix. I love it. And this new Harmony experience takes it to a whole new level. You even get your own personal AI agent named Aria to help you build your site and manage your business along the way. Check out what everyone's calling the new way to create websites. Try Wix Harmony for free at Wix.com slash Harmony. That's Wix.com slash Harmony. So what makes it fundamentally different from other supplement companies in this space? I mean, you are walking into a space that's getting a lot of communication and conversation about it.

8:33Kara Goldin:And I think it's trying to differentiate what you're doing is it takes talent. I know you've got that and Liz as well. So, but what were you trying or what did you see, I guess, in the space that wasn't being covered? Yeah. And it took us a while. I mean, so we, you know, I was running Allbirds for, call it about a decade. And Liz was always super instrumental in my leadership of the company, personnel decisions, strategy decisions, you know, always extraordinarily behind the scenes. And, you know, throughout that journey, so I got a sense for how Liz worked, which was great. What I also saw is, and we talked about significantly, is all of the daily issues that Liz was facing on her own with no credible source of information around, you know, why are things happening to me during pregnancy, after pregnancy, as she entered perimenopause, all these different phases of life.

9:38We're looking at this, we're saying, you know, it's pretty amazing. But if this were happening to a man, this problem would have been solved 50 years ago. And very interesting as a backdrop, when there's this lack of leadership, lack of focus and attention on a space and a sector, it's such an interesting opportunity for a brand to be created and really stand for something and make a big impact. That was very similar to what we saw in starting Allbirds around the idea of sustainability in apparel and footwear. And it was just lip service being paid. So as we saw these kind of things, we started thinking, okay, how do we address that very broad idea?

10:18We started talking with, we did focus groups across the country. We broke women into different age groups as we did these focus groups to really understand what were their top of mind issues, what were they concerned about, were they getting information. And we started to hear lots about vitamins and supplements. We started to hear about the sources of information women were getting. And then we started talking about what their health issues were. And it was very, very consistent that when we met women in a specific hormonal age of life, the symptoms were unbelievably consistent. And we saw it.

10:59So we're like, this is a big insight for us. For me, not having any lived experience here, I'm, I'm like, asking questions, looking at data, doing a lot of research. I don't get that. I can't feel it myself. So I can't base this on intuition, which is kind of unlike my previous experiences. And it's really sharpened my ability to hone that curiosity into insight-driven and then execution for the company. So what we found, when I say it's consistent, it's like you're in perimenopause, brain fog spikes. Your mood issues, your anxiety, your disruption of sleep, these issues are very unique to that hormonal stage.

11:40So as we started looking at the landscape, everyone universally across all ages and stages, they want something that's simple. They want it to be credible, science-backed, and very, very simple. Like one thing that you can do a day to really protect all of what's going on in your body and make you feel yourself again, that is universal. But what you're dealing with is quite different. So in designing the company, we then said, okay, that's an interesting insight. Now we went out and we did a thousand women study where we got into really detailed health issues with each of these women and to understand what is the top of mind concerns.

12:21And this not only validated what we saw from the focus groups, but it gave us very quantifiable data on what is the most important issues for women in each of these stages. and that led us down to develop product that exactly met these insights that we drew from all this work. And I think when you look at the landscape and you're asking me about crowded space, yes, it is, so is shoes. A lot of interesting new awareness around the topic. How do we differentiate on that? I think what I'm describing here is a bigger idea than maybe it sounds on the surface, but this idea that you can have one product, like you come to my website, right now, there's only one product for you.

13:06We have three products, one for reproductive age, 20 to call it 40-ish. We have one for perimenopause, 40 to 50-ish, and there's lots of bands around that. So the age is not necessarily the correct way to think about it. And then postmenopause. But you select your age. We have one product for you. And we've done it because the nutrients that we know you need and the symptoms that we know we can mitigate and make you feel much better are so specific to where you are in your life. And that's a pretty big idea. Now we have three products and yet we can address a very large population and make people feel much better because we know exactly what you're dealing with.

13:44So I would say that that is like the core of the company. And it's the core insight that really drives why we think we're different and why we think it's an attractive proposition for for women when they come and look at ours and compare it to anything else that's on the market.

13:58Kara Goldin:No, I love it. And it's today, it's a direct to consumer company. Do you have plans to take that beyond direct to consumer at some point? Yes. Yes, of course. We I mean, I think in this industry, a good 50 50 balance between retail and digital is in predominantly your own digital is the right kind of mix, it feels like and And that'll change over time, just given what technology does and what media landscape is like. But that is roughly what the target is. But we would like to learn from our customers intimately in the first one or two years, just doing direct-to-consumer, working with Amazon as well, but digitally focused.

14:44So we really have access to these customers. We figure out what we thought was brilliant when we started that turns out was not very brilliant. and then as we do that, I think there's going to be some marquee retail partners that will support us phenomenally well, but we want to be in a position to be fantastic partners for them before we go into those stores. We want to create some demand for them as well instead of relying on them to drive all the customers and we would actually like to be a draw for their stores and be able to put some money behind it, which requires a bit of scale. So yeah, that's the idea.

15:15Kara Goldin:I love that you walked into this new industry, but were looking at developing an entirely new company. I'm sure there was tons of learning that went on in this space, which is super, super exciting. I remember when I was first starting Hint, I came from tech and probably the most exciting thing for me and going into the beverage industry and trying to create a product that didn't have any preservatives in it and tasted great without sweeteners and all this was I didn't know any better. So I just kept asking questions and really tried to figure out how do I do this and made a lot of mistakes in the beginning.

16:01Kara Goldin:A lot of things surprised me. When you think about, especially when you were trying to figure out, is this the company that we want to start? What really surprised you about it? Maybe you thought we're going to go in this direction, but then you had to change course a little bit because you were so surprised. Like, did you think you needed to launch with multiple SKUs versus, as you were saying, just one per kind of stage of life? Yeah. I mean, you're, you're already down to a level of detail that, that was like, uh, after the surprises, I would say, I mean, what, what I, that I would never in a million years have told you I was, I was going to go into vitamins and supplements.

16:43I mean, just shock and let alone not even for me, but for just focused on women.

16:54It is a new industry for me. Lots of parallels when you're talking about reaching consumers with a physical good. So there's lots that I can take from my previous experience to make sure that we do things more efficiently and very successfully. but uh i would say as we started you know as i as i alluded to earlier when my when my wife liz and i were talking about the space of women's health and how it's under resourced you know we were looking i was previously at a biotech company um before entering footwear um and i was really on the material science side looking at climate change and its impact on the ability to service lots of different industries with products that were low carbon.

17:37That took me into shoes. So going here is another big turn and big pivot in life. That said, as we started to think about this idea and we saw vitamins and supplements, I have probably the same sentiment that many of the consumers that are now looking at purchasing our product have. Is it snake oil? Is this really true? Is this a regulated industry? Like there's lots of questions that swirl around vitamins and supplements, which make a lot of people skeptical, rightfully so, because there are a lot of bad actors in the industry. What I found that really surprised me the most is when we looked at clinical research, when we work with all the doctors that we brought on for a medical advisory board, yes, there's lots of things that you can do through more traditional pharmaceutical, Western medicine.

18:27Yes, there's things that are incredibly important for you to do from nutrition perspective, making sure that you eat fitness as well. But there is a role for vitamins and supplements, which is highly underappreciated. And I was shocked to find some of the clinical data that suggested that some of our ingredients that we use today work better in circumstances for symptoms that are related to depression and things like that versus something like an SSRI. And you see when women get into perimenopause, the prevalence of SSRIs prescribed for women, jumps up well over 30%, which is pretty shocking. You think one in three people that you're interacting with is probably on an SSRI for treating depression, but there are natural solutions that are nature's best serotonin booster.

19:13You have these things available with deep clinical research that you can formulate in and deliver such a healthier and more good feeling day for someone very simply. So I would say that's the biggest surprise for me is that yes, some of my skepticism coming into this industry was grounded and it is true and people should be some skeptical, but even more the reason why a business that doesn't cut corners follows the clinical research and does their activity with a very scientific backing can be a great tool as part of what the ecosystem has created for each individual and all those different things I mentioned supplements and vitamins being one of them.

19:57So that has been a big surprise for me. And I've become a pretty passionate believer about it and a user myself in such a way. We don't market our products for men. I use the postmenopausal product because a man's biology is probably closest in similarity to a postmenopausal woman. And I feel so much better every day. And I kind to kick myself for not having done all this work and done all this research myself just for my own benefit as a human uh enjoying life better um and so you know i now see that power so clearly and i think the impact that that's going to have on people who use our product and perhaps even the broader industry in in some echoes of what we had done at all birds around sustainability i think the same can be true for how we bring some attention to how these issues can be solved for women.

20:52Kara Goldin:Yeah, definitely. And you worked with OBGYNs and naturopathic doctors in helping to formulate the final product. Obviously, that was a very different experience than your Allbirds experience, but I bet it was super interesting, right? And trying to get information from them and see sort of what they felt was missing as well. You know, in some ways there's so much similarity. I will say, you know, I've been in the world of chemistry for quite a long time now. And that was true working in the biochemical field that I was in prior, making phenomenally high performance chemicals out of carbon neutral green materials, figuring out what we could replace in the petrochemical industry.

21:41Working on that dimension with pretty deep chemistry and then connecting that at the intersection of what consumers want and what problems consumers are facing, that is extraordinarily similar to what we're doing today. And yes, they happen to be doctors instead of chemists and people in labs. So it's a little bit of a different flavor. But if you think about what we're actually trying to do, we are trying to identify a problem that has not been solved by an industry for women, and then utilize the most cutting edge and most scientifically rigorous research in order to bring a solution to bear that will really solve the problem.

22:20And in those ways, it's extremely similar to live at that intersection between scientific materials, science, science, innovation, and consumer products. And so I would say it's been really enjoyable and very much feeling like a continuation of what I've done for the last 20 years, frankly.

22:40Kara Goldin:So consumer trust, you touched on this, but is so critical in health, obviously, in any industry, but particularly in health. How are you building the brand that maybe is similar to what you had to do with Allbirds, but also kind of different because you're focused on a specific demographic and three different age, like I'm not sure what you call that, but the kind of - Yes, the hormonal stages, yeah. The hormonal stages along the way. Like how is it similar and how is it different? Yeah, that part is, it is interesting. You know, I think, you know, I would say the parallels overall have been that cutting corners doesn't work.

23:34Like consumers, consumers are, I hear people talk about consumers negatively quite a lot. Like they're, you know, consumers are dumb, they'll blah, blah, blah. I think consumers are brilliant. I just think they're very busy and they don't have a lot of time to focus on what you're telling them. Like it's, you know, you get one second in a week to maybe make an impact on them. So how do you do that? And in both Allbirds and Biologica, I think the most important element of that has been not cutting corners. You know, we had at Allbirds, we really believed that consumers will never buy a product because it's sustainable.

24:14And I learned this through, you know, going into people's homes as a cameraman, posing like with our researcher. So I could actually hear how people are shopping, what they're thinking. We're looking at that. So we knew that sustainability will never sell a shoe. It has to be a better product and do something better for a human because it happens to be sustainable. That's the route that we chose to take in order to make better and differentiated products. And, you know, I think the process here is, it's very, very similar. So we are building trust through medical credibility, cutting zero corners.

24:55We're doing clinical studies at pharmaceutical grade clinical studies, not to say, you know, the vitamins industry often you see clinical studies where it's like, okay, we gave you a hefty dose of vitamin D. Does your blood work now show that you have more vitamin D? Like, yes, of course. Like, duh. That's not an impressive clinical study. We're actually trying to solve a real mental health problem as well as some physical health symptoms. And we're actually studying the impact. Well, if you take our product, does it actually solve this problem for you? And in order to make sure that we're on the right track, we're using highly validated, repeated studies at great pharmaceutical grade clinical work on each of the ingredients that we use.

25:33And we make sure that the potency that we formulated in and the quality of that material is exactly matched to what the clinical data would suggest you should use. And that gives us assurance that we are going to solve these problems for women. And in doing that, and the brick by brick building of doing that without cutting corners and doing it the right way, over time, I am quite certain we'll build that credibility. So that is just a matter of time. I think in addition to that, we've exposed all of the research that we've done. So if you go to our website, we have a really fascinating health quiz that you can do.

26:12It's not a quiz to sell you product. It's a quiz to benchmark you against your peers to say, what are the issues that I face? And how does that stack up with other women? And that's exposing the work we did in that thousand woman study that led to our product development. We've put all of the research. There's literally a dissertation worth of research on our website in our wellness center of, I don't know how many people have read it yet. We'll see if it's actually worthwhile. But there is a dissertation worth of information on women's health on there. And so I think all of these ladder up to us building credibility.

26:47And I think as you put these together, you don't cut corners. There's always going to be a moment where somebody pokes around the website and they're like, wow, this is way more legit than I've ever seen. Maybe that person's influential and could tell a lot of other people. And that's when things start to pick up. And I think that's a compounding impact. And so that's the approach that we're taking in this business. And I'd say some similarities with Allbirds, albeit very different industry where there's a lot of fashion cycles. And that's a very different kind of a purchase decision than something that you're going to ingest that you hope will actually make you feel better every day.