With the rise of accessibility to information via social media, learning about your health has never been easier. It seems like everybody wants to share strategies to promote wellness, yet there is still a stigma around conversations about women’s sexual and reproductive wellness.
Mixhers has challenged that stigma and put it at the forefront of their women-owned brand aimed at empowering other women to own their wellness. After Jess Toolson found herself postpartum with kids and facing true PMS symptoms for the first time in her life, she decided to set off on her own health journey to tackle the problem at the source.
This brand is taking the women’s wellness space by storm and aims to increase brand awareness to get their product in front of the women who need them. From relying on affiliate and influencer marketing for most of their revenue, to establishing brand recognition and having women come directly to them—Mixhers has gone head-on to create a community of like-minded women on a mission.
Jess and Kara Atkisson joined us on our Hit Subscribe podcast to take us through how the Mixhers’ brand went from 60 subscribers to 9,000 and become a leader in their industry through increased brand exposure. Continue reading to learn more about their brand awareness journey.
Key takeaways
- The Mixhers brand was founded on the desire to get ahead of women’s health issues.
- As their product offerings grew, brand awareness became key and they transitioned to a new tech stack to support their scaling.
- Establishing themselves as leaders in the womens health space has set Mixhers apart from other brands.
The beginning of Mixhers
Growing up, Jess Toolson found herself unable to relate to her friends in their teenage years when their PMS symptoms, like cramping, had such a high impact on their daily lives. But this all changed after she had children and began experiencing common PMS symptoms that teenagers face, like cystic acne, cramping, and heavy flow.
Taking matters into her own hands
Though she tried her hand at medications to resolve the symptoms, they weren’t actually solving the problem at its root—so Jess took it upon herself to be her own advocate for her health and wellness.
“I wasn’t feeling better on these prescriptions. So I really decided to be my own health advocate and find my own solution.”
– Jess Toolson, CEO at Mixhers
Bring in Cody Sanders, her now business partner. Together they worked to formulate the perfect conction of herbs to support a woman’s menstrual cycle needs for the brand. Jess tried them out for herself and committed to them longterm, rather than relying on short-term solutions like the medications she had been prescribed.
With a commitment to attacking the underlying issues, Jess begun to notice that taking these supplements reduced the symptoms she had been experiencing. Her own journey was a great example of what was possible through a commitment to health advocacy and holistic wellness. From there, they went from helping one woman to wanting to launch a brand and build awareness for a product to help the masses.
Now, Mixhers has nine products that each work to improve women’s heatlh. They’ve been listening to their customers’ needs and staying true to their brand image—a brand for women, by women.
Why subscriptions?
Everybody Jess talked to related to what she was going through and yet a true solution was simply not as accessible as it needed to be. The target audiences had always been women who related to Jess’ struggles at the time, and Mixhers aimed to get brand visibility and put their products in the hands of these potential customers who truly wanted a change.
With their flagship product being a supplement to support women’s monthly period cycle, it made sense to offer subscription for convenience for their paying customers. They wanted to make this product functional, accessible, and easy.
From there, the brand’s offerings has grown to more than just support for that time of month. Mixhers has evolved to a brand that aims to heal and support many different areas of womens health.
As brand product options grew, so did the need to build brand awareness and garner new customers. They knew that their products worked, but with a brand awareness strategy they could get Mixhers into the hands of women who needed them. While advertising campaigns get the job done, they knew that by building awareness around their products, they could create spokeswomen that would do the marketing for them.
The hiring decision to increase brand awareness
In comes Kara. Three weeks after the launch of Mixhers and 60 subscribers in, Kara was introduced to Mixhers to create brand awareness and work on their marketing strategy. While she initially started off as an invested employee from a marketing agency, Jess saw that she was the one who was going to bring Mixhers to the next level and she came on full time in 2020.
Since then, the company has grown to a team of almost 20 women. While one might assume that they hired on industry experts with such fast growth, the reality is that many of their employees are young, with minimal experience, diving headfirst into garnering new audiences for their tried and true product.
“And that’s one of my most favorite things to tell people is like, we run a very young team. For most, this is a first job, or they’ve come off from an internship and entered into Mixhers.”
– Jess Toolson, CEO at Mixhers
Scaling for growth
As Mixhers continued to grow from one product to nine and 60 subscribers to 9,000, they needed to move off of their previous WordPress Woocommerce tech stack to Shopify and a new subscription platform. With such a small team, it was actually just Kara with the help of a UX designer and developer who undertook the task of migrating their 9,000 subscribers to a new ecommerce and subscription platform.
Transitioning to a new tech stack
The reason for this transition: scalability and conversion. They wanted to move off of their previous tech stack to one that optimized conversion rates and would make sense for their ever evolving digital marketing strategy. They wanted to get their product in front of people to create brand awareness, but they also wanted to make sure they were driving traffic to an optimized online storefront for the greatest return. And so, they made the change to Shopify.
With the new platform’s conversion rate optimization and their subsequent update to Recharge, they were able to gain 4,000 new subscribers in just the first couple of months.
After Kara evaluated her choices for a new ecommerce platform, the decision to bring the brand to Recharge to power their subscriptions came with the desire to reduce friction with the migration as much as possible. This ended up opening the door for quick growth through two simple things: a better website and a streamlined process for their subscribers, paired with high brand awareness.
How Mixhers reached their target audience & grew their subscriber base
With such a niche product and market, Mixhers was able to build brand awareness by simultaneously building up the community they served. With minimal competitors in this space they were able to create brand awareness through relatability, including influencer and affiliate marketing strategies through brand partnership.
Gaining momentum that fueled brand recognition
Jess and Kara note how in the initial stages of their brand awareness campaign, people didn’t want to talk periods and menstruation in social media posts. But, after a few invested women went full force as Mixhers’ very own brand evangelists, they were able to differentiate themselves in the digital world with their own unique brand voice.
“It was amazing to see how, even like you say a viral product, also viral energy. It’s like all of a sudden, instead of us trying to beg for people to talk about Mixhers, it changed.”
– Jess Toolson, CEO at Mixhers
Since this turning point in the brand awareness journey, customers and interested women began reaching out to them and wanting to work with them. They became more than just a product, but an instigator to important conversations that needed to be had in the social media space. By building brand awareness they were able to cater to the needs of women and create a community that talked about the important things and also offered solutions for common problems that women were facing.
The next chapter for Mixhers
The journey isn’t over and there is still much work to be done to continue creating brand awareness. When asked what the brand had in store for the rest of 2022, the answer was simple: more of what they were already doing. After their transition to a new tech stack and fast growth last year, they decided to branch into doing more events to raise brand awareness and connect with the community.
We loved chatting with Jess and Kara about how they’ve built such a strong brand community both with their customers and within their team, and are so excited to see what their brand does next!
Check out the full interview with Jess and Kara, as well as conversations with other industry experts, on our Hit Subscribe podcast.
Sources
[1] About Us (Mixhers)
[2] Conversion Rate Optimization (Recharge ecommerce glossary )
[3] How Mixhers builds community and empowers women (Hit Subscribe podcast)
