Less than two years after launching, supplement brand Liveli has shifted away from the popular nootropics category to the even more popular CBD wellness category.
With the rebrand, Liveli, part of the Enlightened Brand Ventures portfolio that includes Suja and Kopari, has introduced a five-product range of powders and a 25-mg. hemp-derived CBD daily capsule. Prices range from $49.99 to $69.99, and the products are available on the brand’s website. The brand has also revamped its design to focus on earth tones compared to a brighter aesthetic earlier.
Liveli co-founder and Enlighented Brand Ventures CEO James Brennan began to pivot the brand about a year ago. Through a Suja project, he’d identified a CBD supplier that developed a natural extraction process allowing elements of full-spectrum hemp CBD to be turned into a fine powdered particle that’s smaller than a nanometer in size. That’s super, super tiny given that a sheet of paper is 100,000 nanometers thick.
Brennan is convinced CBD is a bigger opportunity than nootropics and, in testing his CBD powder discovery, became a huge convert to cannabis wellness. “I was all in across the board,” he says. “I wanted to use it for everything. I really became a major believer in the different things that it can offer, from anti-inflammatory to calming effects.” Illustrating his passion for CBD, Kopari branched into the cannabis compound as well with a body care range.
Liveli’s makeover is timed with an amicable separation from its initial co-founders, husband-and-wife doctor duo James Lee and Tess Mauricio. “One of the things the FDA is really adamant about is separating medical and science from what we’re doing [in the CBD space],” says Brennan. “We’re not making any claims and, furthermore, we felt we needed to protect them and their licenses. With the new direction, they felt like not having clarity around the way that this was going to be looked at by the FDA and others, [and] that it was wise to take them out of the mix.”
“There’s going to be a lot of folks who are sitting at home looking for healthy things to build and help their immune systems, which I think we qualify for.”
Prior to its CBD swing, Liveli was generating $2.5 million in revenue. Brennan shares that the overhaul took six months from beginning to end, and estimates it cost approximately $500,000 to complete. He’s a beauty and wellness industry veteran, but executing a relaunch in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic is uncharted territory for Brennan. He’s sticking to a direct-to-consumer model for Liveli at the moment as the retail environment remains in upheaval. “We’ve always started DTC, and we get to learn who our customer is,” says Brennan, adding he eventually sees Liveli on the shelves of retailers like CVS and Target.
Liveli had planned to do a big reveal of its changes at Natural Products Expo West, the massive trade show that was scheduled from March 3 to 7 in Anaheim, Calif., and set up its booth before it was called off last minute. The brand is charging ahead with a seeding campaign sending out full-sized Liveli products this week.
“There’s going to be a lot of folks who are sitting at home looking for healthy things to build and help their immune systems, which I think we qualify for,” says Brennan. Liveli is going to partner with a handful of influencers to propel organic social traction. Brennan explains, “We don’t want to burn money by taking risks that we’re just not sure are going to pay off. We’re taking things slow.”
The impact of the coronavirus is being felt across the Enlightened Brand Ventures portfolio. Brennan has secured small business loans to support brands other than Suja as retail sales grind to a halt. Until the pandemic, there were 60 employees across Kopari, Liveli, Original Grain and Enlightened Brand Ventures. Brennan recently made the tough decision to lay off 25% of the staff at Kopari. “We needed to do this to make sure we stay alive for the remaining team and the business,” he says. “Without a line of sight on when we can realistically get the economy moving again, we are being forced to play a blind hand. The world is pretty much on pause right now.”
Brennan and Melissa Reinking, chief revenue officer at Liveli, are unsure what the beauty and wellness landscape will be like after the pandemic, but they’re certain it will be transformed. Reinking posits, “Consumers are probably going to look more closely at their buying practices, and [learn] more about the local companies in their neighborhoods or in their community and support those brands much more than they had thought about previously.”
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