"Taking a proactive approach": O Positiv co-founder on new skin supplement, ingestible beauty

How would you define ingestible beauty within your company?

We're new to ingestible beauty. Coming off of our first product, Flo, which was a vitamin for PMS and menstrual health, we were really excited because one of the biggest reasons people took Flo was for skin health. 

A lot of our customers suffer from hormonal acne, we wanted to really double down on that. We came about it in a roundabout way, because we saw people were taking care of their acne, not with topicals but by taking Flo.

Coming off of listening to our customers, seeing how they approached their hormone health … ingestible beauty to me is something that's taking a proactive approach, instead of a reactive approach.

A lot of times topicals are reactive and once you have the issue, once you've noticed wrinkles and that your skin is dry, you put this on, when Retro is the approach of taking something every day and helping your body naturally produce collagen, instead of taking collagen.

What has been your company's approach to introducing that concept to new consumers? 

Education takes such a big role in our company in general. You make these big claims and you're excited, but customers are like, “hey, prove that to me.” 

One of the main ingredients in our product, which is astaxanthin, is from a type of algae. We've partnered with Astareal which has clinically studied this exact strain of astaxanthin and we needed to first educate ourselves on it. We designed our customer experience around educating consumers.

Content plays such a huge role in Flo’s strategy and is going to play a huge role in Retro’s strategy of (introducing astaxanthin and its benefits). I think it's about breaking down the idea that you're limited to moisturizer, retinal, sunscreen.

Yes, all those things are wonderful, you should be doing that in conjunction, but there are also things going on inside your body that people don’t really address. It's an amazing new frontier that Retro is going to have a big hand in, but there's no doubt it's going to take education.

How have your consumers responded to this product so far?

We split the customer segments into three groups. We know our Flo customers and O Positiv customers. We launched it to them and they were so excited.

The other segment was young women who are interested in beauty, interested in fighting the aging process early, whose beauty routine is not makeup focused, but it's skin health focus. 

That group we talked to was very different from our third group, which is a group of older women looking for something to make them feel youthful. This Retro vitamin will help retroact things like sun damage.

The response across those groups has been wonderful. 

Outside of sales, how are you going to measure success in the ingestible beauty market?

It's just market share are awareness for this product. I think it’s really just about getting recognition from the skincare and beauty community. 

I am very supportive of other companies doing this because I really think is the future. I'm excited to see what other companies come up with, how they actually build products around supporting the longevity of beauty, your skin and your health from the inside. 

But it's really looking at our customers and getting feedback from them. We hold our customer feedback and the reviews that we get on our product as sacred. We're looking to constantly evolve. Right now, in the early days, we have our ear to the ground.

As much as we're educating consumers on the product, they’re educating us on how we can make it better. Then step two is getting this recognition in the beauty community.

What do beauty industry professionals need to know about this ingestible space and companies like yours that are trying to break into it?

What people need to focus on is the efficaciousness of ingredients and making sure that what's in it really has the clinically studied ingredients in it that can follow through. 

The idea of it being proactive versus reactive is really important. We recommend people take Retro for two months to see the full effects. Yes, that's true with some wrinkle creams and things like that in the beauty industry, but when it comes to topical beauty people look for more instant results. 

I still think there's a lot of education that needs to be done. Being really transparent on how to measure results, when to see results and what they should expect is really crucial.