Keeping It In The Family
Rejuvia’s founders are betting that a cross-generational family team and deep medical roots will be a winning combo in CBD
Kristen and RC Williams are co-founders of Rejuvia, a producer of premium hemp and CBD products, as well as related as mother and son. Kristen and RC founded Rejuvia while looking to follow their mutual passion for health and wellness after Kristen sold a successful medical device business and RC pursued his studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Having Rejuvia as a family business means that we can always keep our wellness and healthy living passions at the forefront of our mission.
What inspired you to start Rejuvia? How did you decide to go into business as a mother/son duo?
Kristen: I was inspired to start Rejuvia with RC after selling my medical manufacturing business that I started and ran for over 30 years — an FDA registered, cGMP compliant designer and manufacturer of ophthalmic and anesthesia products.
During my year off after selling, I researched CBD since it was finally gaining acceptance as a viable wellness product. We’ve always been an incredibly health-conscious family, but never had many opportunities to take our passion for wellness to the next level. Everything we do in our family is centered around healthy living and our wellness. While I was researching the hemp and cannabis before it became federally legal, I realized that forming a CBD brand in the future was that next level for us.
When RC was home on winter break in 2018, the Farm Bill was signed and hemp was federally legal. RC’s entrepreneurial spirit and natural marketing skills seemed like the perfect compliment to my business and manufacturing experience. We’ve absolutely loved the challenge of starting a company in such an uncertain market.
We had a lot of bumps in the early stages. Starting partnerships with all of the manufacturers we have now wasn’t easy for us. We would be on the phone nearly all day discussing, strategizing and deciding on how to move forward. Having such a small team can be disadvantageous at times, but we believe it’s the reason why we are gaining traction. Having Rejuvia as a family business means that we can always keep our wellness and healthy living passions at the forefront of our mission.
CBD is obviously hot. The market has gotten big and crowded relatively quickly. How did you think about creating a brand and standing out?
Kristen: Creating a really strong brand was incredibly important for us. We knew that, with how crowded the market is and will become, top of the line branding was essential. We worked with a creative, design, and branding company to help guide us through creating one of the most stylish and sleek brands in the industry.
Originally, we created a lower quality, in-house brand that we figured would help us generate early revenue through quick speed-to-market. It didn’t, and we realized we would have been out of the market within six months if we decided to stick with that approach. We paused everything and took ourselves out of the market.
We realized we needed to build a real, sustainable brand, and that took time, spending six months developing a brand that will last — a brand that will help us compete, alongside our competitive advantages.
We’ve positioned our brand to have an aspirational, comforting tone. All of our products are lifestyle solutions that allow our community to adopt control of their wellness. So, our product imagery and designs are edgy, sleek and attractive — we want to stand out with our eye-popping imagery, vibrant labels and boxes.
How does an uncertain regulatory environment factor in on a company and brand level to Rejuvia’s plans?
RC: Building a product that was sustainable through regulatory changes was one of the most important factors we considered when starting Rejuvia. We were able to see right away that it was an unregulated, uncertain market, which meant that heavy regulations were looming. We didn’t want to be one of the brands that was killed by regulatory change, so we made sure we set everything up in the most sustainable way, from manufacturing partnerships to our verticals to our products.
We started by ensuring that our entire supply chain was, at a minimum, certified cGMP compliant level. Every avenue we decided to pursue had to be compliant with government regulations in every facet.
Because of our experience in medical manufacturing, we knew that to offer the best organic hemp-based CBD products, we needed to find a partner that reflected our own commitments to quality and strict manufacturing compliance. Finding a manufacturing partner that shared our company values was crucial first step for us.
We also needed to start with the best quality hemp and control the entire process from seed to bottle. Complete vertical integration ensures safe, consistent and pure products. We partnered with the most experienced grower and manufacturer of hemp-based phytocannabinoids in the country, allowing us to stand by our product quality and consistency for the long run.
It is expected that the FDA will regulate the ingested products are dietary supplements, and we are already compliant with current and future regulations. We’ve also taken great measures to ensure that our website, boxes, labels and our banking are entirely compliant and have no grey areas that can be future problems.
So much of cannabis culture and dialogue is coming from the West Coast. Being Philadelphia-based, what are you seeing as an East Coast CBD startup?
RC: The most notable thing we see is still a relatively big stigma around cannabis and hemp on the East Coast. Obviously the stigma here is much stronger than it is on the West Coast, so something we’re seeing is consumers and non-consumers still having a reluctance to venture into the hemp space. We have to adjust our brand tone and personality to the mindset of the customer, who is often not very fluent in CBD language and terminology, and can be deterred by the prospect of being a perceived outlier in the community.
It’s definitely daunting to try CBD when you’ve grown up in an anti-cannabis culture for so long. We recognized this before we even started our company, so we’ve adopted an educational, guiding tone as a brand. Before we introduce CBD to our community, we want to educate them about everything CBD-related. We want to ensure that CBD is right for our customers and that they make themes educated choices they can.
You’re currently a student and athlete at UPenn — is CBD something that your classmates or teammates are actively talking about? What’s that look like?
RC: Being a student at UPenn is a pretty interesting culture to be in at the moment. There’s less of a stigma around hemp and cannabis here, so we’ve been quite successful opening dialogue with students about joining our community and trying our products. We get some pretty honest feedback from the students here, which is very valuable to us.
It’s not necessarily a very public conversation (yet), but once you start to talk about CBD with the students here, they open up and start rattling off about how much they love it. CBD’s mostly known as a stress-reliever to my classmates — my friends who use CBD typically start their day with it in the morning. It’s an interesting contrast to many of our early customers who use it to help them sleep.
The most interesting thing I see here at UPenn is that students don’t really pay much attention to the CBD they use. They have this notion that all CBD is the same, and the cheaper, more potent brands are the best brands. It’s cool to be able to live around that mindset everyday. It helps me adjust how we position ourselves as a company and how we adjust how we speak to consumers who haven’t been educated about hemp and cannabis yet.
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