Under The Hood: RC From Rejuvia

Let’s start with a simple question: How are you sleeping these days?

Finally sleeping a lot better! It was in late 2020/early 2021 when we came up with the idea of the oral sleep spray, and since then, our sleep has been off the charts. As a former D1 soccer player and my mom being a generally health-conscious person, we’d always wanted to create something in the health and wellness space. 

We had always known how critical sleep was to the overall health function, but both of us had been struggling with it in recent years (maybe COVID, stress from college, etc.). The classic supplements on the market – melatonin gummies, generic sleep capsules – weren’t doing the trick for us, and we didn’t love the ingredients we found in them. My mom had a critical medical manufacturing background, which ultimately led us to the unique oral spray form factor of Rejuvia. 

How long did it take you to go from idea to reality, and what did it entail?

It took us about a year or so. We spent a lot of initial time thinking through and researching our sleep formula and how we wanted to craft our ingredient blend for V1 of the product. We also spent a lot of time thinking through the brand, our unique messaging, and how we wanted to position our product.

The sleep aids market is pretty saturated. How did you feel about entering it?

In general, we were really excited about the sleep supplement category. It’s crowded, like most CPG markets nowadays, but there’s always room for unique brands with top-tier products. We knew we had a good enough product to make a dent in the market and build a sustainable business, but we had to do a lot of thinking around the brand and what was going to make us stand out.

My mom had come from the product and manufacturing side of things, and I really had no prior experience, so the whole marketing, branding, and customer acquisition side of things was a completely new game to us.

In the beginning, what expectations did you have for Rejuvia in terms of sales or customer volumes?

We were really excited whenever we would hear the Shopify jingle go off. Every order used to come from people we would personally know – friends, family, or friends of friends. We really had no expectations early on; we were just excited whenever someone would give our products a try, and we would use that as an opportunity to learn about our customers and how our products impact their lives. 

In the early days, if we got 10 orders per day, we saw that as a huge success and something we didn’t think was possible. Of course, things have changed, but those milestones of 1, 10, 100, and 1,000 orders per day all mean just as much.

How did you attract your first customers?

The first customers we ever acquired were family and friends. I think that has to be true for most CPG businesses. Most of the early customers who are still with us today came from organic Facebook and Instagram posts both of us shared on our personal profiles. We were lucky to have such a great group of customers off the bat who gave us honest feedback and helped us build the business in an accelerated fashion.

We also started forming influencer marketing partnerships with fitness-related influencers, as we initially thought that was going to be our ICP. Those two strategies combined helped us acquire our first 1,000 or so customers.

What’s been the #1 piece of feedback you’ve gotten about Rejuvia? 

We can make the product even better. It takes time to build a 10/10 product; almost every batch we manufacture has some formula or ingredient iteration based on consumer feedback and testing, but we still think we have so much headway to make. 

We also get a lot of feedback around the flavoring of our sleep spray – believe it or not, flavoring is one of the hardest aspects to balance within the formula (which contains 13 natural sleep ingredients). We’re considering launching new flavors down the line and offering different sets of sleep formulas to attract various segments of the sleep supplement category.

When did you realize you were onto something big with Rejuvia? Can you describe a turning point when Rejuvia went from a startup to a real competitor?

Once we started acquiring customers through word of mouth, and we didn’t know who they were, we realized we were onto something that could be impactful. We thought it was unbelievable when someone who wasn’t family or a friend tried our product and continued ordering each month. That was turning point one.

Turning point two had to be when we moved our fulfillment over to Shipfusion. We had grown a lot and were still managing everything on our own – literally thousands and thousands of sprays would get shipped to our home, we would package them into boxes, and then we hired an incredible employee who would help us ship out hundreds of orders per day. We realized it wasn’t sustainable when it was starting to consume all of our time, and we were struggling to scale our volume. Once we could confidently pass off our fulfillment and inventory management to Shipfusion, we knew we could finally focus entirely on growing the business.

What were some of the specific challenges that accompanied your growth? What advice would you give to other startups?

Financing a D2C business is tough. Even if you’re posting 10-20% profit each month, it’s hard to make the cash actually appear since it’s usually tied up in inventory buys. We struggled with that early on; we thought it was going to be really easy to grow month-over-month given the nature of the business, but a lot more goes into it than just watching your Shopify Sales go up. We didn’t realize how hard it is to make a D2C business look good on and off paper without scale and some leverage angle.

We also struggled to delegate aspects of the business to trusted partners when we needed to do so. We always wanted to do everything ourselves and have total control – branding, marketing, fulfillment, product, etc. But it became clear that to break through to the next level of growth, we had to trust partners like Shipfusion. While having total control over every aspect of the business was instrumental to our success early on, we realized we had created a glass ceiling for ourselves by doing that. 

You’re a relatively small operation that’s doing big numbers. How are you staying on top of it all? How important was finding the right partners (like a 3PL) in enabling you to scale quickly?

The beauty of the D2C model is that you can run a lean operation and still build a large business. If you embrace that and build with that in mind from the start, then you can scale significantly, even with limited resources. We aimed to do that from the beginning and being a family business definitely helped. Communication and trust are easy, and there isn’t any “fluff” that you might find in non-family businesses where people are scared to speak up or call things out. 

We’ve maintained that approach. My mom and I still manage a lot of things ourselves, but now we do it with the help of great partners like Shipfusion. Finding highly skilled partners for areas outside our core strengths, like fulfillment, has been incredible for our ability to scale.