How Thorne drove 63% growth in DTC sales after a brand awareness push
Supplement company Thorne found that nearly 9 in 10 people who are buying supplements are doing research before making their purchase.
But it has also found information alone isn’t enough to win over customers.
Chief growth officer Mary Beech said the company has moved toward more brand marketing, from creative campaigns to Reddit AMAs, in a bid to reach a customer who is pursuing excellence and wants a high-quality product.
“We did look at what other storytelling was out there in the supplement space, and saw there was an opportunity to tell a more aspirational story,” she said.
Thorne is a supplement company with over 170 SKUs spanning categories like protein, creatine, magnesium and hydration. The company brought in $500 million last year, going from 4 million customers in 2024 to about 7 million today. Beech said the direct-to-consumer business alone grew by 63% last year.
Beech spoke at the Modern Retail Marketing Summit in Huntington Beach, California on Tuesday about the company’s full-funnel approach to growth. She joined the brand in August 2024, and her purview includes overseeing marketing and e-commerce. Part of the growth trajectory has included moving from “a pyramid” that focuses on lower-consideration customers to a full-funnel approach.
“I walked into this company that has incredibly quality and efficacy. There’s so much to talk about, but how do you communicate that to consumers in a direct way that’s going to entice a sale? That was definitely a lot of hard work on our part,” she said.
How to measure brand awareness
Thorne is a 40-year-old company, which started its business as a provider-driven brand sold through healthcare practitioners and offices. But it’s slowly grown into an omnichannel brand, starting with joining Amazon in 2015. It also has its own website and sells through Target’s website and the Mayo Clinic Store.
Beech said she’s agnostic to what channels customers buy on. Rather, she’s more focused on getting people to buy the brand regardless of margin differences. A key metric the company focuses on right now is new customer acquisition, she said. “I just want to drive demand, and then I want you to be able to do whatever is convenient for you,” she said.
To help measure success, Beech said the company has added upper-funnel metrics to reports she shares with the company’s board and financial executives. That includes looking at branded search on places like Amazon and Thorne.com, plus measuring trust and consideration.
To help with its storytelling, Beech said the company has focused on fashion- and brand marketing-style campaigns, running six campaigns with an agency focused on quality creative. It’s been a shift for a company that holds strong ties to its science-first roots, and where the marketing team is “dwarfed by the medical affairs team,” Beech said.
Beech said Thorne has invested in a “know me, show me” marketing strategy. That means recognizing who the customer is and then following up with product information to win the sale.
“We were very, very good at talking about us — and that’s the ‘show me’ side. We have to talk about our testing, our certifications, our manufacturing,” she said. “But first, we have to talk about and really center around the consumer. That was hard for a company that is super proud of its quality.”
Finding the right channels
Part of growing awareness has meant experimenting with new channels. Beech said the company keeps the focus on places that reach Gen Z and millennial shoppers, who make up about half its consumer base. Their core customer is “the proactive optimizer,” or someone who is very interested in their health and wants to make smart choices, she said.
Beech said one channel the company tried recently was podcasting, but it didn’t show solid results. The company tried both working with an agency and managing podcast advertising in-house. “We don’t have any SKU that is over 10% of our sales,” she said. “I think if you’re only selling one product, it’s very easy to be clear on podcasts, but it just didn’t work for us,” she said.
But Thorne has found more success on Reddit, where the company can conduct AMAs. The longer format gives people the time and space to be specific, she said. Similarly, both paid and organic YouTube videos from paid influencers or Thorne’s medical staff have helped the brand gain awareness. Beech said the company is also seeing gains in an affiliate ambassador program it launched in late 2024.
Using customer-facing AI to drive growth
To help get customers from the mid-funnel, Thorne has been looking at ways to take advantage of the rise of AEO, or answer engine optimization. Beech said the company has had a blog for about 13 years that helps it get surfaced in places like Claude and ChatGPT when people are seeking a product.
“I had a ton of content already written by our medical community. We have a patient education partnership with the Mayo Clinic, so we have lots of content that is written by doctors at the Mayo Clinic, and those things have really helped us have a high visibility score on AEO, and we’re continuing to do that and really invest there,” she said.
But rather than just rely on external factors, Thorne also funneled all that content into building its own LLM to help customers once they’re on its site. The tool, called Taia, serves as a wellness advisor to shoppers on its DTC site. And while those who specifically choose to engage with the tool tend to show higher AOV or LTV, Beech said the conversion start rates from those who choose to engage with the tool are still on the lower side.
To help fuel the tool’s usage, Thorne is using Taia to accompany search and product comparison tools. The summaries on product description pages, for example, feature buttons with prompts like “How do I use this product?” or “More info on ingredients,” which open up Taia.
“That’s something that is a huge opportunity for us, and we’re really excited about investing there,” Beech said.