Two $100M+ Operators Get Honest About Launching New Brands

Let me just like for quick context for those listening.

Ridge launched a fiber and hydration brand earlier this year called Gut Culture.

And it was just Ridge for the last few years has had a number of like swings that we've taken.

A lot of our new category development has come from just like rapid experimentation in terms of like what can we get live and figure out whether we can scale ads or whether our existing customer base wants it, things like that.

Gut Culture was our first example of a net new brand.

So I'm super stoked to kind of dive in on the weeds here.

I will say we basically completely shelved it for now.

It's very much on the back burner.

We gave it a really solid effort for six months.

The big thing is just the opportunity cost of running Gut Culture right now is too high.

We're wrapping up Q3 now and we're up 50% year over year.

We're growing in international markets.

We're growing in retail.

We've got our time and attention to spend on much higher leveraged things right now.

When we decided to experiment with a new brand like Gut Culture.

It seemed a little bit more advantageous.

The risk reward seemed better.

At this moment in time, we're really focused back on the core brand.

But you know, Sean and I have been here 10 years.

Over the next 10 years, we'll take many more swings at new brands, I'm sure.

So just to like level set, that's where we're currently at with Gut Culture.

Love that, love

that.

We kind of carved out 10, 15% of our internal team's time.

So we were almost approaching like, what does it look like if Ridge were to act more like a holding company? Or if we treated our marketing department as more of like a growth service that could be used across different brand properties.