Lo Bosworth’s Recipe For A Successful Launch on Social Media
Most of you will know Lo Bosworth as the reality TV girlie from The Hills or Laguna Beach, but she’s dedicated the past 8 years to building an incredible supplement biz, Love Wellness.
Lo's business is pretty huge (tens of millions in sales and a Target best-seller), but she started like all of us: with her savings, Google, and social media.
Love Wellness started with vaginal health products before launching into gut health and more categories. She spent the first two years building this business herself—DIY-ing the website, Googling how to find manufacturers, using her own savings and literally just doing the scrappy stuff we all do.
“I was calling contract manufacturers and doctors being like, ‘I have this idea. Can you help me?’”
Lo launched Love Wellness by leveraging social media and influencers. If she was launching in 2023, she’d make one key change—add shock value.
“I think the number one thing is, is there shock value in your content? You have to have a story that is so wild and so out there. Beautiful lifestyle ads simply don't work anymore.”
On top of their website, Love Wellness launched years ago on Amazon, and Lo says it was a total flop. Two years ago she hired an agency, and that channel has been performing way better.
“If you're trying to scale a business, there's only some things that you should learn firsthand. Otherwise, you waste a lot of time and money by trying to figure things out yourself.”
Most of Lo’s launch budget went towards inventory (so actually buying the product) and digital ads. In their first two years, Love Wellness saw 3000% growth and by 2019 hit eight-figures in revenue. Lo’s since picked up $25m in investor money.
In 2019 Love Wellness launched at Ulta, followed quickly by Target. Lo decided to originally place her products in the clean beauty aisle rather than the tampon aisle, where similar brands lived. She thought women would be more comfortable hanging out in a beauty aisle and she was right—Love Wellness became a best seller in both retailers.
Lo’s comfortable with losing some customers who would usually buy from her own website to her Amazon store and retail stockists, even though both Amazon and stockists take a cut from the sale. She says brands need to consider “a sale is a sale” and let customers shop where they’re comfortable or where it’s easiest (i.e. where their cc and shipping info’s stored!). On the Love Wellness website, they’re even testing a ‘Buy on Amazon’ button.
Subscriptions have been a big part of their online biz too (using Shopify app Recharge). More first time customers subscribe than make single purchases!
Love Wellness has a huge (thousands of members!) community hub hosted on a third party platform, but they’re moving the ‘Love Club’ to a custom-built space on the website to give loyal customers another reason to visit the Love Wellness online store.
