The Next Supplement Wave Pt 2: How Arrae Out-Positioned an Entire Category

In this episode, we're going to look at the positioning of the women's supplement brand RA. Spelled ARRE. They launched six years ago and crossed a hundred million dollars in revenue line. They are not winning because they have a format nobody has seen before. They are winning because the positioning is razor sharp. And by the end of this episode, I'm going to unpack that positioning and show you why it's working at a level most supplement marketing never even reaches. And you see, it's not the product that sells with marketing as the wrapper. With supplements, it's almost the reverse. People don't buy supplements the way they buy other products. And in a market, this crowded, the words you wrap around your product are often everything. And array proves it. But before we dig in, this is part two of a series called The Next Wave, where we're looking at the supplement brands scaling right now and pulling out what they're doing differently from the last generation. In part one, I made the case that the next wave is winning on positioning and specificity instead of format. Today, we go deep on the sharpest example of that in the whole category. You don't need part one to follow this, but they stack nicely if you want to go back. Welcome to Health Business Mastery, the creative thirst podcast. I'm your host, Bobby Hewitt. Okay, let me start with why this matters so much right now because if you're running a supplement brand positioning is probably the single most under invested thing you've got. And think about where most of your energy goes. It goes into the formula, into sourcing, into the label, and the packaging, into the ads, the creative, the funnel, the email flows. All of that matters, but almost nobody sits down and does the hard thinking about positioning, about who exactly this is for and what exact words make that person stop and feel seen. And you can see the result of that everywhere. Go look at 10 supplement websites in any category right now. Read the headlines. They all say some version of the same thing. Support your gut health. Science-backed wellness. Ingredients you can trust. It's all interchangeable mush. You could swap the logos and nobody would notice. That's the problem because when your positioning is interchangeable, you've handed the buyer no reason to choose you except price and reviews. And the moment the decision comes down to price and reviews, you've lost because there's always someone cheaper on Amazon and someone with more reviews than you. Broad interchangeable positioning also wrecks your economics. In a way, most founders never connect back to the words on the page. When your message speaks to everyone, your ads have to compete for everyone's attention, which means you're bidding against the entire category for the same expensive clicks. Your cost to acquire a customer climbs. Your conversion rate stays flat. And you start to believe you have a traffic problem or a creative problem when what you actually have is a positioning problem. The message isn't doing any of the qualifying work. So you're paying to qualify people with ad spend instead. Yes, it's a crowded market full of brands that all sound the same, all fighting over the same clicks, all bleeding margin because none of them are doing the selling in their marketing. But then there's a ray. A ray was built around targeted women's wellness problems. Bloting, anxiety, heartburn, sleep, gut health. Forbes has profiled them as a nine-figure wellness brand and reported year-to-date growth north of 460%. They started direct to consumer and they've since expanded into real retail. Sprouts, target, Ulta. Their bloating product is what put them on the map. And they've built out a focused lineup from there, including their metabolism product, Mb1. And more recently, they partnered with Pamela Anderson on a metabolic product aimed at women 45 and up. So this isn't hype. This is a brand that went from nothing to nine figures in about five years in one of the most crowded corners of the entire supplement world, women's wellness. And I'm telling you that the engine underneath that growth isn't a proprietary molecule. Nobody else has the engine is positioning. So let's take it apart. Their positioning line is targeted supplements for unsexy problems. Let's start with the second half because that's where the real psychology lives, the unsexy problems. Bloting, anxiety, heartburn, gut issues. What do all of those have in common beyond being health problems? They're a little embarrassing. They carry a quiet shame with them. Nobody wants to stand up in a meeting and talk about how bloated they feel. Nobody posts on Instagram about their heartburn. These are the problems people deal with privately and don't say out loud because there's a low grade embarrassment attached to them. Now here's what almost every other brand in this space does with a problem like bloating. They either tiptoe around it with clinical sanitized language, gentle digestive support, or they go the other way and get gross and medical about it in a way that makes the buyer feel worse. Both of those miss the mark. What Array did instead is they named the emotional truth out loud. By calling these problems unsexy, they said the quiet part that the buyer feels, but nobody in the category will acknowledge. They basically looked the buyer in the eye and said, yeah, this stuff is kind of embarrassing and unglomerious and annoying. We know we're not going to pretend it isn't and that acknowledgement is disarming. It creates instant recognition. The buyer reads unsexy problems and thinks finally somebody who gets it and isn't going to make me feel weird about it. This connects to something I've talked about before, which is the core emotion of a market. Underneath a lot of these women's wellness problems, the core emotion isn't really the physical discomfort. It's the shame and the self-consciousness that ride along with it. The feeling of my body is doing this embarrassing thing and I can't control it. If you understand that the real emotion in the market is shame, then the worst thing you can do is pile more shame on with clinical or judgmental language. The most powerful thing you can do is take the shame off the table entirely, which is exactly what the word unsexy does. It's playful. It's knowing. It refuses to treat the problem as something to be ashamed of. There's a technique underneath this that's worth naming because you can use it. When you describe a negative or embarrassing situation, the way you phrase it determines whether the buyer feels attacked or feels understood. If you say you're bloated and gassy and it's embarrassing, you've just attached all of that directly to the person and made them feel bad. If you frame the problem as a category of unsexy problems, a thing lots of people deal with, you've described their exact situation without making them the problem. You've put them in the problem instead of making them be the problem. That's a subtle shift and it's the difference between copy that makes someone flinch and copy that makes someone lean in. That's the unsexy problems have. Now let's look at the first part of their positioning because it's doing something completely different and just as important. Remember, it's targeted supplements for unsexy problems. That word targeted isn't describing the problem. It's making a promise about how the solution works and in a category drowning in vague do everything wellness. The word targeted is doing an enormous amount of quiet work. It says this isn't another catch all multivitamin that sort of helps with everything and nothing. This is aimed. This is precise. There's a specific product for your specific problem. Blote for bloating. Calm for anxiety. One clear job per product done well. That precision is exactly the specificity idea we talked about in the first episode of this series made into a single word. The whole thesis of the next wave is that broad is invisible and sharp wins. Targeted is array, planting a flag on sharp. It tells the buyer in one word that this brand isn't going to hand her a fuzzy promise. It's going to hand her the right tool for the exact thing she's dealing with. In a sophisticated market that's heard every vague wellness claim a thousand times, that promise of precision is a genuine relief. But here's where it gets even smarter because targeted and unsexy pulling in opposite directions is the whole trick. The founder has described the mission as sexy solutions for unsexy problems. And you can feel that tension in everything the brand does. The problems are unglamorous. Blow gas, anxiety, but the brand around them is anything but it's polished, modern, aspirational. So the buyer gets to deal with her decidedly unsexy problem through a brand that makes her feel confident, current, and in on the joke. She's not a person defeated by her bloating. She's a person who's got it handled with a product that feels like it belongs in her life, not in a pharmacy. That's an identity layer sitting on top of the targeting and it's the same move, the strongest brands in the last wave pulled just aimed at a different feeling. The buyer doesn't want to see herself as someone with a shameful gut problem. She wants to see herself as someone who's ahead of it, who found the cool, sharp little brand that gets it. Array hands her that identity to step into and people will pay a real premium to buy the version of themselves they want to be. So look at what this positioning accomplishes altogether. The word unsexy creates recognition and takes away the shame. It says we see your exact problem and we're not going to make you feel bad about it. The word targeted promises precision. It says there's a specific aim solution for your specific thing, not another vague catch all and the aspirational brand wrapped around both of them hands the buyer and identity. It says here's who you get to be when you handle it with us. You've got recognition and relief from the shame on one side a promise of precision in the middle and aspiration and identity on the outside. That's an enormous amount of psychological work happening in a line short enough to sit at the top of a home page. Now let me connect this to the four forces because this is where it ties back to everything I teach about how people actually buy supplements. If you're new to the show my whole framework is that supplement buying runs on four forces. Desire, hope, trust and belief. And great positioning doesn't replace those forces. It's the thing that lets all four of them land. Start with desire. Remember it's easier to intensify what's already there than it is to create desire. The woman dealing with bloating already wants it gone. That desire is sitting there fully formed before R.A. ever shows up. What sharp positioning does is grab that existing desire in the first two seconds and make her feel like this brand is aimed directly at it. Broad positioning lets the desire drift. Sharp positioning locks on to it instantly. Same desire but one brand captures it and the other lets it wander off to the next tab. Then belief. This is a big one because belief is about aligning with what the buyer already thinks and feels rather than trying to argue her into something new. When a rate calls these problems unsexy they're aligning perfectly with what the buyer already believes. She already believes bloating is annoying and a little embarrassing. The brand isn't trying to change that belief. It's agreeing with it out loud which makes the buyer feel understood which makes everything the brand says next more believable. You earn the right to be believed on the hard stuff. By first showing the buyer you already understand the easy true human stuff. When you're positioning nails desire and belief up front your hope and your trust land harder later because a buyer who feels instantly understood is a buyer who's leaning in open ready to believe your mechanism might actually work for her and ready to trust your proof. But a buyer who felt nothing when she hit your page because your positioning was mush that buyer is skeptical and half gone before you ever get to your ingredients or your clinical study. Sharp positioning doesn't just help desire and belief it sets the table for all four forces. Now I want to talk about the thing that scares most founders about this approach because it's the exact thing that makes it work. Sharp positioning is polarizing. Unsexy problems is unapologetically aimed at a specific woman. It's not trying to also appeal to a 60-year-old man buying a hard-health supplement. It's not trying to be for everyone and that narrowness isn't a weakness. It's the entire source of the power. Here's why. A message sharp enough to strongly attract the right person is always sharp enough to not attract the wrong person. You can't have one without the other. The brands that try to appeal to everyone end up magnetic to no one because there's nothing specific enough to grab onto. The moment a rye decided to be unmistakably for a certain kind of woman with a certain kind of problem and a certain sense of humor about it they became invisible to everyone else and irresistible to her. She's the only one who is ever going to buy anyway. This is also by the way where the economics get really good. When your positioning is this sharp the message itself does the qualifying. The right buyer sees it and self-selects in. The wrong buyer scrolls past and never cost you a click that was never going to buy anyway. That's how you get a lower cost to acquire a customer and a higher conversion rate at the same time which normally feel like their intention. Sharp positioning relieves that tension because you stop paying to put your message in front of people it was never for. So let's make this practical because I don't want you to just admire a rye's tagline. I want you to be able to build your own version of this and there's a specific exercise I want you to run. Start by writing down the actual problem your product solves and then keep asking what's the real emotion underneath it. Not the physical symptom the feeling. If you sell a sleep product the surface problem is trouble sleeping but the real emotion might be the anxiety of lying awake watching the clock knowing tomorrow is going to be a wreck. If you sell a metabolism product the surface problem is weight but the real emotion is often shame or frustration or the feeling of doing everything right and getting nowhere. You have to find the emotion because the emotion is what your positioning has to speak to. The symptom is just the doorway. Then ask yourself the array question. What is the true slightly unspoken thing about this problem that everyone in my category is too polite or too clinical to say out loud because that unspoken truth is your unsexy problems. That's the phrase that's going to make your buyer feel seen in a way no competitor has made her feel. The gold is almost always in the thing nobody's willing to name and then on the other side ask what identity does my buyer get to step into when this problem is handled. Who does she get to be? Because that's your sexy that's the aspiration you're wrapping around the solution you want both halves. The honest disarming truth about the problem and the aspirational identity on the far side of it. When you've got both and you can say them in a handful of words you've got positioning that does the work of a hundred ads. But let me warn you about how this goes wrong because a lot of brands are going to hear this and mess it up. The first way people mess it up is they try to be clever. They reach for a cute punny tagline that sounds like positioning but isn't rooted in a real emotion the buyer actually feels. A raise line isn't clever for the sake of clever. It's clever because it's true. Unsexy problems is funny because it's exactly how the buyer secretly thinks about her own bloating. If you're sharp line isn't anchored in a real felt truth it's just a slogan and buyers can smell a slogan. The second way people mess it up is they fall in love with the words and forget the product still has to deliver. Sharp positioning gets the right buyer in the door and gets her to try you. But if the product doesn't work or the experience is bad all that positioning did was help more of the right people find out you don't deliver. Positioning is the promise. The product still has to keep it. A raise line works partly because the products behind it actually perform for the women they're aimed at. The positioning and the product point at the same buyer and the same promise. They're not in conflict. And the third way people mess it up and this is the most common is they get scared of the narrowness and they sand off the edges. They come up with something sharp and then leadership gets nervous that it excludes too many people so they broaden it, soften it, make it safer until it's back to being interchangeable mush that offends no one and attracts no one. If you take one thing from this episode let it be this. The edges are the point. The moment you sand them off to be safe, you've thrown away the entire advantage. Broad feels safe and performs terribly. Sharp feels risky and performs. In this market, sharp wins. So let me pull this all the way back to the thing I care most about you understanding, which is that this isn't generic marketing advice. It's specific to how supplements get bought. In a lot of categories, you can win on distribution or on being the cheapest or on sheer ad volume. Supplements are different because the buyer is skeptical. She's seen every promise before. She's a little jaded and she's making an emotional decision and a functional decision at the same time. In that environment, positioning that makes her feel instantly and specifically understood isn't a nice to have. It's how you cut through at all. It's how you get her to lower her guard. Long enough to hear your mechanism and look at your proof. Array didn't outformula the women's wellness category. That category is packed with good formulas. They outpositioned it. They found the sharpest, truest, most disarming way to speak to a specific woman about her specific unglamorous problems. They wrapped an aspirational identity around the solution. That's the leverage that lives in positioning when you actually do the work most brands skip. Look, if this episode hit a nerve, if you're sitting there realizing your positioning is the interchangeable mush, I was describing. That's actually good news because it's fixable and it's the highest leverage fix you've got. If you'd rather not wrestle it to the ground alone and you want a team that does supplement positioning for a living to build it with you, that's exactly what we do at Creative Thirst. We specialize only in dietary supplements. We work with a small number of brands at a time and we're selective about who we take on. If that's where your brand is right now, you can apply to work with us at CreativeThirst.com.