Fabian Geyrhalter:
Welcome to the show, Kat.

Katerina Schneider:
Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s such a pleasure to have you. We’re recording this on a Friday afternoon in the summer, so I’m really, really happy that you were able to make the time. Listen, you’re the founder and CEO of Ritual where you set new standards in the supplement industry through traceable science and traceable sourcing. Many of my listeners are very familiar with your brand. They have seen it. They have used it. You’ve been around for a while now, but maybe not so much of your story. So you launched Ritual 10 years ago about back then you were pregnant and you launched Ritual because you couldn’t find a supplement brand that you could trust. So you did what one has to do and you decided to build your own, which in my opinion is how most great D two C companies are started a real personal need that you don’t see being met in the marketplace and you just jump at it. But you were pregnant and you still said, you know what? I’m passionate enough, I’m driven enough to actually not put this on the back burner. Take us back a little bit to that time of your life and why you decided that this is important enough for you to actually push through.

Katerina Schneider:
Yeah, exactly. I was four months pregnant when I started Ritual. I was working in venture capital, investing in startups, running a fund for Troy Carter at the time, who had invested in over 70 companies, everything from Uber, Dropbox, Warby Parkers, Spotify, and I started taking prenatal vitamins for my pregnancy and realized that there was really no brand that I trusted where I knew where the ingredients were coming from, and I knew that it was backed by science. And so something I couldn’t stop thinking about. And I knew that women deserved better, especially during this life stage, during one of the most vulnerable stages of their lives. And that’s what propelled me to drop everything, quit my job while I was building a family and really not just launch a brand that was setting a new standard in the supplement industry, but really setting a new standard in women’s health through traceability, through traceable science and traceable sourcing. So everyone knew where their ingredients were coming from and why they were there. We invested in human clinical studies, which we’re committed to by 2030 on every single one of our products. And we now have the number one prenatal vitamin in the US and the only leading one backed by a human clinical study. But like I said, we’re building more than just a pregnancy and reproductive health brand. We’re really setting a new standard when it comes to women’s health and building the leading platform there.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s remarkable. And you created your own standards. You’re not following anyone else. It’s a little bit like Evelyn created in its own way of rating fashion factories for accountability, and you call your standards the mate traceable standards. Tell us about why you took it to that level of accountability when no one asked you to do it, and how you see that amount of earned trust from your customers in return add to the growth of your brand.

Katerina Schneider:
So traceability is just the core of the brand, and it’s not just providing the information, but providing information so our customer can make really informed decisions about their health and feel really confident. And we’re actually showing the proof behind all of the decisions that we’ve made as a company, as it to traceable science and traceable sourcing. Those are the two key areas where traceability for us is really important. I’m going to back up a little bit. The supplement industry has exploded over the last 30 years. It’s gone from 9,000 to over a hundred thousand supplements without any major updates to regulations. So our consumer who we call the chief health officer, she’s the one that’s actually making all the purchasing decisions for a whole household and she walks through the supplement aisle similar to what I did when I was pregnant and has to decide for herself, is this safe?
Is it going to hurt me? Is it effective? Does it work? And we just simply felt even since the beginning for me that that’s not something that anyone has to ask themselves. No one has to become their own federal agency. So how we address the safety and efficacy issues in the Kategory are through traceability of science, showing the efficacy of our products through things like clinical studies and the traceability of sourcing, which is where we show certifiKations, testing, and even all the way down to this level of detail where we show the loKation, the final destination of manufacturing and even the supplier behind all of our ingredients. So I think when you think about what we’ve done, it’s truly groundbreaking. We weren’t looking at anything anyone else was doing in our Kategory. We just decided to do what’s right. And I think that’s actually led to kind of a quite compliKated brand and brand story in a lot of ways because it’s not one thing, it’s several things.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
So many things to dive deeper into here. Amazing. I mean, first of all, it makes so much sense that you did it because your problem was not solved in the marketplace. You did not understand the marketplace, you didn’t come from the health sector, you didn’t come from the vitamin or supplement sector. So it made sense for you to just look at everything new afresh. I just absolutely love the idea that you give your customers the title chief health officers, that that’s who she is and we need to listen to her. Do you have a group of customers that you bring in or do you have surveys or how do you actually listen or do you just make the decisions based on you having been your first best customer back when you were pregnant and going back to what would I have felt safe with? And now in this new scenario, whatever the next supplement is that you launch, does it just go back to you questioning it or do you go further and actually ask others? How does that work?

Katerina Schneider:
It’s a little bit of art and science I would say. Yeah, that’s everything. And as the brand is a little bit of, I would say half and half of both, I think for the initial idea, this was a problem that I had as a founder and as a future new mother, someone that was pregnant, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was keeping me up at night. Why are there no brands that I trust or connect with in this Kategory? Like you said, almost 10 years ago, everything, there were really no D to C brands in the space, digitally native brands, and that was definitely more art than science. But as far as surveys and customer insights go now as we’ve evolved as a brand, we’re incredibly fortunate I would say, because we started a brand as a digital native brand. So we built this subscription only in the beginning platform with hundreds of thousands of active subscribers that we could easily tap into at any moment and survey them, ask them feedback on the brand, but also what they wanted to see next from us and what they wanted us to even how we wanted to evolve products as we launched them.
And so that’s where the science came in. I would say on the customer side, a good example of this was we started our brand with a multi only. We actually didn’t launch the company with a prenatal vitamin. I think that a lot of people know that, but we only had a multi for women, 18 plus for two years. And a big reason for that was I was afraid to sell prenatal vitamins on the internet as a first product. Of course,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Of course. Yeah, it makes tons of sense.

Katerina Schneider:
And I wanted to earn her trust. And the way we did that was put a stake in the ground through this multi, which now has a clinical study as USP verified, which less than 1% of supplement companies has a patent on the delivery technology. It was like every check mark was there. Then two years in, we had all these customers that were saying, Hey, we would love for you to launch a prenatal. And so we put it out. But we had an interesting evolution product wise as a company. But just going back to the customer side, as we were looking to expand beyond multivitamins, we asked our customers, what did you want to? Hundreds of thousands of them who were very active, everything from quantitative and qualitative interviews, what do you want to see next from us? And it was a resounding conversation around gut health and microbiome, mostly focused on digestive health. And so we launched that really helped us launch our probiotic product, which is a pre-pro post biotic in one. And that product did over 30 million of sales in the first year, which is pretty significant. And I would attribute that to really deeply listening to this active consumer base that we have.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s amazing. And especially because you hinted at the beginning how much the supplement space grew just even not only in the last 30 years, but even since you started, the whole gut health space just became a huge thing in the last, I don’t know, eight or five years. It’s amazing how you launch it to such great success. That’s really cool.

Katerina Schneider:
Definitely. I do think there was probably even, I don’t know the numbers off the top of my head, but the acceleration even in the last few years has been astounding. I think it’s never been easier to launch products and brands and not just this Kategory but all Kategories. But yeah, it’s a lot harder to make them stand for something.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It makes me wonder because the supplement industry obviously is extremely opaque and it must be easy to launch just generics, I’m pretty sure. But you became a certified B Corp as well, and that must be so hard to get that stamp of approval in your space. Was it difficult or are there a lot others that are certified B Corp in the supplement space?

Katerina Schneider:
There are not a lot of others. It definitely was exciting for us because it was just a reflection of us aligning people, planet profits, which was kind of the ultimate reflection of where I wanted the brand to go. Since day one. We always talk about this kind of takes a back burner to other messaging, but internally we really do focus on sustainability and environmental impact as a brand. We started the company, all of our products are vegan or clean label project certified. And what we saw was our industry had really been asleep at the wheel of one of the biggest impacts to our health really of all time, which is climate change. It’s like we care about our health, we’re putting health products out, but then we don’t actually care about the broader impacts of the environment and our impacts as companies. So we had a commitment to be net zero by 2030, and we took the environmental impact work just as seriously as we did our clinical studies and some of the science and mapped it out with leaders and thought leaders in the space. And I’m really excited, we haven’t announced this yet, but we will that our B Corp scores way over a hundred, which is even amongst the peers that do have B Corp scores, ours is one of the highest. And I think it’s really a reflection of what we’re doing, I think across sustainability, what we’re doing across how we measure traceability, the key word inside out outside in, and that that’s also reflective of how we lead the team and our culture.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Tremendous. And I mean talking from the insight out on a less deep and strategic level, but more from your design, your brand design, the UI ux design, the photography, the copy, it is just all so gorgeous. Was that always important to you? And how did you overcome that awkward phase in the beginning where you most probably had those ambitions to really shine with brand, but perhaps you didn’t have the means to make them a reality that you have today? Was there a weird phase where you had ambitions and you couldn’t make it happen, but today you have it all in one place and you know that everything is perfectly connected? How did you build that brand?

Katerina Schneider:
Yeah, so that’s definitely a passion of mine. Creative is something that I think has been, and those that are listening that know the brand has been pretty consistent since our long. That is just because for me, it was really important that visually and every inch of the brand reflected those standards that we had in our physical product. So just kind of going back when I raised our first round of venture funding, went to a well-known creative studio agency that designed a lot of well-known D two C brands and they created our first brand identity. But when I looked at it, it felt very luxury. It felt inaccessible. It doesn’t look like the brand does today. And I definitely had a little soul searching to do because I did spend a lot of money on that as out of our first pool of money. And I actually decided to scrap it.
And that was a bold move. It didn’t make me feel anything. And I think what I did next is I went to these two women who were so talented and we spoke about the vision and the idea of something pulling you in versus pushing science at you, this idea of brightness and transparency visually. And so they show the early designs of what the brand was and ritual, and it made me, I got goosebumps. It made me feel something instantly and I was like, wow, I knew this was going to be something. And everyone that I showed felt the same way. It just really powerful. And so when I look at the brand, like you said today, was it always like this? It actually, I think we’ve elevated it step by step, but it hasn’t been a large incremental, it’s been a progression. And I would say even our website, we made some iterations in the last couple of weeks, but before that, our team was joking that our website looked exactly the same for nine years. I’m like, I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing, but

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s both. Yeah, it’s both. It’s amazing.

Katerina Schneider:
Yeah, but it’s interesting. We did do user testing and people for the old website, which was literally live a week ago. And what we saw was it’s still connected with people in every single way. So we only incrementally really marginally updated some of the ui.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, it’s amazing because obviously it looks tremendous right now and it’s an amazing experience going through it. And I also don’t want to stop at a design because I think that copy is so important, especially for your audience and just a couple of the lines from your site for skeptics by skeptics, our radical idea supplements should work for the real bodybuilders. The future of health is clear. Those quick forward word sentences that are so meaningful and deep as far as how you want to build your brand and what you want to bring across, that kind of stuff is not easy to get to and it’s a delight to read that and to go through the site. But now over to something else, you just did a very different campaign, one featuring fake AI moms and you knew I would bring this up as a brand person because you just posted about this not recently, and you team did this AI mom campaign I think in 24 hours or something. Tell us about that. How did it come about? It’s just a very interesting experiment.

Katerina Schneider:
Yeah, it was something, the team, to be quite honest, we were all nervous about. I think, yeah, we’re like, oh man, people are going to really judge us for this one. I think we have the world’s best creative team in house. And I am not just saying that I truly believe it. Everyone that works on the team, on everything from copy, design, video strategy, brand, they’re so thoughtful because they really deeply care about what we’re doing in the world and the mission. And I think it comes through in the work. I think AI is a tool and it’s a canvas that we’re experimenting with as a company even despite I think great fear. And so we are really close to this agency called Giant Spoon. The founder is a really great friend of mine, actually. It was the first time we went out of house and built a campaign which actually just won a Cleo called Trace, like a mothereffer, I dunno if I can say it fully here, but it was like this unhinged mom energy of just the mom is the one that really goes hard, this chief health officer.
And so we had these big billboards all over cities that said trace like a mother pill covering part of the effort part and a really bold video. And like I said, I just won the Clio. And so they actually, their chief creative and the founder and I have been talking a lot about just kind of pushing the boundaries in our team as well. And when this Google VO tool came out, we’d already been talking so much about this idea of real versus fake, how ritual is the real amongst the sea of fakes. And so when this came out, they brought this idea to us, they’re like, wouldn’t be fun to do this. And we’re like, I was like, oh my God, absolutely. Yes, I want, I want to use, this is such a brilliant way. I think a lot of people are hiding the fact that the AI is fake. And this is, I think one of the only campaigns that I’ve seen were, and really we were one of the first brands to use that was leveraging fake AI moms, but not hiding it, actually saying it upfront. And then we kept all the weird funky captions that AI generates to even I

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Saw that too. That was hilarious. I mean, not only does she have a tail, but then the captions where he hilarious too, which is great.

Katerina Schneider:
And it still has that unhinged mom energy from the previous campaign, but it’s really leaning into the fakeness of AI while still bringing in these universal truths of motherhood.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s hilarious. It’s really hilarious. Well, talking about going against the grain, did you ever go against your early customer data or customer sentiments and did a totally gutsy move that was solely based on instinct where you’re like, well, customers tell us this data tells us this, the industry tells us this, but we really want to experiment in this direction. We want to go the totally other way. Was there ever anything like that?

Katerina Schneider:
There’s always something like that. I think that’s how I’m naturally wired and very contrarian. I think our early investors were a founders fund and I think are incredibly contrarian, which is why we got along when I was serving our customer or food customer base when I was launching the company, like gummy vitamins for instance were just so hot. That was the thing. Everyone wanted gummy, everyone wanted to eat their vitamins, blah, blah, blah. And we launched a capsule product which was like, I don’t even know if it was declining or whatever, but it wasn’t something that no one said, Hey, I want a new capsule multivitamin that’s going to be twice as expensive as the next product. So it was completely against I think what consumers were saying, but what they did care about was transparency. They cared about knowing where their ingredients were coming from, they cared about science.
And so it’s almost like that surpassed some of the other things. And we’ve become really known for a lot of our capsule technology. We have six patents right now on our capsule technology, which is like, yeah, we’re not just going to a manufacturer and we’re like, here, create this, or you tell us what we should create. We have scientists that are looking at the products that we’re creating and we’re saying, what is the best way to deliver this into the body? And it’s oftentimes not a gummy vitamin where we’re seeing data where nine out of 10 melatonin products and gummies for instance, are mislabeled. When we launch our sleep product and we have a clinical study on it as well, we’re looking at releasing how your body releases melatonin throughout the night and mimicking that or stress product, which looks at cortisol, stress hormone results, and everything has a purpose to it. And so the design of the products, they’re not only beautiful visually, they’re clear, but it actually is, it’s almost just as important if not more how these things are getting delivered in the body as it is what’s in them. And that is a new kind of conversation that I don’t think our customer was asking us for. They were asking for, how do I eat my supplements?

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Sure, faster horses don’t give us a car. Exactly. Or whatever the latest trend is. That’s what we want. Absolutely.

Katerina Schneider:
And for me, it’s easy to go against that customer instinct because I know it’s the right thing for their bodies. And that’s kind of what drives me more than following a trend of an ingredient or something. I’m like, oh, I know that if someone wants an edible probiotic, most likely it’ll get destroyed by the stomach acid, but how do we create a way that it releases in the colon, which is the ideal place for the bugs to thrive, and how do we create technology or partner with companies to create technology around that? What’s best for people? It’s hard, I think because you have to find novel ways to market something. It does make it more challenging.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s the harder route to take. But if you’re persistent, then you end up with a brand that stands for what your brand stands for today. And the clear capsules is such an amazing move that must have been so hard to accomplish

Katerina Schneider:
That they’re not clear. But again, they have, it depends on which product, but it is beautiful how that aligned where the product does the talking for a lot of the messaging that we have where we can limit the amount of words that we have. And that’s always been kind of my vision is how do you does form follow function and how do you create something that speaks for what you’re trying to say?

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Amazing. When you look back, can you put your finger on when there was this big breakthrough moment where you felt like, you know what? This is not just an idea or a startup or this is actually there’s momentum. This is going to be a big brand. We’re actually going to take over a good amount of market share. Do you remember a specific moment, because I’m sure there are micro moments every week, but was there one big moment where you’re like, this is it. I think we’re a brand now?

Katerina Schneider:
Yeah, there definitely are micro moments, I think because I 10 years almost in and I’m still the CEO and founder. I like those micro moments. I feel it because I’m so in it, it’s hard for me to sometimes see things as big moments. So

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah, I mean you feed off of those, right? Because if you don’t get those micro moments, I mean as a founder, those are extremely important.

Katerina Schneider:
Yeah, totally. So I’ll tell you what some of those micro moments were that I feel like they kind of ladder up, but the branding, seeing the branding and the emotional resonance that it made me feel was like, oh, this is going to be really big. I was like, wow, this can extend to a lot of things. This brand makes me feel trust and is just really powerful. So that was the big one. I got ritual.com. That was a big early day win for me because I felt like also similar to the product needed to communiKate something, I thought the clean nature of a name and brand was really important. I think once we started getting traction on the multivitamins in two years in and grew the business, I think it was seven figures, two years in, that was a milestone to say, Hey, people trust us for prenatal now.
And then I would say the next one was getting number one status on the prenatal vitamin in the us, which was kind of just a full circle moment for me as someone who started the pregnant, getting full distribution in target and having number one products there was pretty impactful. I think the first a hundred million was really exciting in sales. The next 200 million was really exciting in sales. And I think now with the number one prenatal, I think what gets me excited and I feel like it’s as cheesy as it is, I feel like we’re just getting started, that we really just have this right to dominate when it comes to women’s health at large. If people trust us for pregnancy during the most critical life stage and vulnerable life stage, and we’ve earned their trust there, what else do we have the right to win in? And that gets me really fired up for the future.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, I see some new Kategories coming up. Very good. You heard it here first. Very cool. Now going into the big question of branding, obviously you’ve been mastering this over the years and it is extremely important to you, so important that you actually bought the.com to have that clean word, which is very cool. What does branding mean to you? It’s such a strange word that’s so misunderstood, but what does the idea of branding mean to you?

Katerina Schneider:
Yeah, it is a strange word, and I think we focus on it too much. And as I advise other founders and CEOs who are starting out or in the early stages, I feel like oftentimes they’re so focused on getting that initial logo or the initial site and the way it looks and feels and the language and some handbook ready, but it actually doesn’t really matter. It’s actually how you bring those principles to life through all the different touch points after you’ve been handed a beautiful design. That’s actually the most important thing. And I think that that’s where a lot of, I would say iconic brands or on the way to an iconic brand fail, I would say a lot of brands fail because they just think that’s it. The brand looks beautiful. Some agency or human handed me these amazing assets, but it’s actually what you do with those assets going forward. What does the social look like? What are the touch points that people are seeing every day? And I think that is actually what’s critical, and I think branding today is so different because most people aren’t going to your homepage, they’re interacting with your influencer ad and they’re buying on TikTok shops or through other methods, so they’re never even seeing some of these things that you might think are branding. Right.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
So true, so true. And I know even us, I run a startup brand, a product brand on the side, and sometimes we invest a good chunk of time and money resources into a certain video or certain ad, and then we do something that is completely low budget and it’s just really quick and we just put it online and that’s the thing that goes viral. That’s the thing that suddenly gets thousands or tens of thousands of views. And the other one that’s highly polished, it’s not even performing well. It’s really, it’s like where the customer takes it and it’s usually not the home pitch. It’s not where everything is polished. It’s like a total other places. Sometimes they even surprise us where they come from and they’re not even from our side, right? They’re like a customer generated content that suddenly starts leaving a mark, which is really, really exciting. To get us closer to an end of today’s episode, if you could take your entire ritual brand and you would put it through a funnel and out comes one word that, or two that perfectly describes the essence of your brand, what would it be?

Katerina Schneider:
I’ve said traceability way too many times on this podcast already, even though I was going to go with that one, I’m going to surprise you and not say it. I would say trust our vision is to be the most trusted brand for her health and form lifelong relationships with her. When I think about the currency that I’m trying to build with our consumer, it all comes down to trust, and that is the most valuable thing that we can earn as a brand in this. Bringing it back to the beginning, just crazy evolution of our Kategory

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And trust comes out of traceability and transparency, so that’s where it all comes from. Yeah, no, totally.

Katerina Schneider:
Exactly. That’s a good point, right? Because for our mission is around traceability. It’s made traceable as our mission to provide transparent information, and if we achieve that, then our vision is activated, which is around trust. So trust is everything for us as a brand.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s what bubbles all the way to the top. Exactly. Without that, you’re not in business and you understand that much better than a lot of others in this space. Super, super exciting. What’s going to happen with Ritual in the next six months, 12 months? You already shared with us some of those things. Anything else that you’re excited about, maybe in the very near future about Ritual that you want to share with everyone? Or also where can people find ritual?

Katerina Schneider:
Yeah, I think that’s what I’m really excited about is that we started, and I mentioned this earlier as a.com, ritual.com only subscription brand, but we really evolved in the last few months. You can buy us a la carte on virtual.com or quarterly, and now you can also buy us on Amazon or Target. And then we are launching several other retailers later this year, and it just really meeting our customer exactly where they are. That’s been really exciting and that is actually what I’m most excited about right now.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Very cool. Where can people follow you personally or where can they get to know Ritual more? We know you’ve got the domain.

Katerina Schneider:
Yeah, we’ve got ritual.com, but we also have Ritual on Instagram and that is a great place to follow us. And I think what’s interesting there is I’m so, I’m a little bit more private on my own personal, but I feel like our account really tells not just the brand story, but a lot of the intentionality behind me starting Ritual and how it’s weaved in to the brand. So it’s the perfect place to follow us. I think TikTok as well, and yeah, I’m excited to connect with folks.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Sounds perfect. Listen, Kat, we really appreciate your time. This was such a great episode. Thank you so much for sharing all these insights.

Katerina Schneider:
Thanks so much for having me. This was fun. As I said, the most fun I have today.