819 Bobby Bitton: Co-Founder & CEO of O Positiv Health

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. Support for today's episode comes from OneSkin, a skincare company that's actually rethinking how we approach aging.

0:48Kara Goldin:I've always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with skincare. There are so many products out there that promise everything and deliver, unfortunately, very little. And at some point, it starts to feel like you need a shelf full of products just to keep up. That never made sense to me, and I've always believed the best solution should be simple, effective, and grounded in real science. That's exactly why OneStude stood out to me. This isn't about hype or trends. It's a company founded by female PhD longevity scientists who asked a real important question. What if we could actually slow skin aging at the source instead of just masking it?

1:29Kara Goldin:That research led to their proprietary OS01 peptide, the first ingredient scientifically shown to target those damaged scene-sent cells that drive visible aging. In other words, it's not just another cream. It's designed to help your skin function better longer. It also stands out because it's backed by real data, multiple clinical studies, thousands of five-star reviews and you can feel that intention in the product. It's thoughtful, it's focused, and it works with your skin, not against it. Born from over a decade of longevity research, OneSkin's OSO1 peptide is proven to target the visible signs of aging, helping you unlock your healthiest skin now and as you age.

2:13Kara Goldin:For a limited time, try OneSkin with 15 % off using code CARAgolden at oneskin.co slash CARAgolden. That's 15 % off oneskin.co with code CARAgolden. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Golden Show. Have you ever wondered why so many women's health issues, whether it's PMS, menopause, vaginal health were treated like side conversations instead of real priorities. Our next guest did. And today I'm excited to be joined by Bobbi Bitton, who is the co-founder and CEO of O Positive Health, the brand on a mission to challenge taboos and build science-backed solutions for women's health at every stage of life.

3:06Kara Goldin:Bobbi co-founded O Positive and launched the first ever gummy vitamin for PMS. What started as one bold idea has grown into the number one women's health brand on Amazon with over 25 million bottles sold. And today we'll talk about building a category that is really not only a defining brand, but also scaling from D to C to retail and all of the things that go on when you're really launching something, but also So launching a brand could be considered taboo in many people's minds, taboo topic, but Bobby has taken this on. So I'm very excited. Bobby, welcome to The Kara Golden Show. Oh, Kara, I'm so excited to be here.

3:54Honored to be speaking with you. It's fun to be speaking with an operator and an entrepreneur that's built it and been there and done everything that we're about to talk about. So thank you for having me.

4:05Kara Goldin:This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by Bombas. Let's be honest, this time of year just hits different. The weather finally turns, you're outside more, moving more, and suddenly the little things you wear every day actually matter. That's why I've been reaching for Bombas. I've been getting back into walking and hiking again, and their sport socks are a total game changer. They're cushioned exactly where you need it, super breathable, and they just stay put. So I'm not thinking about my socks. I'm enjoying the movement. And once the hikes go away, their warm weather footwear is honestly my go-to.

4:42Kara Goldin:The slides are lightweight, waterproof, and incredibly comfortable. Perfect for running around Marin, traveling, or just relaxing at home. But it's not just socks and shoes. Their underwear and tees are next level. Soft, breathable, and actually built to last. It's one of those upgrades you don't realize you need until you try it. And here's the part I really love. For every item you purchase, Bombas donates an essential clothing item to someone facing housing insecurity. They've donated over 150 million items and counting. That's impact. Head over to bombas.com slash Kara and use code Kara for 20 % off your first purchase.

5:24Kara Goldin:That's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash Cara. Code Cara at checkout. Support for today's episode comes from OneSkin, a skincare company that's actually rethinking how we approach aging. I've always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with skincare. There are so many products out there that promise everything and deliver, unfortunately, very little. And at some point, it starts to feel like you need a shelf full of products just to keep up. That never made sense to me, and I've always believed the best solution should be simple, effective, and grounded in real science. That's exactly why OneStude stood out to me.

6:05Kara Goldin:This isn't about hype or trends. It's a company founded by female PhD longevity scientists who asked a real important question. What if we could actually slow skin aging at the source instead of just masking it. That research led to their proprietary OS-O1 peptide, the first ingredient scientifically shown to target those damaged scene-sent cells that drive visible aging. In other words, it's not just another cream, it's designed to help your skin function better longer. It also stands out because it's backed by real data, multiple clinical studies, thousands of five-star reviews, and you can feel that intention in the product.

6:45Kara Goldin:It's thoughtful, it's focused, and it works with your skin, not against it. Born from over a decade of longevity research, OneSkin's OSO1 peptide is proven to target the visible signs of aging, helping you unlock your healthiest skin now and as you age. For a limited time, try OneSkin with 15 % off using code CARAGOLDEN at oneskin.co slash Kara Golden. That's 15 % off oneskin.co with code Kara Golden. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. So for listeners just discovering O Positive, how do you describe the brand and what it stands for?

7:30Yeah, O Positive at its core stands for, you know, disrupting women's health and and standing for need states and things in women's life that have been historically overlooked, that we want to go make products for, education for, and community around. We built it really based on my sister's experience, experience with her own health. My sister's my co-founder. We work together every single day at this business. And it's just been inspiring for her to say, how can we create proactive approaches to women's health when previously, if we're looking at history, everything's been very reactionary. When they have a problem, that's when they're going to solve it.

8:09Not kind of finding out the root cause and doing it at the start. So that's kind of the ethos of the brand. And it's just been so exciting to watch it grow and kind of grow from its humble beginnings of focusing on menstrual health now to really focusing on kind of four main areas being menstrual health, vaginal health, pregnancy, and menopause is kind of how we span her life and look at where we want to go build category-defining products.

8:32Kara Goldin:I love that you're building this company with your sister as your co-founder. And the story really started with her, which I think is really awesome that you listened, first of all, to your sister. I said, when I first read about this, I think that There's probably a lot of families out there, maybe siblings that, you know, throw ideas around, maybe throw problems around that they think they have a solution for. And you actually helped her launch this idea to what it is today. What made you believe there was a real business opportunity here? Yeah, I mean, it was starting a company with your sibling.

9:22for us was one of the best things we've ever done, right? It's just the trust that you've built with your sibling over so many years, the wonderful judge and jury of your parents that can still to this day settle any dispute that we have, which is incredible. The roots really came from, again, seeing me and Brianna were roommates at the time and seeing her go through her mid-20s and really struggle, struggle with her health, struggle with going to the doctor and trying to find the root cause of her cramps, her mood swings, her hormonal acne, that was affecting both her confidence, but also her physical body.

9:57And being frustrated that everything was reactionary. They're like, you can go on birth control or you can suck it up. And that is what it means to be a woman. And she'd come home and she would vent about this and vent about her frustrations. And me kind of being a little bit of the problem solver, having some entrepreneurial experience myself, was like, okay, well, this feels like, is there something out there to be solved? And we did research and we found incredible, ingredients and papers and studies on like proactive approaches to menstrual health and to hormone balance and to these things that now you kind of hear about all the time.

10:29But 10 years ago, people weren't really talking about how to kind of take your hormone health in your own hands. And we started just small and looked at, you know, our family, Brianna's friends, my mom going through menopause and said like, this is a pretty big market because if it's that like aware in our sphere, it must be wide reaching. And we started talking to our friends and started talking to women and doing surveys. And oh my God, the response we got of, oh my God, yeah, I haven't really thought about my hormone health. It was kind of just birth control or deal

11:03Kara Goldin:with it. So interesting. How did you come up with the name O-positive? Yeah. So the name O-positive represents the female sign. So the O and the plus of O positive. So O positive health is women's health. It's a little cheeky. We definitely have to explain it to some people, but the O represents the gummies. All of our gummy rings are an O shape and then every one of our products ends in O. So it's kind of like this through line that unifies our sub brands as well as really when you look at it visually, an O and a plus is that female sign. When you first launched, how many SKUs did you launch with and how has that changed today?

11:43Yeah, so we've been around for about eight years of the company and for two and a half years, we were a one product company. We launched with one SKU, one Focus, one Need State, which was the first ever supplement for PMS. It was called Flow. It still is called Flow. It's one of our hero products in our portfolio. And it was just this wonderful rocket ship, right? Now launching a lot of products and having products that worked and plenty of products that did not work and did not scale. You realize how lucky you were that your first product really took off. But it was, I think, for a couple of different reasons.

12:18It was, you know, first mover in the category of menstrual health. It was a product where women can really feel and experience the results, right? It's different than like a multivitamin or an immune product that, you know, you take it and you can't really tell if it's working or not, but you take it regardless. us, our kind of promise to our consumers very early on was we're going to make products that you can feel. And what that means is it's product that they stay with because they get attached to the results that they're feeling. And it becomes much more similar to kind of like a prescription regimen because you feel the results and you don't want them to, you know, your symptoms come back, then maybe a historical supplement.

12:56And over the years and really just getting close to our consumers from that early onset, we saw that there were so many categories similar to menstrual health that we could disrupt, that women were coming to us asking for. So if you're thinking about menopause with kind of that next category we entered into, it was my mom, you know, suffered with ovarian cancer. She's healthy and wonderful, but she couldn't go on any hormone replacement therapy. So she was like, hey, is there something hormone free and proactive that you could actually create for me for menopause. And that kind of was our second category.

13:31So one born out of my sister's experience, second born out of my mom's. And then very much when we entered vaginal health and pregnancy, it was how can we take this model of categories that have low education, low resources, low community, and really reactive solutions and flip it on its head and offer heavy education, very proactive approach to it. And kind of that step before you have to, you know, go to the doctor and really be concerned with things that get extreme. But a lot of people are taking health in their own hand, especially with this content out there and people's doctors they're finding on TikTok now.

14:07It's crazy.

14:08Kara Goldin:That's so, so true. What was the hardest part about launching a brand in a category that not only maybe many people still consider taboo, but also you hadn't had this experience, right? You knew what the problem was, you had ideas, but this is not what you or your sister were kind of schooled in initially. Although you did go back to school and trained as a nutritionist, but I think it's still, if you did not grow up in sort of a pharmaceutical. A lot of people would say, what do I know about this? And it's just too hard. Yeah, I think it's funny. I think a lot of entrepreneurs say, if we knew what we knew now, I don't know if we were to start, right?

14:59The mountain you have to climb is sometimes so high, it's good to not know where the actual peak is. Because then you just start putting one foot in front of the other. And for us, being a consumer product company, product had to be at the center of everything we did. And being in a category like vitamins and supplements is kind of where we started. It's low barriers to entry. And to be honest, there's a lot of snake oil out there. So it's important to us to understand how are we going to stand above the rest? And it was, you got to know what you don't know and you got to find people who do. And that's a lesson I think in life.

15:30It was me and Brianna going out and in the early days, crashing every OBGYN appointment that we could make for Brianna and pretending that it was for her and we would say, okay, well, we have this product idea and can you help us with it? Finding the best nutraceutical scientists, I think, honestly, in the world to partner with you and believe in you and believe in this category of women's health to develop the products that we have today. And then today, we have six board approved OBGYNs on our staff that help formulate our products, make our products, make sure they're safe and our science team as well.

16:04But in those early days, it was knocking down the doors, finding people to partner with you. And then when it came to, you know, obstacles that we didn't foresee, just being in the market of women's health and kind of being this first mover in the category, you know, we didn't understand kind of the headwinds that we would face when messaging products the way we do, right? We were one of the first companies to call a probiotic for women what it is, which is a vaginal probiotic, right? It's for the vaginal microbiome. It helps balance pH and yeast in the vaginal microbiome. And we were the first people to call it that.

16:42And what happened when we named a product vaginal probiotic is we immediately got banned on every single platform. So on Facebook, on TikTok, on this for being a sexualized product. And it took months of fighting with policy, showing them examples that ED medication was being marketed on this website, but yet we're blocked as a women's health brand. And we're really proud of the work we did because we were able to overturn policy at every single big advertising business. So think the Facebooks and Metas of the world, the TikToks of the world, the Amazons of the world. We were able to bring them onto our way of kind of thinking and bring them along this journey to actually open up for every women's health company that markets today that's able to say the word vagina or vaginal health stays too old positive.

17:32And we're really proud of that work we did. So it's like a lot of battles on the product side, knowing what we don't know and finding people that do, but also kind of changing policy a little bit when it comes to how you advertise and talk about these products in a anatomically correct way, not a sexualized way. I think that's really important.

17:49Kara Goldin:Yeah, no, so, so interesting. So you launched initially as a D2C product and O Positive is now the number one women's health brand on Amazon. Then you scaled into national retail. Do I have this right in terms of the order? How did you think about that as a go-to-market strategy? So when you were getting ready to launch, you're still trying to figure out who your consumer is. You're fighting policy issues and rules that different social media companies are making you jump through hoops in order to get the brand out there. But how did you think about the go-to-market strategy? How did you figure it out?

18:41It was a lot of trial and error and a lot of us taking it from crawl, walk, run approach and being very methodical about it. And, you know, the beauty of starting as a direct-to-consumer brand, I still think that's an incredible way to start a business because you have access to all the data. You own your customers in the sense of like the communication on how you can communicate them. You can ask them questions. They can be your biggest advocates. So starting the roots as a direct-to-consumer business had a lot of pluses for us. And then moving slowly into other e-commerce channels like Amazon was a business game-changing for us, first and foremost, because that's where people buy supplements.

19:23It's where people feel comfortable and feel informed when it comes to their quality of reviews, their quality of products. And for us, that existence added that extra touchpoint for us. It made our marketing dollars go further. It made kind of everything start working in that flywheel. And that next phase of retail, once we had kind of a big DTC business or e-commerce business where we kind of like had this engine working on social media marketing, we had the foothold in Amazon and started gaining ranking and started accomplishing those number one slots on a lot of our products. then we felt it was time to go retail.

20:01We had retailers knocking on our door for I think three years before we actually said yes, right? A lot of people kind of jump at it and are very excited by it but our fear was we never wanted one product alone on a shelf with no support. So we waited until we had enough hero SKUs to command a brand block and a presence that would stop someone in store even if they've never heard about us. Hopefully they have but if they haven't, stop them in store with a brand block and tell a clear story versus maybe our first product flow alone on a shelf. We don't think that would have been successful, even if it was a big product online.

20:35So come 2022, 2023, when we felt like we were ready for it, it was finding the right partner for us that our first retail partner was Target. And having someone and a partner that believes in your mission, that's going to give you the space, that's going to give you space to educate a consumer for the first time on, you know, first that you know they never had a vaginal probiotic or a menopause product in in that category or in that aisle um and they gave us the space and again it was crawl walk run we started with 200 doors right they were like they offered more we said 200 like crawl walk run learn the business um and then eventually yeah we expanded nationwide we launched in walmart which has been an incredible partner um and more to come because i think when you have that flywheel of all three and you take your time to build the retail Amazon D2C flywheel, it really works.

21:24And it fundamentally changed our profitability of the business because it makes your dollars go further if you have that extra sales point, extra touch point for consumers to buy you.

21:35Kara Goldin:I totally, totally agree. So what was the number of SKUs that you believed that you needed to launch with in stores? And I loved how you explained that because I totally agree. When we launched in Target as well, I mean, we really believed that we had to, in our case, I guess it was when we launched with three SKUs initially in Target many, many years ago, we really saw, you know, pretty good numbers. but when we ended up launching with five SKUs, it was dramatically different. And we had to, in order to get to five SKUs, we had to be able to show, you know, velocity and, you know, same store sales and how, you know, we compared in the category and all of those things.

22:30Kara Goldin:But for those who aren't familiar with that concept, I'd love to have you unpack that a little bit more, how you guys thought about it. Yeah, it was, it's, the expansion to retail has been so exciting. And I think for us, this idea of commanding a presence is something we thought a lot about. And when you're going to retail, also the data for the first time ever versus an e-com brand that's very, very private is very public. And people can see how well you're doing, right? You have hurdle rates, which is kind of like the level that you have to reach per how many units you sell, how many dollars you sell per week are very real, right?

23:10You have these real, you know, you don't have as much flexibility because they're on different buying cycles. So for us, we entered Target with six SKUs. They gave us the opportunity of waiting long enough to be a big enough brand on e-commerce that we actually got to launch on NCAP, which was really cool. only in 200 doors. But we got this opportunity to share the story, have our logo big, actually offer more education on what these products actually do. So when it goes in aisle a couple months later, that consumers have warmed up a little bit. So that's kind of our thesis was six SKUs is how we launched.

23:40NCAP was really important to us. And then broader expansion, try to keep all those SKUs together, right? We like the SKUs together. So it commands a presence when you're walking into the store. In some categories, when we've had to be split up, right, if some of our SKUs are in the digestive aisle, some of them are in the intimate aisle, we always set a rule of kind of minimum three. So we love five together, but we never want a product alone on a shelf. We wanted at least three. So it commands a little bit more horizontal space to take it up. And we see they lift up each other because in most companies, you kind of have your hero SKU.

24:14And when our hero SKU, which is our vaginal probiotic is next to other SKUs, it lifts all tides. So for us, like brand blocks are really important. Having at least three, ideally five together. And then where you can partnering with retailers, maybe it's getting an exclusive deal, something like that to get an end cap to introduce that consumer, that guest to your product for the first time in that retailer is mission critical. Like we waited until we could do that. And I advise other companies that I love working with, you know, There's no rush. You got one chance. Take your time when you show up, show up right.