Vestiage plans to formulate and acquire its way to top of anti-aging game
Kimball delved into his circle of contacts developed over a career in finance to put together an executive team who all agreed to put in sweat equity to launch the company, which recently went public. And he formed a strong cadre of industry partners, including Robinson Pharma on the formulation and production side, NutraGenesis in supply and Ingredient Identity in testing and validation, to bring out the company’s first anti-aging product under the Monterey Bay Nutraceuticals brand name.
Integrity as an asset
Kimball said he wasn’t interested in half measures, either in the exectives he recruited or in the formulation of the company’s nutraceutical and cosmeceutical products. After a stint on Wall Street, Kimball said he was involved in the financing of some early stage health product companies. That experience instilled some strong beliefs about the industry, he said.
“I didn’t want to be some lotion and potion guy. I didn’t want to be someone who put out something that had 5% or 10% of some active and then put a really strong marketing spin around it. That’s not the integrity that I wanted our company to have,” he said.
Kimball's management team includes executives from companies like Nike and Annie's Naturals. The company is launching with three brands that address energy, mood, stress, weight management, skin elasticity which are named Calm and Collected, Trim and Energized, and Super Soft Skin!.
The Calm and Collected product features NutraGenesis’s ashwagandha root and leaf extract, maitake, sea buckthorn and astaxanthin. The Trim and Energized product includes green coffee bean extract, rhodiola, raspberry ketone, sea buckthorn oil, lichi fruit extract and astaxanthin. Super Soft Skin features Nutrageneisis’s Sendara, a pantented combination of ashwaganda and amla, as well as some of the ingredients common to the other products. All of the products are formulated as one-a-day soft gels.
Putting formulation first
Kimball said the team gave its formulation partners this mandate: Make the best product you can, and let us worry about the retail price. The result, he said, are superior formulations aimed at a top shelf anti aging consumer.
“We want products that are elegantly formulated that have the concentrations that match up to the clinicals,” Kimball said. “We know the premium anti aging consumer better than anyone else. It’s expensive to do what we do at Monterey Bay.
“I don’t ever want to be on the shelf at $9.99 competing for that shelf space,” he said.
Acquisition strategy
In addition to developing its own line of products, which the company plans to release into distribution in the next few weeks, Vestiage is actively interested in acquiring more lines, Kimball said. The company’s launch products, which include the Reluma line of topicals based on human stem cell technology, are aimed at women, and the goal is to expand upon that.
“We know how to do mergers and acquisitions. We know how to acquire companies. We are definitely looking to acquire a male-oriented anti aging line. That should occur within the next quarter,” Kimball said.
“We are a brand manager that has the ability to provide a lot of great brands that need to be part of a bigger organization.”
Kimball spent his brief minor league career behind the plate. Catchers are often solid, fullback-type wide bodies who anchor the team, and as such are rarely the marquee names. But that’s not the kind of company Kimball says he’s building.
“We are a premium and prestige brand. We are a platform that is built for speed,” he said.
