For chef and health coach Tayla Burke, who started building My Girl Wellness shortly after the pandemic hit the United States and launched it in 2021 with a trio of gut health offerings, a women’s health-focused ingestible brand was a natural next step.
Prior to the pandemic, she founded Camp Conscious, producer of the Summer of Wellness Festival in Los Angeles, which brought together wellness brands and consumers for a day of learning and community. Burke says, “Before products, at the forefront, My Girl Wellness is a women’s wellness community and brand dedicated to supporting each community member from start to finish in whatever their goals, aspirations and dreams are.”
My Girl Wellness kicked off with a plant-based three-step system comprised of probiotic Gut Goals, digestive enzyme supplement Eat Your Heart Out and constipation aid You Go Girl. The products are priced from $28 to $38 individually or $102 as a bundle. Today, My Girl Wellness also has extended into sexual wellness and begun a hormone health line as well as a line of functional elixirs with eight products all priced under $40.
Burke explains she started with gut health because, as a health coach, she says she understands that “getting to the root cause of your gut health, other areas of your health that you might be struggling with can actually fall into place. Once we planted our flag there, we really wanted to tackle all other areas of women’s health and wellbeing.”
My Girl Wellness’s sexual health range, which Burke says took over two years to develop, launched in March with two products, $38 Panty Dropper and $26 Glad You Came Wipes, a two-step system to deal with the messy aftermath of sex. Burke asserts, “Your sexual health should be prioritized to the same level as your physical health, and it’s so intertwined.”
“Panty Dropper is a sensation serum, it helps stimulate blood flow down south, helps add some glide and increase orgasms. It helps everything feel good down there,” says Burke. Speaking of Glad You Came Wipes, she adds, “Step one is the dry wipe, we say to clean up the fun. Don’t use the T-shirt or toilet paper or the towel. Use the dry wipe to wipe it up and then follow it with the wet wipe to help soothe, restore and protect the area. It helps ward off infections, irritation and keeps everything clean.”
The sexual wellness products bring My Girl Wellness’s launches in 2023—from March to July—to five products, and it’s not done. In time for the holiday season, it will launch another product in October. The product, Sip Support, is an herbal supplement formulated to stave off hangovers. Burke says, “You take two capsules at night. It’s packed with all of the vitamins and minerals that become depleted through drinking. It also has some herbs that help detoxify alcohol through your liver.”
Six new products in eight months is ambitious for an emerging brand like My Girl Wellness. The schedule wasn’t by design. “Unfortunately, they all kind of piled up together,” says Burke. “It was supposed to be spread out over two years, and it pretty much came together in six months. Our sex line took two years, and so this year we invested in product development to establish ourselves as not just a gut health line. We wanted to establish ourselves in many different categories, which I feel like we’ve done pretty well.”
While My Girl Wellness has a few more products in development for next year, the main goal for 2024 is to focus on lifting awareness for the brand and the issues its products address. My Girl Wellness has a free app where consumers can learn from health experts and each other as part of a community with, according to Burke, “zero judgment.” The mother will also have her hands full with her toddler and newborn.
My Girl Wellness is focusing on subscriptions, too. Burke reports that 38% of its revenues this year come from subscriptions. From the first quarter to the second quarter of this year, My Girl Wellness increased its customer base by 61%. Its bestselling product, Eat Your Heart Out, has driven 28% of it sales this year. Burke says that, although investors have been reaching out to My Girl Wellness, the brand is bootstrapped. She says she spent “six figures” getting it off the ground.
My Girl Wellness is exclusively direct-to-consumer at the moment. Burke is having conversations with potential retail partners, but understands that pushing into physical retail can be very expensive for a small brand, and some retail relationships function more as awareness drivers than revenue drivers. So, she’s in no huge rush.
“I want to remain in control of my company and my brand and my messaging as much as possible from the beginning,” says Burke. “I take pride and joy in the years where I’ll be in full control, and retail is a huge beast. I want to make sure we make the right partners and that we complement each other.”
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