Vestiage hires direct-media partner with history of building brands
Vestiage CEO Scott Kimball said ROI was chosen because of its strong track record in building brands. The campaign will start with one product and one mode—radio.
“ROI Media is the firm that started brands like eHarmony, Life Lock and Legal Zoom and and they started them exactly the same way they are starting us. They started with radio because it’s cheap and you can refine exactly what the message needs to be,” Kimball told NutraIngredients-USA.
Acquisition and partnering strategy
Since its inception, Vestiage has pursued a strategy of choosing top-of-shelf partners and acquiring anti-aging existing brands, like the Reluma line of topical products and the Regimen line of men's anti-aging supplements. The company also works closely with other 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. The first batches of Monterey Bay products is in production at Robinson’s Southern California plant, Kimball said.
Kimball said ROI Media has had experience with nutraceutical brands and is skilled at staying in compliance with federal rules about claims language.
“They know what they are doing and they know what they can and can’t say about these things,” he said.
Vestiage has been built around a health aging strategy, Kimball said. And the partnership with ROI is built around that premise, starting out with just one product, a Regimen testosterone-support supplement.
“Everyone in the world is going after the 25-year-old guy with their advertising dollars and they are doing it with pictures of him with his ripped abs. I look in the mirror and I look at the guys in the gym, and they are 50-year-old men who don’t have a shot at becoming the ripped abs guy,” Kimball said.
“We just want to continue to be able to play tennis, or whatever else we are doing. I think there is a huge market for that.”
Marketing inertia
Kimball said that even though barriers to entry in the dietary supplement business might be low as far as setting up shop and getting a product produced by a contract manufacturer are concerned, there are some hard lessons to be learned when it comes to marketing that product. Unless a company is fortunate enough to bring out the rare product that seems to take off on its own, there is significant capital outlay involved in building up marketing momentum and showing major retailers—the GNCs of the world—that your product is worth their time.
“Unless you have $2 million in cash sitting in a checking account, don’t do it. That’s the bare minimum it will take to get something from zero to something close to the speed limit,” Kimball said.
“Nobody shows you any love when you are early on. You pay cash for just about everything.”
