Olly is bringing emotion to its first body care foray.
The Unilever-owned vitamin brand’s new Olly Mood + Skin range has 10 products, including body wash, intimate wash, shave oil, body scrub and body serum, formulated with mood-boosting fragrances and clinically proven skincare ingredients to support the skin barrier. The products are priced at $12.99 each and sold nationwide in stores and online at Walmart and Target and on Amazon and Olly’s website.
Olly Mood + Skin’s products were built to complement the brand’s vitamins, and they contain skin barrier-supporting vitamin complexes. The scent of the adaptogen-infused Calm body wash and serum features notes of eucalyptus and amber to facilitate decompression. Similarly, Olly’s Goodbye Stress softgels are formulated with adaptogens like ashwagandha and lemon balm extract for stress relief. Bright body wash and scrub have an energizing citrus scent and contain ginseng. Olly’s tangerine-flavored Laser Focus gummies contain ginseng, too.
“We are about whole person wellness. We thought personal care seems like a really nice place to expand [into] from that standpoint,” says Olly chief revenue officer Bryan Ferschinger. “We’ve got Olly vitamins and supplements that are really helping you from the inside out, and now we’ve got Olly Mood + Skin, which is more about helping you from the outside in. They’re designed to repair your skin barrier, but also formulated with these mood-enhancing fragrances that are backed by neuroscience to transform your mood.”
To substantiate mood transformation, Olly’s in-house research and development team conducted electroencephalogram (EEG) tests on participants to measure electrical activity in the brain while smelling the Mood + Skin products. Bright’s scent was shown to amplify beta and gamma activity, making the participants more upbeat. The Calm scent was shown to augment alpha brain waves, the ones that cue relaxation, leading participants to feel grounded.
“This becomes this triple whammy,” says Ferschinger. “With the fragrance, this does help transform your mood. Plus the skin barrier, and, ultimately, from an Olly standpoint, you also have the vitamins and supplements. So, now we have this amazing routine and regimen that you can create.”
There are two products in the Mood + Skin range that are fragrance-free: women’s wellness offerings Happy Hoo-Ha Wash and Happy Hoo-Ha Shave. They include prebiotics, glycerin and vitamin E and complement Olly’s Happy Hoo-Ha Vaginal Probiotic supplement.
The women’s wellness category has been a major focus for Olly since its inception. The brand launched a decade ago with Women’s Multivitamin and now spans nearly a dozen supplements to support girls’ and women’s health, from childhood through menopause, including vaginal probiotic capsules Happy Hoo-Ha.
“We are about whole person wellness.”
Ferschinger says, “We’re excited about [Happy Hoo-Ha Wash and Happy Hoo-Ha Shave] because a lot of what Olly has always been about is how do you break down some of those social stigmas and help women have solutions that help them throughout all of their life stages.”
Olly is entering a strong body care category. Data from market research firm Circana reveals it’s been a sales driver of late, and skincare overall in mass grew in both dollar and unit terms in the first quarter. According to consumer data platform Numerator, Olly experienced 6% year-over-year consumer base growth, which calculates to nearly 1 million new people or 930,000 households, in the past 12 months. Unilever’s Beauty & Wellbeing category saw sales up 6.5% in 2024, driven by volume at 5.1% and price at 1.3%.
Unilever acquired Olly in May 2019 from Eric Ryan, the serial entrepreneur behind Method, which was acquired by Ecover in 2012 then SC Johnson in 2017, and Welly, which was acquired by Unilever in 2021. The company has since executed a string of deals in the supplement and ingestibles category. In 2020, it added Liquid I.V. and SmartyPants Vitamins to its stable, and it scooped up Onnit and Nutrafol in 2021 and 2022, respectively. Nutrafol has tapped into Unilever’s vast knowledge in the beauty category by launching haircare in 2023, and now Olly is leveraging that knowledge.
Ferschinger says, “They are absolutely the experts…It became the best of both worlds of all of the capabilities of Unilever and all of that science and tech and all of the expertise that we had on the vitamins and supplement space coming together for the first time to create this amazing portfolio of products.”
