July 19, 2023
Led by dynamic founders and CEOs, the three winners of NBJ’s Leadership and Growth awards demonstrate the integrity and mission-focused leadership required to excel in an extremely competitive marketplace.
Established Company: MaryRuth’s Organics
Family-focused supplements brand MaryRuth’s Organics, a digitally native business founded, bootstrapped and helmed by its namesake, MaryRuth Ghiyam, has grown exponentially since its 2014 launch. Now the top VMS brand on Amazon and a juggernaut at retail, MaryRuth’s pulled in $165 million in 2022 and is projected to hit $300 million this year.
Personal tragedy propelled Ghiyam into health and wellness, but she never set out to be a supplement company CEO. Both her father and brother died young of heart conditions, then complications from brain surgery left her mother partially paralyzed. Moved by these experiences, MaryRuth become a certified nutritional consultant and health educator.As part of her protocol, MaryRuth taught “liquids until lunch” (which is also the title of her 2021 book), leading many clients to ask what type of vitamins they should take. “At that time, most were capsules, which made people nauseous on a liquid diet,” says David Ghiyam, MaryRuth’s husband and company president. “We thought, why not create high-quality liquid vitamins?”
MaryRuth formulated the company’s flagship Liquid Morning Multivitamin and Liquid Nighttime Multimineral, both sugar-free, vegan and made with organic ingredients. The intention was simply to serve her clients, not seed a wellness empire, but the supplements started selling out as soon as they launched on Amazon. The company brought in $500,000 in 2014. The next year, revenue hit $2.5 million, then $5.5 million, then $10 million, then $20 million.
Along the way, MaryRuth’s built out its e-commerce site and launched many more SKUs, all to great success. “What’s incredible is we were first a brand for the whole family,” David says. “Then we created specialized products for kids and quickly became number one in the kids category.” The same thing happened in the toddlers and infants set.
David believes the brand was a smash from the start because it exudes warmth and trust, contrasting the “clinical appearance and tone” of many supplement lines. “There is a real person running the company, a mom of four small children, who makes products primarily for her family and then spreads them to the world,” he says. “I think that resonates with consumers.”
It especially hits home with other mothers. “Moms are our greatest ambassadors and enthusiasts, so we have tremendous word-of-mouth growth,” David says. “We’ve doubled down on what’s important to Mom. Besides having organic and sugar-free options, we offer optionality in form. Kids are picky eaters. Do they like fruit bites, liquids, meltable tablets, powders?”
But most importantly, says David, MaryRuth’s invests heavily in rigorous testing. Every product is Clean Label Project Certified.
For the first five years, MaryRuth, David and MaryRuth’s mom, Colleen, bootstrapped the brand, which was profitable from day one, David says. In August 2021, MaryRuth’s sold a minority share to Butterfly Equity, a food-focused firm with Bolthouse Farms, Orgain, Pete and Gerry’s Organics and Qdoba in its portfolio. “But not because we had to,” David says. “We just knew that the support of a reputable private equity company that specialized in our space would be valuable for getting to the next level. We want to always be woman-owned and controlled. ”
Butterfly principal Francesco D’Arcangelo says the firm was inspired by MaryRuth’s mission to empower people to take control of their health and wellness, its commitment to innovation, plus its focus on flavor and format. “Her dedication to promoting a structured routine for the entire family and creating high-quality bioavailable and absorbable supplements resonated strongly with us.”
By providing the institutional capital to “help professionalize the organization,” D’Arcangelo says Butterfly helped MaryRuth’s boost revenue by 70%. A key driver of that growth has been a strong push into brick-and-mortar, starting in late 2021.
The brand has moved into Whole Foods Market, Natural Grocers, Walmart, Target, Publix, Kroger, Wegman’s and soon Sprouts Farmers Market. More recently, MaryRuth’s inked an exclusive partnership with the kids’ YouTube show “CoComelon” for its infant and toddler products sold at Sam’s Club.
“MaryRuth's has continued a robust online presence that is now translating onto the shelf through extensive retail growth,” D’Arcangelo says. “This is creating an interesting flywheel. We are fueling growth back into e-commerce and allowing the business to scale very strongly.”
D’Arcangelo also credits the founder for the company’s achievements. “MaryRuth is an incredible leader, with the perfect combination of personal drive and passion for helping others.”
That passion led her to create the financial-assistance program We Care Support. “Whatever you can afford, we’ll work out a discount that works for your family,” David says. “MaryRuth doesn’t want anyone to be denied good health or better ingredients. We have 5,000 or 6,000 families in the program, and they are some of our most loyal customers.”
D’Arcangelo wants to see MaryRuth’s further cement its position as a leading VMS player while moving into other “better-for-you products for the whole family” and continuing to forge ahead into retail, the brand’s fastest growing channel.
“I feel like we’re just getting started,” David says. “We now have half a million points of distribution, maybe more, and we’re saying no to people because we don’t have enough inventory. We can’t make our products fast enough, so we are expanding our supply chain to fuel more growth. We also have a ton of innovation in the pipeline. For the next two years, our goal is 50% to 100% growth a year.”
Scaling Company: Gainful
Among scaling companies (roughly $15 million to $99 million), personalized performance nutrition brand Gainful stands out. College athletes Jahaan Ansari and Eric Wu co-founded the direct-to-consumer business in 2017 to cut through the confusion, intimidation and opaqueness they associated with sports nutrition. Their solution—premium-quality personalized protein powders plus ongoing support from registered dietitians (RDs)—took off. Gainful has expanded well beyond protein, surpassed 1 million orders, turned a profit and, in April, debuted nationwide at Target.
Gainful was born out of “personal necessity,” Ansari says. “Eric and I were both high school athletes and played club soccer through college, but we never had a nutritionist tell us the right supplements to enhance our fitness regimens.”Sports nutrition, especially protein powders, felt daunting. “Walking into GNC and staring down aisles of indistinguishable tubs was rather off-putting,” Ansari says. “Honestly, it seemed like some of this stuff might hurt me. We surmised that this personal pain point may also be a broader marketplace need.”
Ansari and Wu thought they could create a brand around making it easy for people to match ingredients to their goals, with RDs helping to formulate products and guide customers throughout their journey. With support from RDs, they devised a quick online quiz to learn about each customer and customized protein powders accordingly. The founders went through tech startup accelerator Y Combinator to aid their launch.
“A YC mantra is ‘do things that don’t scale,’ and we took that to heart,” Ansari says. “When we had only 100 customers, we’d handmake each powder to order. Of course, that doesn’t scale, but we learned a lot about our customers, their likes and dislikes, and which ingredients worked and didn’t.”
That early data helped them home in on SKUs that had “critical mass of a lot of use cases,” Ansari says. With an edited portfolio, Gainful could still provide elite-level personalization but become “a scalable business that could be a $2 billion or $3 billion company eventually,” he adds.
The company also ceased a la carte sales. “Fitness and wellness are a long-term journey, and a subscription model lends itself well to that,” Ansari says. “Hopefully, that first purchase is the beginning of a long, fruitful partnership to help you reach your goals.”
For this reason, providing guidance post-purchase is also integral to Gainful’s value proposition. The brand offers personalized recommendations on product usage and checks in to track progress. And if a customer isn’t progressing as they’d like, an RD can help figure out why while offering comprehensive nutrition and wellness advice.
As the business gained traction, Ansari and Wu were astounded by the growth. “When we launched, we were wide-eyed and bushytailed,” Ansari says. “We thought, imagine if we did $100,000 in revenue … the deal was, we’d get matching tracksuits. We hit that milestone, but then just looked to the next, and the goals got loftier. We never did get those tracksuits—we should.”
By 2019, Gainful had secured a “tremendous set of investors” to help it scale, Ansari says. Among the first was BrandProject, which had already invested in personalized nutrition, including Persona, now owned by Nestlé, which leveraged its team to help with marketing, technology, design and branding.