Lo Bosworth on Building Love Wellness And the Education Gap In Women’s Health
“The times have changed significantly. The information gap is getting smaller, but it still is out there.”
At South by Southwest, Lo Bosworth shared the lowdown on her brand Love Wellness.
In 2016, Bosworth, formerly a reality TV star on “The Hills,” began Love Wellness after struggling with her health due to an underlying gut issue. At the time, she wasn't able to find something that would help her in stores.
“I started to realize that many of the health issues that I was dealing with were coming back to this gut health issue and there were no women's wellness brands at the time,” she said. “I started working with forward-thinking doctors that combined the best of East-meets-West medicine to figure out and find solutions.”
She continued: “Ultimately, at the time, those solutions were hyper-niche women's probiotics, which are no longer hyper niche.”
Bosworth then built Love Wellness to be solutions-oriented. Now, the brand has an array of products, including probiotics, vaginal suppositories and topicals. But it wasn't all smooth sailing — when she first launched, social media followers were wary of her health-related content, and some media outlets published articles slamming the brand with notions that it could be snake oil. But years later, Love Wellness has made a name for itself in the wellness category.
“The times have changed significantly,” she said, pointing to media coverage as key in shifting the conversation. “The information gap is getting smaller, but it still is out there.”
With this in mind, Bosworth is focused on education, as more brands come to market and could create confusion for consumers. Right now she's focused on “gummy math,” where she calculates the amount of sugar one could be consuming with gummy supplements.
“We are doing a sort of sugar awareness campaign in the supplement space,” she said.
The brand had grown over the first seven years to a “pretty steady $50 million net revenue,” and the team brought on Maria Dempsey, formerly of Nest Fragrances, last year as the company's chief executive officer.
“My focus has shifted from a true operational role to a role that is focused on innovation, regulatory and then of course marketing because I make a lot of content on behalf of the brand,” Bosworth said.
Bosworth said she's seen the women's health industry evolve over the past eight years. She still sees a lot of area for growth over the next decade.
“Perimenopause is a category that is ripe for opportunity because you have women that are changing significantly within their bodies,” she said. “We're starting to see so much innovation… topicals, suppositories, estrogen. Topical estrogen is going to absolutely explode.”
With this, Bosworth has also seen retailers open up to the category. Love Wellness is available at Target, Ulta Beauty and Walmart, for example. At Target, the brand has seen particular success being merchandised in the natural beauty aisle, not just the OTC section.
“When you put ‘shy buys' in highly trafficked areas of the store that women love to be in…your ‘shy buys' take off,” she said.
WWD recently reported that Bosworth is focused on expanding some of the brand's bestselling products into franchises. Most recently, the brand launched a Bye Bye Bloat Body Care collection, an extension of the popular Bye Bye Bloat supplement.