CEO Sharon Leite On The Vitamin Shoppe’s Reimagined Beauty Shopping Experience, The Power Of TikTok Trends And Indie Brand Incubation

If the first thing that comes to mind when you think of The Vitamin Shoppe is tubs of muscle-building powders for gym bros to guzzle for bulking up, think again. A visitor to the Franchise Group-owned specialty health and wellness retailer’s location in Edgewater, N.J., is privy to an experience that’s more like Sephora than a supplement store. Soon, many of The Vitamin Shoppe’s 700 other locations will offer the same experience.

Under the leadership of Sharon Leite, who became CEO in 2018, the retailer is evolving because its customer base is evolving. It’s not as old, male or body builder-centric as people would imagine. A new initiative to place products from The Vitamin Shoppe in college bookstores across the country could push it even further in that direction. As its customers change, the retailer is driven to identify products to meet their changing needs in offline and online venues. In the second quarter of this year, nearly 25% of its business, which hit almost $307 million in sales, was direct-to-consumer. Lifted by traffic improvement, comparable-store sales advanced 2.1% in the quarter. 

Beauty Independent spoke with Leite about how The Vitamin Shoppe is reimagining beauty in its stores, whether TikTok trends translate to IRL sales, and why the company loves working with emerging beauty and wellness brands. 

What are you seeing in terms of The Vitamin Shoppe’s customer changing?

We started our business back in 1977. It was almost like a marketplace before marketplaces. It had every single product, a large assortment, always high-quality products, that was the hallmark when the business was started back then.

Over time, that customer has really changed. It’s gotten younger because we’re finding younger consumers are more interested in really understanding health and wellness, which is exciting. The other thing that’s very interesting about the business is that the customer is very 50/50 in terms of men and women.

Historically, sports nutrition was about the guy in the gym pumping up muscles. What we’re finding is that that customer now is actually people like us because of the needs of people [for] healthy aging. People need a lot more of those types of products. 

How is The Vitamin Shoppe updating its approach to the beauty category in store?

The whole beauty category is one of our best-kept and worst-kept secrets. We’ve had the product for a long time, but it hasn’t really seen its time in the sun. In our existing historical stores, the products are in that back left corner, and it’s not merchandised like a typical beauty business. 

If you go to the Edgewater store with the new store design, the beauty is in the very front of the store. It looks more like a beauty department. The product is showcased on glass shelves. It’s merchandised, it’s a little bit more boutique-y than the a line of products that show up on the shelf. There’s even photography that is about showing very natural skin.

Thinking about the category specifically, we are looking for innovative products that are clean. Now, there are lots of definitions of clean. What does clean really mean? It really is about ingredient stories, solutions, natural, organic—and they’re not necessarily the huge brands. They tend to be very specialty, which is the niche that we believe that we should be playing in.

We love the opportunity to bring up new and independent beauty entrepreneurs. When you think about it, initially they get immediate distribution very quickly, and it’s a lot easier for them to get word out about what their products are and who they are. 

We believe in the category. We think about it a little bit broader than the way I think traditional beauty does. It is skincare. It is body care. You’ll see aromatherapy in the front of these new stores because it becomes a sensory thing as well. It’s very different in the new stores with what we’re trying to drive around lifestyle versus what it has traditionally been. But, believe it or not, there is beauty in every single store. You just don’t see it. I wish you did, but that’s definitely changing.

If we think about it from a person’s overall self-care routine, it makes sense for beauty and wellness products to be sold in the same place. And, when I think about my beauty routine, it is much cleaner than it used to be. I put a lot less products on my face.

It’s also about the multivitamin I take and making sure that it’s the right multivitamin. It’s the fish oil that I take because I know that’s good for my joints and the way I can move. I’m a huge collagen fan, so every morning it goes into my coffee. Those foundational health things to me are also about my beauty routine. I do very much think about it all together.

One of the things we’ve talked a lot more about too is accessibility. We talk about, lifelong wellness starts here. We so believe that we want our customers to become their best self, however they define it, because we know that every customer is on its own journey. You’ve got certain needs or desires or solutions that you’re looking for as do I. 

When we talk about lifelong wellness, we talk about how the [Vitamin Shoppe] consumer is getting younger and how it’s broadening. It really is about, how do we make what we do accessible? I think it can be very intimidating. There’s not a lot of trial and play, like in beauty. That’s where the expertise has to come in. Trust becomes exceptionally important because, if you don’t have product information, you don’t feel confident.

What I love about what we’re doing at The Vitamin Shoppe is making sure things are factual, the information that you read, the claims that are made. That’s one of the things we pride ourselves on. The brand pillars we talk about in terms of quality, innovation, expertise, it’s a lot about the product, but it’s also about how everything that we do, how we think about building the business and what we believe we can be for the consumer today and for the future.

There’s so much information out there, especially with so much on social. When you look at the explosion of what’s happened with TikTok, all of these things are great to get the word out, but who is that single source out there who you can really trust? That’s what we also hope to be able to deliver, products that are accessible, that truly are great quality, that stand for something and deliver results for what the consumer’s looking for.

Speaking of social, what does The Vitamin Shoppe customer journey look like? Are a lot of sales driven by social? 

We have over 85% of our customers in our loyalty program, so we have really great data about our customers. That’s one component, but it also is the move that we’ve made to social and the influence that it has. You can look at what we look like on Instagram versus what we look like on TikTok, those two are the primary ones that we spend a lot of time on.

I go back to quality, innovation and expertise. It’s so important that you have accurate information. Social media is a really important part of that. When you look at the click-through rate and understand, I see this lifestyle, I want to be that, or I want to engage in this. We’ve seen that’s a big way [customers discover us].

Gen Z and millennial customers, the apps are where they go, we have to make sure that we’re in those channels and linking the digital strategy with social, brick-and-mortar, e-commerce. I try to think of it all as just one big ecosystem now because the lines are all so blurred.

Remember when chlorophyll was the hot trend like a year or so ago on TikTok? We had a 30% increase on searches for chlorophyll on our website. We had a 500% increase in chlorophyll sales in that very short period of time when chlorophyll was the big thing. That trend actually clung in there for quite some time because everybody kept picking it up and talking about it. It’s not widely distributed, but we had it, and we jumped on that trend, which was great.

Logan Paul launched his drink with a TikTok video in front of one of our stores in New York. We had just gotten the product maybe that week. We basically sold six weeks of inventory in six days. That’s the power of social media and linking all of that to your channels and being able to leverage it. For us, that’s a trick out of the beauty book. Beauty does it all the time. 

When you think about how health and wellness and beauty are converging, it’s using those mediums to help us get great information out there, talk about the quality ingredients that we have and the products that we carry, and there’s an altruistic part of what we do. We really want to help you become your best self. 

How does The Vitamin Shoppe try to find or prepare for the next chlorophyll?

Honestly, you can’t. What you can do is, when you see something that’s hot, you have to have an organization that’s nimble enough, that can rush things through. This was one of the things that worked really well for us through the pandemic when everything was going crazy and so many stores had to close and where we’re dealing with all the different regulations, we pivoted to buy online curbside pickup. We were not chasing that. We were already there. When we had to pivot quickly, we already had the infrastructure to do that.

With product, we have a very short window where we can unload the distribution center if we need to. We have ways where the stores can ship product if we run out of it in the distribution center, so we can leverage store inventory. And we have a great manufacturing base and relationships. Those are so important. When you have those relationships with some of your key partners, they’ll do anything they can to help you because it helps them, too. We’ll react as quickly as we can. 

It’s important as a business that you really pay attention to social media trends. While you may have the chlorophyll example, which is like a needle in a haystack, there are other trends that you’ll see trending, and depending on what it is, you can really take advantage of that.

We did that with creatine. We saw creatine trending. There’s supply chain issues all over the world, and we took a leadership position. We’ve been selling a million dollars of creatine a week. It was another trend that we figured out through social and what was happening in digital, and were able to pick up the trend and relate that to the business.

I’m over simplifying this, but it’s staying close to your customer. When I say customer, it’s the external customer, but it’s also staying really close to the internal customer because our 5,000 health enthusiasts [store associates] that we have in the local markets, they learn about some of this stuff in real time. How do you make sure you’re able to funnel up that feedback in a meaningful way so that you can leverage their information? Sometimes they learn about a trend before we see it. We take all those data points and leverage them for the benefit of the business. 

How do health enthusiasts share what they’re seeing?

We have some very specific channels where we can capture the information, but it’s also organic. We have our own channels within the company. Also, all of our stores have Instagram accounts. That’s a way we can capture information from what’s happening with the consumer. We’ve got over 700 accounts between our Vitamin Shoppe stores and our Super Supplements stores. When you aggregate all of that information, there’s some pretty incredible trends. 

The wellness trend report is real information. It’s not extrapolated. It’s real data coming from real people that we were able to mine, not just somebody that is an expert in the industry. These are real customers giving us information. We’re staying in tune to what’s happening, and by the way, it’s happening and moving and changing faster than ever. You can’t rest on your laurels. You’ve got to be constantly looking for that newest, latest, greatest thing.

We’ve tried really hard to understand where the white space is because our business in particular, similar to beauty, is quite fragmented. This helps us figure out where are the white space is. What are the customers asking for? If there isn’t a solution, how can we fill that void? How can we solve that problem?

For emerging indie brands, what does a rollout at The Vitamin Shoppe look like?

We love to find these new entrepreneurs and indie brands and bring them to life. We can scale it so quickly. We’re in a very unique spot where while we scale, we can help them scale. We’re happy with a crawl, walk, run strategy.

We’re happy to start small and help them along the journey, especially when it comes to the fulfillment. A lot of them don’t have the capacity at all. We’ll work with them on that. The key always is the product has to be right. It has to have a great story. It has to be solving for a solution. With the founder or the entrepreneur, is there a level of expertise that doesn’t exist in the marketplace that we can bring to the marketplace? 

We are a specialty retailer, so specialty is really important. We love being the place where these indie brands can come to get attention and that we can help them scale their business. Once they move on to food, drug, mass channels, then it’s probably time for us to bring something else in new. That is the cycle.

Being specialty is so important to us. That’s why you don’t see many mass brands in our business. One of the things we still have work to do on is to figure out sampling in beauty. We’ve done a nice job with sampling on supplements. 

Do you have that conversation up front with founders that there’s going to be a point where The Vitamin Shoppe may want to move on?

Everyone is different. It really depends on where they want to go. Where do they want to be? We’re happy to start with them, but that’s why you rarely see us bring in a product that is mass distributed. We want to incubate. We want to know that the customer’s going to make a special trip to come to The Vitamin Shoppe, that they get a very special experience and the assortment supports that.

Some people come in and they know what they came in for, but we love those customers that graze and want to take it all in. We love sharing the stories of those different brands, what their solutions are, and how can we help [customers] on whatever their wellness journey is. It’s amazing what people will tell our teams in the store or at the call center, solutions that they’re looking for. We want to be able to help them with whatever that might be.

How can brands pitch your buying team?

They can contact us through our website. There is a formal process, but, through people that they know or talking to another entrepreneur or somebody like that, they can connect with us. We’ve had people even come through our social channels and leave us messages. We do comb through all of those things.

What are some of the in-house brands you’ve launched?

TrueYou is a groundbreaking women’s product that looks at women’s wellness and the journey that women go through, and the wellness needs that you have during different periods of your life, from college to menopause. There isn’t a brand or nutritional health and wellness product that meets the needs of women from that time of their life all the way through as they become grandparents. 

We wanted to make sure that we had great quality products, that we had the science to back everything up, and that we could be there on this journey with women. For example, we’ve got Easy Peasy for urinary support. Cool As A Cuke is really great stress and mood support. Grace Period for menopause support, things of that nature. TrueYou is going to continue to expand. We’re launching a body care line. Our intent is to continue to grow this line so, again, it can be a comprehensive product line for the female consumer as they move through their life.

Is the goal for TrueYou to be sold outside of The Vitamin Shoppe?

Yes, TrueYou was developed more like a true CPG beauty company in terms of the packaging, things like the interior labels, making sure that it would look great on a shelf, what story does it tell. It’s really a very special product.