Doug Sweeny is the marketer behind Oura’s $1B year

The smart ring company’s market studies showed it had just about 5% awareness among the U.S. adult population. At the time, it only sold direct-to-consumer.

“The company had been around for almost a decade, and they hadn’t been in any retail at all,” he said.  “If Oura’s awareness is low and you don’t know the product and it’s not in retail, it’s hard to shop and find and discover the product.”

That insight led Sweeny to dive into bringing Oura into retail environments and find more ways to highlight its use cases to customers in mass markets. As CMO, he’s played a role in not just shaping Oura’s brand story but also establishing its retail launches across the globe. Three years since he started, Oura is sold in over 4,000 global retail stores, including Target, John Lewis and Costco. Oura’s U.S. awareness has grown sixfold to 30%.

2025, in particular, has been a standout year for Oura. In October 2025 alone, Oura raised $900 million to fuel its expansion, launched a line of colorful ceramic rings, started selling online at Walmart and opened a first-of-its-kind concept retail store inside Harrods in London. The pop-up features luxe velvet curtains and a massive hand statue, and store associates are on hand to assist with sizing and learn about features. The company is on track to surpass $1 billion in annual sales this year while gaining profitability. 

But such growth doesn’t come easy — there have been legal battles over intellectual property to contend with, and the company received some online heat over enterprise work with the U.S. Department of Defense. Plus, conversations with retailers around launches can take years of back and forth to pinpoint timing, messaging and logistics — especially because a ring that costs $349 or more plus a monthly subscription fee isn’t an easy sell in today’s economic environment.

But for his part, Sweeny said some of what he has to grapple with are “good problems.” There are so many developments around the company’s retail growth, app updates and brand partnerships, it can be hard to know what to prioritize in communications.

“We’re having to be really smart about how we tailor the message to the right time and to the right audience,” he said.

Landing Oura in stores across markets

Colleagues who spoke with Modern Retail praised Sweeny, who previously held marketing leadership roles at One Medical, Google and Nest Labs, for helping expand Oura from a niche, Nordic fitness product into a mainstream wellness brand.

The company has sold 5.5 million rings to date, and is known for helping users track their sleep, stress and other biometrics. But it was getting on retail shelves that helped spur the growth.

In the U.S., Oura started with Best Buy back in April 2023. It then joined Amazon and Target in the spring of 2024. It launched in Costco this spring. Its retail presence in the United Kingdom started with John Lewis, then expanded to Amazon, Currys, Argos and, eventually, Harrods. And as the footprint grew, so did the revenue: Oura reported $500 million in revenue for 2024, double its 2023 revenue.

Looking back, Sweeny calls the retail expansion “deliberate” — both to drive business, and to normalize a ring as a wearable fitness tracker. “They’re trusted local brands, and they allow us to merchandise and show the product,” he said, regarding Oura’s retail partners. “They’re helping educate and build awareness for both Oura and the category as a whole.”

He also credits the Oura staff for bringing new partnerships and ideas together, like vp of global retail Jeremiah Linder, and director of international George Abbott, who helped craft the Harrods concept store. “[Our retail success] has a lot to do with the team, and getting the right team on the field to play the game,” Sweeny said.

Oura’s chief commercial officer, Dorothy Kilroy, said she works hand in hand with Sweeny on many partnership and brand initiatives. Such conversations can get into the weeds about the hardware, technology or medical device innovations, Kilroy said. But Sweeny tends to highlight more consumer-friendly aspects and drill down the science to simple terms. 

“When we do those types of deals, whether they are healthcare or B-to-B or consumer-driven, we really need marketing at the table,” she said.  “Doug has this uncanny ability to turn [the conversation] to stories and not just outcomes — and we’re not just talking about the health systems, but actually human stories.”

Crafting the right messages

Brent Franson, founder and CEO of the longevity-tracking app Death Clock, has been an Oura wearer for years. He said the company has made big strides in how it talks about itself — particularly around sleep tracking — while the ring’s fashion and function are built for broader mass appeal than other wearables on the market.

“They really carved out a niche,” he said. “They nailed the brand — the look and feel, the name. It’s not too expensive; it’s accessible — and it feels like you’re with the cool kids without being outrageously expensive.”

Sweeny said his earliest challenges at Oura involved figuring out how to talk about the product. “I consistently heard different points of view on the positioning of the company,” he said. “There were a lot of different [conversations] around, ‘Who is Oura, and what do we stand for?’ People love the product, internally, and the efficacy. But the, ‘What is it?’ was very different, and I felt like I needed to address that.”

From there, he began exploring ways to highlight the ring’s elegant design and its overall wellness benefits. Sleep tracking became a core way of talking about the device, and the brand has leaned harder into women’s health to attract a female audience.

Most recently, the brand has leaned into how to be trendy and relevant as much as it has leaned into the health aspects.

“It’s wellness and health care, but it’s also got a pop culture and a fashion component to it, which is really interesting and rare within the health care community, in general,” he said. “There are few companies that can do that.” 

And as the retail expansion blossomed, Sweeny said Oura learned how to message appropriately based on the market. Germany, for instance, has more campaigns focused on the ring’s technology. Japan-based campaigns tend to focus on the benefits of sleep tracking, and the market skews female. Awareness currently sits at around 21% in the United Kingdom, and ranges from around 2-15% in the rest of the world, Sweeny said.

Oura CCO Kilroy praised Sweeny’s ability to tie Oura into pop culture as a way to help make the ring relatable to a bigger audience. That has included partnerships with sports teams, as well as a “Mission Impossible”-themed ad tied into the latest movie release.

But one of his most recent splashy campaigns was this past summer’s “Give us the Finger” multi-channel campaign that leaned into longevity as a wellness trend. The advertisements highlight people in their 40s and beyond living their best lives. Beyond turning heads with a cheeky tagline and moving imagery, the campaign aimed to help Oura connect with older users, as its current member base skews toward millennials and Gen Z.

Kilroy called the campaign “some of Doug Sweeny’s finest work.”

“Aging is a terrifying thing for a lot of people,”  she said. “And he really turned that on its head into this beautiful storyline.”

Heading into 2026

With impressive growth behind it, Oura plans to continue gaining share and awareness across markets in 2026. Kilroy and Sweeny both said getting more healthcare systems and organizations as points of distribution is a top priority.

But the company will also be expanding into Walmart brick-and-mortar stores in the coming months, a major test as it looks to continue its march from early adopters to mass market. Sweeny said his team had been in conversations with Walmart for about two years before entering stores. But the momentum of 2025 and sales in other markets have made the timing make sense.

“Now we’re at a point where mass retail across the U.S. is something that makes sense for this part of our journey and where we are, and then it’s about getting that storytelling right within [Walmart’s] experience,” Sweeny said. 

Franson from Death Clock said there are only a handful of people who are inherently strict about wellness routines. Rather, most are fairly casual and take an “everything in moderation” approach. Someone who bought Oura to help improve their sleep may not be as inclined to wear it or subscribe to the app after they’ve solved their initial issues, Franson said.

“Once you’ve tracked your sleep for a while, what’s the long-term value? They have to expand what they’re doing,” he said.

To that end, Sweeny points to the many updates the Oura app has made around stress, women’s health and partnerships with other health tech companies, like glucose-monitoring company Dexcom and menstrual tracker Natural Cycles. And, he said, there’s still a very wide swath of the American public that Oura has yet to reach with its core messages about its capabilities and design.

“For 70% of people in the U.S., when you show them the brand, they [still] don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “So it actually is a challenge, and it’s something all of our team is focused on: getting the stories out about the product.”