Why Care/Of’s $12 Million Investment into Customized Home Delivered Supplements is Relevant for the Natural Health Industry.

First, I love natural health industry. I’m as much of a true fan of ‘my industry’, as someone who is glued to watching sports, and as a die hard fan, I’m telling you, with absolute certainty, that practitioners are no different than barber shops and hair salons in context to their natural product dispensaries. Health practitioners love exclusivity and firmly believe in marking products up 100% +, over the typical retail 55%-65%, merely because ‘patients will trust their recommendations.’ Moreover, they ‘didn’t go to post secondary school for 8+ years so that they can sell the same products at the same prices that natural health retailers provide’. From this standpoint alone, if you’re a natural health product business owner, you should care about Care/Of’s $12 million investment into customized home delivered supplements as if executed properly, can revolutionize how practitioners prescribe and recommend products, taking out a huge chunk out of the pockets of both online and traditional brick and mortar natural health retailers. Customer acquisition loss will be nothing short of epic. In the same way that practitioners built many widespread brands we take for granted today, they can pound them into the ground from which they came, couldn’t they? Well, here’s the thing; professional/private label supplement brands, for the most part (actually, vastly the most part) although WERE better, are most certainly NOT better, not by a long shot. They aren’t better in quality. They aren’t better in efficacy. They aren’t better. Period. That is; professional/private label supplement brands are NOT better to the point where you can’t find comparable or infinitely better at your local natural health retailer, and this holds true for every single revenue driving health category.
Care/Of has an interesting, innovative and exciting potential game changer coming our way with customizable supplements tailored to health care practitioners. What can I tell you? I mean; if Menchies and Chipotle have taught us anything, is that consumer demand is utterly obsessed with customizability. Individualized care expressed within a practitioner’s dispensary? Imagine the possibilities! Revolutionary, right? Well, depends on whether they execute correctly and/or whether the public is ‘supplement savvy’ enough to recognize key quality distinctions over slightly altering dosages of any number of ingredients within a given formula. Giving someone 50mg of B6, or 70 mg of B6, or 73.8mg of B6, or 100mg of B6 because everyone has their own ‘need’ based on their ‘ability to absorb nutrients’ is a bunch of nonsense, as the RDA is only 1.3mg–1.7mg and no practitioner really truly has the ability to assess for individualized ‘absorption’ of any nutrient. Now, do patients/customers care? That remains to be seen.
Those who seek certain quality distinctions over gimmicky ‘creating the need’ type ‘dosage supplement formulas’ won’t buy into it. Those who do not, will. What I know for sure is that innovation is the only way to push the industry forward. Customized natural health products make sense and counts as innovation. Creating an infinite number of useless versions of the same mediocre quality, slightly altered supplement, doesn’t; not by a long shot, in my book. I urge Care/Of and anyone else venturing into this space to seek quality over and above ‘what it says on the box is what you’ll find in the box’, but more importantly, provide a product of substance, vibrancy, that is truly nourishing and healing. Then, they will not only attract those who seek customized health care, but in effect contribute to the creation of high quality, customized health care.
What do you think about customized supplements geared towards practitioners? Is this article too opinionated for you? If not, a heart will let me know that I’m on the right track, speaking from, well, the heart! Much gratitude. Rob