CARE/OF, CRAIG ELBERT: The Personalized Pharmacy

Navigating the vitamin aisle at a chain pharmacy can feel like being lost in the wilderness - unfamiliar figures loom with no clear instructions on what direction to take. Supplements are a $40 billion industry in the United States, but until recently no progress had been made to improve the struggle of identifying and shopping for vitamins. Enter Care/of and Co-founder Craig Elbert, who has an eclectic history in everything from traditional banking to the music industry to high-growth startups.

With Care/of, Craig (who also serves as CEO) has created a seamless and exciting consumer experience around the necessity of daily vitamins. Craig filled us in on the colorful experience that made him the perfect entrepreneur to tackle the medicine cabinet, and the insight he’s gathered for future founders. 

The Childhood

Craig grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, and can instantly call to mind the early habits that hinted at an entrepreneurial mindset. He credits selling baseball cards to his friends at a young age as his first childhood venture. 

“I think of entrepreneurialism as creating things, and growing up I wrote music and did creative writing, which captures that idea of the act of creating something,” Craig said. “Building Care/of what’s always been important to me is that I’m building a brand, and that act of creation feels like something more artistic in a way.”

Before Craig reached the opportunity to create something of his own, he found himself looking for the right fit in the corporate world. 

“After college, I wound up doing investment banking because that seemed like a thing a lot of people did. I did it for two years and hated it; it wasn't for me. I quit that job with no other job lined up and spent some time trying to write fiction at the public library as part of some kind of quarter-life crisis.” Craig said. 

Like many successful founders, Craig had prior attempts at starting something on his own that didn’t pan out. He tried to open a financial consulting business, but his background as an investment banker didn’t line up with the client base he pursued in the boutique retail market. He also worked on a video aggregator for cooking content that never quite took off. Eventually, he reflected on his lifelong passion for music and enjoyment from working at a record store in high school and got a job at Warner Music Group.

“I found that with investment banking there was a lot of high talent density, a lot of really smart people, but there was a low passion for what they were doing,” Craig said. “When I was working at a large public music company I found that the talent density was not as high, but the passion was there. What I wanted was something where I would get high passion and high talent density.”

That desire took Craig out of the corporate machine and into business school at where else - Wharton! After graduation, he started as an early employee at Bonobos when they had just raised their seed round. Craig cut his teeth in the startup world and was able to learn the ups and the downs of building a business, and came to see how a venture-backed brand comes together. 

The Aha Moment

Craig was working on ideas with the team at the startup accelerator Juxtapose in 2015 when he discovered both the personal and business motivations behind Care/of, which he ultimately founded with Akash Shah.

“My wife was taking prenatal vitamins and I had been told that I was Vitamin D deficient, so I was shopping this category, but going into the retail experience it just felt so miserable,” Craig said. “At Bonobos we talked about how we make things delightful, how we focus on the customer. This was a category that wasn't focused on the customer, so that felt like an opportunity.”

On the business side, the size of the industry combined with the negative Net Promoter Score made supplements a healthy category for improvement. Some free BSchool vocabulary for you: Net Promoter Score is an index ranging from -100 to 100 that measures the willingness of customers to recommend your products or services to others. 

“The consumer experience for vitamins showed up as worse than getting cable installed, or worse than getting health insurance,” Craig said. “These are notoriously bad experiences and this one showed up even worse. There are true consumer issues but also very positive business attributes in terms of market size, a problem we can solve, and margin that lends itself well to a digitally native business.”

“Design-wise, we live in a world of icons and symbols, and it was naturally shortened to one because ‘care of’ is always written C/o.”

There’s nothing like a full room at an accelerator to help you out with name generation. We can definitely see how Care/of came from a brainstorming post-it!

“We had a list of different names and someone had just written C/o, and that one stood out as different. We were looking at names like Habit and Juniper, Heyday which is ironic, and then just C/o. It was great because it looked different, it has care in the name, and serves as an intermediary - like a healthy heart ‘care of’ that person.” Craig said.

“It’s important to build marketing into the products to have as much word of mouth as you can.”

With a major emphasis on packaging as part of the Care/of experience, Craig tells us that great care was given to making each box something that would bring vitamins out of the cabinet and onto the counter. The packages don’t look medicinal, and each box features a new rotating design.

“We’ve worked to take a category which is normally very private and make it fun and social,” Craig said. “That meant thinking through packaging so the daily packs have your name on them, and each one has a different quote or something fun each day.”

As Care/of gained customers who loved their product and the way it looks, they noticed organic traction with press coverage and user-generated images. Craig’s strategy has been to lean into that success and amplify it with paid tactics like influencer posts and sponsored content.

Successes on the marketing side have been met with some operational growing pains they’ve had to overcome. Care/of’s product is personalized which means they’ve packed and sold over 250,000 different combinations and printed unique names on them all, with different collateral in each box. 

“There was a lot that I underestimated operationally, but ultimately it winds up being a unique asset and is something that's difficult to replicate,” Craig said.

The Advice

Craig has learned a lot from the founders he’s worked with and from being one himself. His advice to anyone getting into the game: 

• Just start doing - don’t get too bogged down in strategy and decks. Get feedback as soon as possible.

• Consider launching an MVP/Beta Brand to get insights on your product offering without tainting the real brand. 

• When coming from large corporate jobs into a faster-paced environment be decisive and err on the side of action. Don’t be reactive, but make decisions and push forward.

Looking to ramp up your vitamin game? Get your personalized care here.

Photo courtesy of Care/of. 

Written by Kendall Embs.