Electronic Retailer - January 2012 - 23

Marketing
BY VITISIA PAYNICH PHOTOS BY BRIAN DAVIS

For direct marketers well versed in the health and fitness category, January is the peak season when many consumers vow to start the year off right by adopting a healthier lifestyle through exercise and good eating habits. Yet, for every one person who commits to shedding the pounds gradually through a healthy regime, there are countless others who prefer the shortcut by embracing the latest “magic” pill or fad diet to guarantee dramatic weight loss at lightning speed. Oftentimes, however, this method is far from a panacea, but a harsh reality fraught with disappointment and endless yo-yo dieting. When Intelligent Beauty Inc. co-founders Adam Goldenberg and Don Ressler introduced SENSA to the marketplace four years ago, they knew they wanted to create a product that not only helped consumers effectively lose weight, but one that represented an authentic lifestyle brand. “There are too many products out there in this category that promise quick weight loss – 14 days and 20 pounds, etc. We give the customer realistic weightloss goals that we think are attainable,” explains Ressler. That line of thinking is perhaps why SENSA remains one of the top-selling weight-loss products on the market today and why major big-box retailers continuously clamor to stock the product on their store shelves. Electronic Retailer recently sat down with co-CEOs Goldenberg and Ressler to learn more about the origins behind this El Segundo, Calif.-based company, building a solid SENSA brand, and taking an in-house approach to multichannel marketing.

Forging Alliances
In 1997, Goldenberg launched Gamer’s Alliance Inc., an advertising network of gaming sites; while around that same time

period, Ressler founded FitnessHeaven. com. In 1999, Intermix Media purchased Gamer’s Alliance, bringing Goldenberg on board as vice president of strategic planning and later promoting him to COO. The two entrepreneurs eventually crossed paths when Intermix acquired FitnessHeaven.com in 2001 and tasked Ressler with spearheading core ventures that enhanced shareholder value. He became the co-founder of Alena Media while at Intermix, and he discovered and built the acclaimed skincare brand Hydroderm. “At Intermix, Don and I had a chance to work closely and really built the e-commerce arm of that company,” recalls Goldenberg. “We learned how to use the internet very effectively to sell all sorts of products.” When News Corp. purchased Intermix in 2005 for more than $650 million, Goldenberg and Ressler aspired to return to their entrepreneurial roots and concentrate on what they loved doing most: building companies and brands. Thus, they founded Intelligent Beauty Inc. in January 2006. Goldenberg adds, “We started the company with modest roots of working together out of my house with about 15 of our close colleagues. Today, we’ve built a pretty great company that’s evolved into an e-commerce incubator focused on three separate, but very large, categories: health and wellness, beauty and fashion.” SENSA, their health and wellness brand, remains the largest and most profitable of the three business entities, according to Goldenberg. Dermastore. com is a beauty and skincare e-tailer, while Just Fabulous (JustFab.com) is their newest business venture in the women’s fashion category. The three companies combined generate more than $250 million in annual sales revenue.

Partnering with the Good Doctor
About eight years ago, a business associate encouraged Ressler and Goldenberg to view an episode of “Dateline NBC,” which featured Dr. Alan Hirsch discussing his weight-loss research. Impressed by what they saw, the two immediately asked the associate to arrange a conference call with the doctor. “It was really a two-year courtship of talking to Dr. Hirsch and his team to get them to realize that they could affect so many people positively through his weight-loss research to then turn it into a product,” says Ressler. Dr. Hirsch agreed to the partnership and began work on developing the SENSA weight-loss system. What is SENSA? Based on Dr. Hirsch’s 25-year clinical research, the SENSA weight-loss system is designed to work with one’s sense of smell to help trigger a phenomenon called Sensory Specific Satiety. When a person eats, smell and taste receptors transfer messages to his or her brain, which releases hormones alerting the body that it’s time to stop eating. With the weight-loss system, specially designed SENSA Tastants sprinkled on food help speed up the process and trigger a signal, enabling the individual to curb the cravings and feel more satisfied. According to Ressler, Dr. Hirsch conducted one of the largest clinical studies ever on a non-prescription weight-loss product, where 1,436 people lost an average of 30.5 pounds. At the time, Ressler says they wanted to run the gold standard of studies to substantiate the original data before launching the product. After completing their own clinical trial, the Intelligent Beauty team found that their data almost mirrored Dr. Hirsch’s previous studies, and it was at that point, Ressler says, “we knew we 23

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Electronic Retailer - January 2012

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