Lumen Founders Kris and Yasir's Unconventional Path to Success

🏠 Most health strategies fail for one reason: they rely on willpower in environments designed to undermine it. 🏠 What patients do for one hour in a gym cannot compete with what their home environment reinforces for the other 23. 🏠 In this article, board-certified surgeon and lifestyle medicine expert Dr. Seun Sowemimo, MD, MBA, MS, FACS, FASMBS, outlines a more effective approach—designing your environment to make better decisions automatic, not effortful. 🏠 This principle is consistently observed in populations studied in the Blue Zones, where environment—not motivation—drives daily behavior. For patients managing weight, metabolic health, or recovery after surgery, this shift is foundational. ☑️ Small environmental shifts. ☑️ Measurable clinical impact. https://lnkd.in/eceiPMvR #LifestyleMedicine #PreventiveHealth #drseun #njhealth

𝗖𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗯𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆-𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸𝗲𝗱 𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗱𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗻𝗼 ��𝗼𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗿 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘀𝗼𝗹𝗲𝗹𝘆 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝗮𝘂𝘁𝘆 𝗼𝗿 𝗯𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀, 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴𝗹𝘆 𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘂𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗹𝗼𝗻𝗴𝗲𝘃𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗰𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲. Kylie Jenner’s Khy-inspired K.O hydration concept reflects a broader market movement where skincare, hydration, supplementation, and lifestyle branding converge into a single wellness identity. Formulated around electrolytes, hyaluronic acid, and collagen peptides, the product aligns with growing consumer demand for ingestible beauty solutions that support hydration, skin resilience, and functional wellness from within. As the global beauty-wellness market continues to expand, consumers are seeking products that merge convenience, aesthetic appeal, and science-led functionality. What makes this category particularly significant is its ability to transform wellness into a daily ritual, one that is aspirational, socially visible, and deeply integrated into modern lifestyle culture. The rise of “beauty-from-within” supplementation is increasingly influencing how younger consumers approach preventative skincare and holistic health. At 📥 Longevity PR , we see this evolution as part of a larger transition where longevity is becoming culturally embedded through consumer products that combine wellness science with strong emotional branding. 𝐊𝐞𝐲 𝐎𝐛𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬: • Ingestible beauty is emerging as one of the fastest-growing sectors within wellness and skincare • Hyaluronic acid and collagen peptides continue gaining traction in skin hydration and healthy aging conversations • Celebrity-led wellness brands are increasingly driving consumer adoption through lifestyle positioning and community influence • Consumers are prioritizing multifunctional products that blend beauty, hydration, and preventative wellness benefits 𝐋𝐨𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐏𝐑 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞: The future of longevity will not only be clinical—it will be experiential, aspirational, and culturally driven. Brands operating at the intersection of wellness, beauty, and lifestyle are redefining how younger generations engage with preventative health and daily optimization. . . Longevity, Ingestible Beauty, Hydration, Collagen Peptides, Hyaluronic Acid, Wellness Innovation, Preventive Health, Beauty Wellness . . #Longevity #IngestibleBeauty #Hydration #Collagen #HyaluronicAcid #PreventiveHealth #Wellness #BeautyWellness #Innovation #FutureOfHealth

Most DTC supplement and wellness founders I speak to are trying to fix a 2026 problem with 2021 tactics. Here's what's actually changed in the last 18 months. Meta CPMs in health and supplements are up 30-40% year on year. Pixel-based tracking now captures under 60% of actual conversions. Around 30% of supplement ads get rejected before they ever run. Average DTC CAC has climbed 222% over the past eight years. And yet, the playbook most brands are still running looks like this: more ad sets, narrower audiences, manual interest stacking, purchase-event optimisation on accounts that don't have the conversion volume to support it. That worked when CPMs were £6 and the pixel saw everything. It does not work now. The brands quietly pulling ahead in this category are doing the opposite. Fewer campaigns, broader targeting, CAPI properly wired in, and creative volume treated as the actual targeting mechanism (because in Meta's Andromeda system, it now is). The uncomfortable part: most "underperformance" I see in seven-figure accounts is not a creative problem or a budget problem. It is a signal problem. The algorithm is making decisions on incomplete data, then founders are making decisions on the algorithm's incomplete decisions. Compounding error. Expensive one. If you are a wellness or supplements founder spending into Meta right now, here's the question worth sitting with: when did you last reconcile your platform ROAS against your bank deposits, rather than against the report your media buyer sends you?

65% of consumers say it's easier to file taxes than choose a supplement. That's not a trust problem. That's a confusion problem. And most wellness brands are solving the wrong one. Thorne figured this out. They stopped leading with third-party testing, NSF certifications, and clinical validation. They built an entire brand campaign around the feeling of being overwhelmed in the wellness space instead. DTC sales grew 63%. Here's the structural reason it worked: In 1994 there were 4,000 supplement products on the market. Today there are over 90,000. NSF certification is now a retail requirement, not a differentiator. When every brand has the same trust badges, those badges differentiate you from nobody. Credentials don't convert confused customers. They convert customers who've already decided to buy. The brands figuring this out: → Thorne built an AI wellness chatbot that answers questions before pitching products → The Ordinary opened a pop-up designed to demystify skincare ingredients, not sell skincare → Olly partnered with mental health advocates to sell the feeling, not the formula. Brand trust up 28% with Gen Z. All three ran the same play. Lead with the consumer's confusion. Earn their trust. Credentials come second. Most wellness brands still run it in reverse. Homepage opens with "clinically validated" and "third-party tested." Those claims belong below the fold. They close sales. They don't open them. The full breakdown of why credential-first marketing stopped working and what the winning brands are building instead is in this week's Substack. Link in comments.

a lot of people think HigherDOSE won because the pandemic created a home wellness boom. but HigherDose launched the sauna blanket in 2017, three years before lockdown. the pandemic didn't create this brand. it just put it on everyone's radar. the real reason Katie Kaps — a Merrill Lynch banker who scaled Tough Mudder from $10 million to $150 million — turned a biohacking idea into an 8-figure brand is a system of decisions most founders would never make. here's the breakdown: 1/ she raised under $100,000 from friends and family, opened the first location, and was profitable within month one. 2/ she didn't build a sauna chain. she placed saunas inside equinox and boutique hotels, using existing foot traffic as an mvp for retail before owning a single location. 3/ she shot every early campaign without an agency, modelling alongside co-founder lauren berlingeri. the founders' faces were the brand. 4/ she launched the sauna blanket as a d2c product while the spa business was still the plan. pre-pandemic, blanket sales were growing at 400% a year. 5/ when lockdown shut all 11 locations, she leaned into the product instead of the spas. first-week blanket sales went up fourfold. 6/ she aimed the entire brand at women in a biohacking world owned by men. biohackhers wasn't content. it was a category claim. she built an 8-figure brand with a four-person team and no venture capital. HigherDose wasn't built on a better sauna. it was built on the belief that biohacking was always a woman's practice. === if you enjoyed reading this give me a follow Kunle Campbell i help challenger cpg and wellness brands rewriting the status quo, build and scale profitable subscription-first ecommerce infrastructure using a model i developed called the: RULE OF ONE™ → https://lnkd.in/ehVdGN2V

My first Willow & Bloom client just left me two Google reviews that honestly made me tear up a little. AesthetiKa Wellness & Med Spa located in Windsor, CO came to me earlier this year. Kim and Karolyn had been running their practice out of a small clinic room inside another med spa, doing incredible work with Botox and hormone replacement therapy. But they were ready to grow. They had a vision for something bigger...much bigger...and they needed a website that could tell that story. They'd worked with other marketers before, but nothing felt right. Kim told me they were "plain out embarrassed" to even give their website to patients. They were doing exceptional work with patients, but their website didn't tell that story at all. So we sat down together. I listened to their story, their frustrations with the constraints of traditional healthcare, and why they wanted to build something different. They asked a simple question: What if medicine could be practiced differently? They were disillusioned with a system that didn't give them time to truly care for patients. They wanted to create a true place for wellness...somewhere people could be prioritized from the inside and out, not just treated like another appointment on a packed schedule. That's what we built the website around. Their story. Their team. The services that would actually make their clients lead more full filled and healthier lives. Not just a list of treatments, but a clear vision for a different kind of wellness care. Here's what Kim said after we launched the new website: "Willow and Bloom created our website and we could not be happier with the results. The process was professional and prompt, and we were impressed from start to finish. Ashley took the time to truly understand who we are as a business and was able to communicate that so effectively." And Karolyn: "Ashley and the team at Willow & Bloom were absolutely amazing! We have worked with others on our website but they never seemed to get it 'just right'. It always felt like it didn't get our true message across. Working with Ashley, it was apparent right away this was going to be a totally different level of experience - and we were right! She took the time to truly get to know us and our message that we want to share. She is easily to talk to and is also open for ideas. The final product is astounding and it we are so PROUD of what it says about us!" This is why I do this work. Not just to design and build websites (which I LOVE), but to help med spa and wellness practice owners show up online the way they deserve to. With clarity. With confidence. And with a site that actually reflects the care they put into their patients. If you're a med spa owner who's been putting off your website because it doesn't feel right, let's talk. You deserve to be proud of how you show up online. www.willowandbloom.biz

Wellness brands are still trying to sell ingredients when the market is only buying identity. If your CPG brand relies on a "clean label" to win, you’ve already lost. In 2026, being non-GMO and organic isn’t a competitive advantage, it’s the baseline. It’s the price of entry. The real moat isn't the formula; it’s the social proof infrastructure. I see legacy brands spend millions on R&D and clinical trials, then wonder why a creator-native brand with half the "science" is out-scaling them 10:1. It’s because they’re solving for the wrong thing. They focus on content production, while the winners today focus on the creator ecosystems that shape how people discover and decide. In wellness, the creator is the "lab coat" of the 21st century. Consumers don't want to read a white paper (we don’t have the attention span anymore). They want validation from someone they already trust. They want a narrative that makes the product feel like a lifestyle choice rather than a medical intervention. If you’re building in this space, stop relying on "healthy" buzzwords. Start building the systems that make your brand the most trusted voice in your space. The science gets you on the shelf. The narrative gets you in the cart.

When product purchases are disconnected from procedures, profit becomes a guess. Not a rough guess. A compounding one. Most clinic owners know their revenue numbers. Very few actually know their profit number. And the gap between those two figures is where the real story lives. A 2% cost variance here. A 3% write-off there. A vial discarded because nobody caught the expiration date in time. Individually, none of these feel catastrophic. Month over month, they quietly eat through margin that was already accounted for in the business plan. By the time the end-of-quarter numbers come in short, tracing where the profit actually went becomes an exercise in assumptions, not answers. This is true whether you are running a single-location medspa or managing 20 clinics. The math does not care about your size. Here is a real example of what this looks like in practice. Vitamin D3 is a common intramuscular injectable offered across wellness clinics. Once you pierce the stopper on a multi-dose vial, you have 28 days to use what is inside. If your inventory system is not connected to your booking calendar, you have no way of knowing, in real time, how much D3 you have left before that beyond-use date arrives. So the vial gets forgotten. The date passes. The product gets thrown away. That is not just waste. That is a known cost with no corresponding revenue. And it happens with injectables, peptides, IV compounds, skincare, and supplies across the board, in every practice that is managing inventory separately from its service menu. Now flip it. When your inventory is connected to your offerings, that same D3 situation looks completely different. You see exactly how much is left, exactly how many days remain, and exactly how many appointments would be needed to move it. Maybe you promote a complimentary D3 shot for patients already coming in that week. Maybe you run a short-term add-on offer. Either way, you made a decision with real information instead of throwing away margin you already paid for. This is not a technology problem. It is a visibility problem. And the fix is not complicated. Medspas operate on net margins between 15% and 25%. In a business generating $1.9 million annually, a 3% improvement in cost visibility is roughly $57,000 recovered. For a solo practitioner doing $400,000 a year, it is still $12,000 that should not be leaving through the back door. Profit is not a vanity metric. It is the number that determines whether the practice grows, whether the practitioner gets paid fairly, and whether the business is actually sustainable. #Medspa #WellnessClinic #PracticeManagement #ConciergeHealth #HealthcareOperations #MedSpaProfit

Your intimate care product is destroying the very thing it claims to protect. And it has the word "gentle" on the label. The wellness industry has a pH balance problem. Not because brands are talking about it too much. Because almost none of them actually understand what they're saying. Here is what is genuinely happening inside the vagina that most content completely skips over. The vaginal microbiome is not just "good bacteria." It is one of the most uniquely specialised microbial ecosystems in the human body. In a healthy state it is dominated almost entirely by one genus LACTOBACILLUS. Not a variety of bacteria. Not a diverse ecosystem like the gut. One genus. Deliberately. By design. Here is why that matters. LACTOBACILLUS produces lactic acid. Lactic acid maintains a vaginal pH of between 3.8 and 4.5. That acidity is not a side effect. It is a defence system. It creates an environment so hostile that pathogenic bacteria — the kind that cause bacterial vaginosis, yeast infections, and increased STI susceptibility — physically cannot thrive there. Your vaginal microbiome is not just maintaining balance. It is running active biological warfare on your behalf. Every single day. Now here is where the content fails women. Most wellness brands enter this conversation at the pH number. "Maintain your pH balance with our gentle wash." Which sounds helpful. Until you understand that the vagina is a self-cleaning organ whose primary mechanism for maintaining that pH is the Lactobacillus colony you are disrupting every time you introduce a product into or around it. Including the gentle one. Including the pH-balanced one. Including the one with the gynecologist's name on the front. Disrupting Lactobacillus doesn't just change a number. It dismantles the defence system. It opens the door to exactly the infections the product promised to prevent. The women buying these products are not uninformed. They are reading the label. They are trusting the brand. They are doing what the content told them to do. That is not their failure. That is a content failure. The brands that explain the mechanism ..... not just the number, not just the feeling of freshness, not just the clinical-sounding marketing language are the ones women share at midnight in the group chat. Because finally. Someone told them the truth about their own body. PS — Have you ever used an intimate care product and experienced the exact problem it was supposed to prevent? No brand names needed. I just want to know how many women in this room have lived this. 👇 — Your WOMEN'S HEALTH GHOSTWRITER. Because your body deserves content that actually understands it. #WomensHealth #VaginalHealth #WellnessContent #Ghostwriting

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐧 𝐇𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐄𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐨𝐦𝐲: 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐃2𝐂 𝐁𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐬 𝐨𝐧 𝐒𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐤 𝐓𝐚𝐧𝐤 𝐈𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐚 𝐀𝐫𝐞 𝐀𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐓𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐡𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐈𝐧𝐝𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐲 Skincare took nearly half a decade to build a category around ingredient transparency and consumer trust. Home care is at the beginning of that same curve. Every season of Shark Tank India, a new set of home care brands walks in with eco-friendly formulations, plant-based ingredients and plastic-free packaging. The pitches may be dramatic, but the numbers deserve attention. Koparo entered Shark Tank India valued at ₹70 crore on under ₹5 crore in revenue. Investors backed it. By FY24, revenue had grown 2.3x to ₹10.22 crore. A March 2025 round pushed valuation to ₹124 crore nearly doubling in one cycle. Born Good pitched at ₹70 crore for 1% equity. The Honest Home Company, plastic-free and powder-format, built out of Dhampur UP, closed at ₹1 crore for 3% equity. Awenest came in at ₹35 crore on a "come for baby, stay for home" positioning. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧 𝐚𝐜𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐬 𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐢𝐬 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭: Investors are betting on consumers who are questioning what they use in their homes, just as they question what goes on their skin. India's eco-friendly home hygiene market was valued at $14.25 billion in 2024, projected to reach $28.44 billion by 2030. Household cleaning product adoption has risen from 19% of Indian homes in 2014 to 53% in 2024. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐛𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐭. That's where skincare was around 2018 before ingredient-first brands rewrote the rules. The difference: skincare had a clear emotional hook. Skin is visible and immediate. Home care justifies its premium through safety as the baseline: �� Non-toxic for children → Safe around pets → No phosphates 𝑭𝒓𝒐𝒎 𝒘𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒆 𝑰 𝒂𝒎 𝒍𝒐𝒐𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒈, 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒊𝒏𝒈𝒓𝒆𝒅𝒊𝒆𝒏𝒕 𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒔𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝒊𝒏 𝑰𝒏𝒅𝒊𝒂𝒏 𝒉𝒐𝒎𝒆 𝒄𝒂𝒓𝒆 𝒘𝒊𝒍𝒍 𝒊𝒏𝒄𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒈𝒍𝒚 𝒓𝒆𝒇𝒍𝒆𝒄𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒔 𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒔𝒖𝒎𝒆𝒓 𝒔𝒉𝒊𝒇𝒕 from cost-conscious decisions towards plant-derived alternatives, biodegradable actives, and concentrated formats that still deliver on efficacy. Over 60% of new D2C customers are now from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. As clean home care scales beyond metros, formulation performance at accessible price points becomes the real challenge. And that's where the right partnerships across the value chain become critical. The brands defining clean home care in India are being built right now on tight budgets, fighting to establish credibility through the right formulation decisions. That last part is where this gets interesting for us. #HomeCare #D2C #ConsumerTrends #Sustainability #CleanLiving #ChemicalIndustry #FormulationScience #GreenChemistry