The Glossy Beauty Podcast

As beauty and wellness industry insiders are well aware, the supplement space has exploded in size and scope over the past decade. 

Stiff competition has driven new ways for brands, retailers and adjacent tech companies to stand out, from third-party certification to award programs, and more recently, the advent of AI-powered wellness chatbots. Last year, Thorne became a first-mover with the launch of Taia, a first-of-its-kind generative AI advisor that lives on Thorne’s homepage. “In the first six months, [Taia has fielded] over 200,000 messages and more than 350,000 product and lifestyle recommendations,” said Nathan Price, PhD., chief science officer of Thorne. “We get about 8% higher average order value for those who use Taia versus those who just visit Thorne’s [website].” 

Thorne is a supplement category leader launched in 1984 and acquired by L Catterton equity group in 2023 for approximately $680 million. The brand has more than 300 SKUs but no hero product, which is one reason Taia exists.

“My primary thesis is that the No. 1 thing we can do to help Thorne as a company is to help the Thorne customer,” Dr. Price said. “If Taia and personalization can meaningfully make it so that the person gets the health outcome they were looking for, we think [Taia is] going to have a very big ROI.” 

Dr. Price oversaw the creation of Taia, which is trained on Thorne’s internal knowledge database, powered by a team of researchers and doctors, and AI foundational knowledge of health and wellness. For example, Taia can provide insights into common queries around things like gut health, itchy skin or exhaustion. It then provides personalized supplement recommendations, and lifestyle and nutrition tips, and helps users locate informational blog posts or product information on Thorne’s site. 

While the practical uses of Taia are somewhat obvious, Dr. Price is also a thought leader on the future of AI-powered health and wellness. He believes that every wellness brand should begin investing now or be left in the dust in the next two years. 

“It's like deciding not to have a website and be plugged into the Internet when that started becoming a thing in the late 90s,” Dr. Price told Glossy. “It’s absolutely table stakes [because] this is how most people are getting information, and in the future, it's going to radically [increase].” 

Dr. Price’s career sits at the forefront of where longevity and healthspan research intersects with evolving technologies like AI and AI companions. 

He is the author of the 2023 bestselling book “The Age of Scientific Wellness,” has published over 200 scientific papers, and is a professor and co-director of the Center for Human Healthspan at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, a California-based research institute focused solely on aging. He’s also been the CSO at Thorne for more than four years.

In today’s episode, Dr. Price sat down with host Lexy Lebsack to break down the strategy, implementation and future of generative wellness chatbots like Taia, as well as big picture thoughts on the future of AI and wellness, and how brands must future-proof their businesses in the fast-moving AI revolution.

On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, co-host Sara Spruch-Feiner sits down with Kim van Haaster, founder of Bloomeffects, to discuss the brand’s seven-year journey to Ulta Beauty.

Bloomeffects officially launched at the retailer in February, but the journey was years in the making — and included multiple rejections, a brand redesign and, perhaps most compellingly, a social post that transparently documented the whole process, including those rejections.

On this episode, van Haaster candidly shares how Bloomeffects reworked its packaging and assortment to turn Ulta's no into a yes, what the brand changed to get into retail (including lowering some prices) and why Ulta was so worth fighting for for Bloomeffects.

Oura Health, the Finnish wearables company that has sold more than 5 million health tracker rings, is betting on women’s health with the launch of its first-ever proprietary large language model designed specifically for women. 

“We know historically that women have been underrepresented when it comes to a lot of [medical and pharmaceutical] research,” Tanvi Jayaraman, MD, clinical lead of health AI at Oura, told Glossy. “We want to change that narrative when it comes to women's health.”

LLMs are the brains behind AI chatbots, including Oura’s in-app Advisor chat where users can ask general wellness questions, specifics about their personal health data or in-depth medical questions. 

“Women have been searching for answers [about our health and bodies on the internet] for just as long as the research has been done,” she said. “The answers that [women are] looking for are really disparate and scattered. They're on a niche Reddit forum, or they're kind of word-of-mouth, so a lot of [what we learn online is] hypothesis-driven, data-gathering one-offs.”

Starting last year, Dr. Jayaraman’s team of board-certified clinicians began “training” Oura’s new LLM with only the best data and studies available. This is juxtaposed against many other LLMs, which are trained on the internet at large, which can result in hearsay and causality connections being learned as fact, Dr. Jayaraman said.  

“[When we’re able to] pick and choose the right training data, the right sources, the right guidelines for women's health, then you can start to push away some of that noise [from the internet],” she said. “Of course, we have a long way to go when it comes to the actual research, but you have to start somewhere.” 

Dr. Jayaraman represents a new type of physician who bridges medicine, artificial intelligence and product strategy. 

After medical school at Stanford, she worked on AI strategy projects at Bain & Company, working for global diagnostics and pharmaceutical companies, then on Apple’s clinical team, where she worked on next-gen digital health tools. She joined Oura last year. 

Dr. Jayaraman joined the Glossy Beauty Podcast to discuss Oura’s new women-focused LLM, the future of AI-powered wellness chatbots and more.

As influencer marketing evolves beyond one-off paid posts, brands are finding new ways to build relationships that last and go deeper than a hashtag-sponsored post.

On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Pop editor Sara Spruch-Feiner is joined by Kimberly Ho, founder and CEO of Evereden, to discuss why her $100 million Gen Alpha–focused skin-care brand is giving equity — not just transactional deals — to three teenage creators. The initiative, called Generation E, launches in tandem with the brand's nationwide Sephora expansion and reflects Ho’s belief that the next phase of brand-building means inviting the next generation inside the company, not just in front of the camera.

Though it is not unheard of for brands to give equity to creators — for example, Alix Earle had equity in Poppi when it sold to Pepsi for nearly $2 billion — Evereden may be the first to give ownership to a 14-, 15- and 17-year-old.

The discussion explores why Evereden chose to give these three creators equity, even though, as Ho said, "We can fully afford a broad paid influencer program." Ho also shares how the young girls will be brought inside the brand and how this model reflects what Gen Alpha wants from the brands it chooses to endorse.