Sakara Life’s Newest Supplement Fights Against The “Mass Extinction Of Microbes” In Our Guts

Just like a diverse set of microbes is essential for gut health, a diverse set of business drivers is essential for company health. Sakara Life is trying to foster health on both fronts with Fiber Super Powder, its newest product with a starting price of $40 for a 28-servings pouch containing a blend of 10 prebiotic fruit and vegetable fibers and 10 digestive enzyme fibers.

The powder is pushing Sakara further into the supplements arena, giving people an avenue to enter the brand other than its nutrition meal programs that can cost them several hundreds to thousands of dollars. Other Sakara products outside of its nutrition meal programs include Complete Probiotic Formula, The Foundation, The Foundation: Prenatal, Beauty Water Drops and Detox Water Drops.

Danielle DuBoise, who founded Sakara in 2012 with Whitney Tingle, says, “Not everyone wants to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner with us. So, what are the things where we can say, OK, this will still impact your health, this will still have a monumental impact on how you feel, and also you can do it every single day, and it’s easier than doing breakfast, lunch and dinner?”

Sakara’s combination of nutrition meal programs and supplements helped put it on track to reaching $150 million in revenues last year, according to industry sources cited by the publication Women’s Wear Daily. Earlier this year, Sakara, which has raised roughly $20 million in funding, brought on board Henry Davis, former president and COO at Glossier and co-founder of Chord Commerce, as CEO to oversee its next chapter. DuBoise and Tingle remain active at the brand in founder and executive chair capacities.

Beauty Independent caught up with DuBoise, Tingle and Davis to discuss Fiber Super Powder, the power of supplements in Sakara’s product portfolio, the impact of GLP-1 drugs on its business, opportunities for retailers interested in leveling up their wellness assortments and the post-Girlboss era for female founders.

How do you think about developing new products, and why do Fiber Super Power now?

DuBoise: As we think about the future of Sakara and our mission, which is really to give as many as people as possible the tools to own and transform their health, we thought, what can have a real impact on people’s lives and gut health? We narrowed in on fiber. We know from hundreds of thousands of studies that the gut really is the epicenter of health. There was a study by the American Gut Project, the biggest study to date on the gut, that showed people that had the healthiest guts had the most diverse strains of bacteria in their gut.

The No. 1 way to do that they showed was by getting a variety of fruits, vegetables, whole grains and plants into your diet every single day every single week. They found that the minimum amount of plants you should get in every week was 30. Most people are getting half of that. At Sakara, you get upwards of 175 different ingredients with us every single week.

We’re creatures of habit, myself included. If I don’t have Sakara delivered to me, I’m eating the same things over and over that I know how to cook or that are easy for me to grab. So, it’s hard to get variety. The fibers in our fiber powder come from 10 different sources. When you look at across the fiber market, psyllium husk is usually what people get.

I don’t think how we think about launches has changed that much. When we started, we didn’t have a marketing budget. It sounds like this quaint cute story that we started with $700, but it’s actually the truth. We didn’t come for money. We didn’t raise money. We really started because we knew that we were onto something. Eating this way transformed our lives.

So, a new product just meant something that had an impact on my and Whitney’s lives, and we heard from our customers because we were also the customer service people about what they wanted and what would make their lives more convenient.

Davis: That’s very much still the DNA of a launch today. We hear from our customers a lot. Obviously, there are more channels to hear from customers now than there were 10 years ago. We also still as a team talk about what’s happening in the nutritional world and product development world and what we can do to bridge gaps so, when we have a product, we know that that’s something that people need and want.

They’ll have different degrees of educational necessity. Sometimes people know exactly what it is that they want and need. Sometimes they have a problem, not a solution, so will work out how to talk to them. That’s all very community driven. The fun bit at the end is how we make great creative that supports the positioning of this product in the market and feels like it could be from another industry, but still selling products that make people feel better.

What role do you as founders play in the company today?

Tingle: We brought in Henry to succeed us as CEO of the company. He’s this amazing balance of an incredible operator, but he’s had a background in investing and direct-to-consumer being at a client-centric business previously at Glossier, where he was in conversation with the consumer the same way he is at Sakara. Being a direct-to-consumer brand, we’re able to have that close relationship with our consumers, hear about their needs and be able to use that information to create products.

So, it made a lot of sense to bring him in. He is an incredible visionary and creative as well. It allows us to lead the mission. There are still so many people out there that don’t know the importance of your nutrition and the food that you put into your body or that there’s multiple types of fibers and which ones are the right ones for you to be consuming.

How much of Sakara’s business is split between its different offerings?  

Davis: Nutrition is the majority of our revenue, and we have a significant and growing part of the business that is focused around the supplement products we have launched. Fiber obviously speaks to that. We want to make sure that people are getting all of the nutrients that they are not always getting in their diets.

We know that eating Sakara will do that for you, but there are a variety of reasons why people can’t eat Sakara as much as we would like. Very much part of the strategy going forward is, how do we get more of the benefits of Sakara to more people?

Our core way will always be eating with us. We can give you hundreds of ingredients a week that you could not get if you source them yourself, but we can also make sure that there are other formats to get things to people in other ways. When I came on, it was very clear to me we had a phenomenal brand with a phenomenal mission. It gives us permission to push a little bit harder into areas where we can offer more things to more people.

DuBoise: I would just add you’re supposed to get at least 28 grams of fiber every single day, and most people are getting under 15. If you study functional medicine, it’s upwards of 35 to 50 grams of fiber. We are really in this fiber epidemic. If you think about fiber as the food for our microbes, we are literally starving out microbes. There’s this mass extinction happening of our microbes, and we don’t even know what they do for us.

Our powder is six grams of fiber, and if you think about most people getting 15 or less, that added six grams is really significant to get you closer to that 25 and hopefully even closer to that 50.

Through supplements like Fiber Super Power, are you bringing in a different kind of customer?

Davis: We see a variety of different behaviors with Sakara, let alone the psychographics and demographics. There’s a myriad of those as well, but the behaviors are really interesting. People are starting to work out how this can fit into their life and how they can get the benefits in ways that really suit them. Our job as a brand and particularly a brand that prides itself on understanding the needs of its customers is to make sure we’re responding to those.

We have customers who will eat Sakara 52 weeks a year or nearly. We have customers that will come and do one week a year or four weeks a year, but split over the year and have supplements in the middle. So, how can we make sure that we’re responding with offerings that suit them and offering things that if, you’re only using one week a year, we can still make sure you’re getting some core nutrients in other ways?

DuBoise: At its price point, Fiber Super Powder is much more accessible to a wider audience, and it gives them the opportunity to gain some of the benefits that they would from our Sakara program and integrate that into their daily life.

It feels like all the talk right now is about return customers and repurchase behavior. Are Sakara customers coming back for supplements. How do you keep people taking them?

Davis: We have an incredibly loyal base of customers. The vast majority of our revenue comes from repeat customers. When people use Sakara regularly for any period of time, they notice the difference. It is something that really does change your life, and it is something that people feel very strongly about.

Products like this we find can be strong add-ons for people who are like, I’m doing the right thing, I feel really healthy, how can I go a step further? And they can be really nice ways to get people back into a groove if they haven’t been for a while. We see a lot of past customers coming back with these new products, and they’re nice shiny things to push the brand out there.

The packaging on this one, for example, is really beautiful. It gets Sakara as a brand out there, shows what we’re about, shows that we’re trying to help your wellness and digestive health. These are all things that we want you to know us for and that can lead to a pathway for a deeper relationship.

Where are you finding opportunities for Sakara to show up, whether it’s in on a digital platform or in a physical environment?

Davis: Digital channels are very competitive at the moment. Where we find the most success is in our proprietary ambassador program. When you’re in a big marketplace for attention, it’s very hard for anyone to find attention, and we do quite well.

We have a good story to tell, but where it’s most interesting is things that we own, stories that we can tell directly, people that can speak authentically to Sakara and their love of the brand. That is where we are most excited, where we see the most traction and most growth opportunity.

Sakara has gone into beauty and was previously at Sephora. What’s been your experience in beauty?

Davis: This is not the hottest take ever, but these categories are all collapsing in on each other to a certain extent. So, wellness and beauty for a long time have been collapsing in on each other, but there isn’t a Sephora for supplements and health in the way that there probably should be. What you see in some of the beauty retailers is adjacent supplements. So, in the hair section at Sephora these days, Nutrafol is there, you’ve got Vegamour, you’ve got interesting supplement-topical crossovers.

We know that people shopping for beauty are shopping for beauty outcomes. People shopping for supplements are not necessarily shopping for beauty outcomes. That’s an interesting learning for us, but we do think that there is a tremendous opportunity to treat the intake of supplements and nutrition, whether it’s our food or something like fiber, with the ritual of a beauty customer. It doesn’t need to be supplements buried in the drawer of shame or food as something you don’t think about as part of your health or wellness or beauty routine. We are really trying to change that conversation.

DuBoise: We’re in beauty as deep as we’ve always been. There’s a direct gut-skin access. Brand wise, what Whitney and I recognized really early on was eating well is not just about feeling good, it’s also about looking good, and you don’t have to choose between taking care of yourself and looking good. They come from the same place. That’s really one of the anchors in our brand.

Tingle: My personal story is I suffered from cystic acne for over a decade of my life. I tried everything out there, antibiotics, Accutane, you name it. It didn’t work, and it was because I didn’t have a skin problem, I had a gut problem. So, for me, even this fiber powder coming out, this launch is a beauty product, and it’s going to fit into my beauty routine, making sure I take care of my gut so that I can take care my skin.

Retailers are entering wellness because it’s a multitrillion-dollar industry, but they’ve encountered challenges trying to win in wellness. How do you advise them to do it better?

DuBoise: Retailers, you need a new aisle. When you think about the supplement aisle, you’re going for allergies, you’re going because you have a cold, you’re going because of multivitamin. None of that is anything about wellness or vanity. Then, when you go to the food aisle, it might say Heart Health Association-approved, but you’re not really going into the food aisle and feeling inspired that you’re taking care of yourself.

We’re going to need to have some kind of brand new aisle, which I think Sephora really tried to do, but I think it may start in a place that’s more food-anchored where people are already going. All the time, people are asking me, “How is it that little microbes in my gut connect to my skin?” One of the reasons I love fiber is because I think people can really understand what it does. So, I think starting in the beauty aisle, it’s a steeper climb.

Tingle: I love that idea, Danielle. I think it’s a real opportunity for retailers. I think it will take a few of the big brands making the leap in partnership with a retailer in order to bring the other ones.

Davis: If you walk down the supplements aisle, I think the brands are pretty uninspiring. Retailers can only merchandise what they’ve got to merchandise. So, how do you make things that are inspiring on the inside of the bottle and the outside of the bottle in a way where customers want to take them?

I think you’ve seen that kind of innovation in beauty over the last 15 years. You have not seen it so much in this space. I think there’s a real opportunity for people to make better things and really inspire people. How do we inspire you to look after yourself? Not just Sakara, lots of brands should be trying to do this and that will force the hand of the retailers.

How can an executive work best with founders who were the creative vision behind a brand to take that brand to the next level?

Davis: The No. 1 thing is to really get to know the founders that you’re going to work with and make good decisions. I am very lucky I get to work with two phenomenally talented, visionary and kind people who are mission driven and want to do amazing things and help as many people as possible. We were aligned from the get-go. Bringing a partner on like me helps them further their outcomes.

We spent enough time together and went through enough conversations and getting to know each other that the trust was there. We understood everyone’s ambitions, goals and values, and it felt right. From a hired executive point of view, spend time and make sure you’re clear on what it is the founders want and that that’s what you can deliver.

GLP-1 drugs are obviously a huge trend. How do you think they will impact your business?

DuBoise: Fiber is a GLP-1 promoter, so we’re on trend there. Our hypothesis is that people want to be in the driver’s seat of their health, how they look and how they feel. There is a huge opportunity to help people understand through products like fiber how much you can control the volume of your health with these daily decisions. They want to feel a transformation, and they want to know that they can control the volume of that change.

Tingle: I would add that our nutrition programs are a great companion to a GLP-1. If you don’t change the way that you eat while taking one of those drugs, then as soon as you get off, you’re just going to go back to the way that things were and gain the weight back. By eating healthier foods while you have that support from the drug, then you can make better changes.

I saw something come out the other day about how, with the release of these GLP-1 drugs, people are eating more fruits and vegetables. I think that they’re just going to help continue to lead people in this direction towards wanting to eat and live a healthier lifestyle.

In the post-Girlboss era, what are expectations for female founders today or what do you want them to be?

Davis: There needs to be a real change in attitude towards female founders. I think some of the things that female founders have had to go through—and that starts in fundraising and in the press as well—have not been fair.

You talked about the Girlboss era, but there was no Boyboss era. I mean that in terms of the takedowns. There was a lot of stuff written that reveled in people’s difficulties in starting businesses, which is an incredibly hard thing to do and requires a lot of bravery. I really hope that that era is very much behind us and we’re in a new one where it’s more supportive of people taking a risk and starting a company.

DuBoise: When we announced that Henry was becoming CEO, we were very careful to speak to, we’re not stepping down, we’re stepping up. One of our advisors a long time ago said, “Know what you’re good at and spend most of your day doing that.”

There’s no playbook for building a company from $0 to a nine-figure business. We learned a lot. We’re very proud of what Sakara is today and also can recognize what we’re really good at is inspiring people to take care of themselves, to educate them on how and why. We got to a point where that was none of our day as we were managing such a big business.

So, we feel like we’re stepping up into what we are fundamentally very good at, and it doesn’t mean that we’re stepping away from something we’re bad at. We did it for 13 years, and now we found a partner and someone we trust who’s going to go do what he’s really good at, which allows us to do what we’re really good at.

I think a lot of female founders are scared to make decisions like this because the press will take them down or they don’t know if they can ever hand it over. As Henry said, there is more of a magnifying glass on female founders and those decisions than there is on our male counterparts.