We’ve entered an era of mass customization when it comes to virtually everything but what happens when it comes to your daily vitamins. Enter Care/of, the personalized daily vitamin delivery service that sends a monthly supply to your door based on your own personal needs and physiology. The startup, launched in November of 2016, promises to provide transparency, honesty and quality around the vitamins you put in your body daily when using the service. It also provides up to a 20% savings for better quality vitamins when compared to the average health store.
Today we sit down with cofounded and CEO Craig Elbert to discuss the rapidly growing business, its future, and the company’s latest round of funding.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
We just completed a $12 million Series A financing for Care/of led by Goodwater Capital with participation from Tusk Ventures, RRE Ventures, the co-founders of InVision, Bullish, and the company’s lead seed investor, Juxtapose. We’ve now raised over $15 million in total funding.
Tell us about your product or service.
Care/of is the first personalized vitamin and supplement company offering bespoke recommendations, built on honest guidance and top-tier ingredients. It is one of the fastest-growing companies in the direct-to-consumer health and wellness space, having doubled sales every two months since its launch in November 2016.
What inspired you to start the company?
Most consumers who have ever tried to shop for vitamins know how confusing it can be. My cofounder and I had both experienced this ourselves. At one point, I was in the vitamin aisle looking for vitamin D for myself and prenatals for my then-pregnant wife, and was overwhelmed by the hundreds of products in the aisle and the hunch that some of the brands there were not ones to trust. I knew there was an opportunity to create a better-designed customer experience that would make the process much easier for people simply looking to do something good for their health.
How is it different?
We created Care/of based on principles of honest guidance, better ingredients, and a personalized approach. Customers who visit our site don’t have to choose among hundreds of products—instead, we ask them to share a few details about their health, and we recommend the best supplements for them, based on peer-reviewed research and input from our Scientific Advisory Board, a team of doctors and researchers. Our digitally-based approach makes this possible. Nobody is really leveraging the resources and transparency that technology provides and marrying it with old-fashioned empathetic customer service. At Care/of, we’re doing that.
What market you are targeting and how big is it?
We are targeting the $40 billion supplement industry to start – and specifically anyone who is looking for an easier, technology-enabled experience. Anyone who has a particular health goal in mind can visit our site and find a solution that makes sense for them, based on their diet and lifestyle. The majority of people in the US take vitamins and supplements,…