How First Day’s Founder Alice Li Built a 9-Figure Kids Vitamins Brand From One SKU

Sean Frank (0:00)

All right, Alice, welcome.

Alice Li (0:02)

Thank you.

Sean Frank (0:02)

We are gonna have you start at a very simple place.

What the hell is First Day? Explain it for the audience, because I think, I wanna start here, because I think that our audience is mostly like 25-year-old men.

Alice Li (0:16)

That's what I thought, to be honest.

Sean Frank (0:17)

And they may not know what First Day is. So let's start with like, what is First Day? What do you do, what do you sell? Great. Let's go there.

Alice Li (0:23)

We're a nine-figure, mostly e-commerce family wellness brand. So we make products for kids, teens, mom and dad, toddlers across multivitamins, tribolytics, and all sorts of amazing products that are really oriented around how do we bring this incredible perspective on what's the root cause of health issues today, and making it a delightful, joyful experience, and then making it for the whole family.

Sean Frank (0:51)

Like one of the things, maybe I'll just go here next.

Why so many, is it harder to make so many products in wellness versus like being a single skew version? Like I'm just like, I'm thinking of like Groon's as an example. It's like, there's like, I make the green gummy. Although I guess they have others. You have a lot of product. Did it start with a lot of product? Did it start with one?

Alice Li (1:11)

It started in 2019 with just one skew. So it was our kids' multivitamin. I wanted to start with the most difficult member of the family to start with actually, because there's such a trust barrier with parents. You can experiment on yourself, but you're never going to do that with your kids.

But the goal was to build a family brand. And so growing from kids, and then we naturally got a lot of poll from moms saying, oh, like I'm stealing it out of my kids' bottle in the morning, and I would love it for myself. And then going from there. And yeah.

Sean Frank (1:45)

Why did you want to start with the hardest one? That sounds counterintuitive.

Alice Li (1:48)

I think it was great for brand building.

Sean Frank (1:50)

Okay.

Alice Li (1:51)

And so, you know, as I think about the business, it was all about how do you build something that lasts in the long term, especially in MySpace supplements.

There's so many fads and flashes, like up and down of what consumers want. And I think deliberately we chose all the most boring, most steady categories within vitamins, supplements and minerals to really establish the brand and to make sure that there was longevity to the business. We're...

Sean Frank (2:23)

Go ahead.

Jason Panzer (2:23)

And it seems like a super crowded market, so it's just so impressive that you're able to stand out from the crowd.

Alice Li (2:31)

Thank you.

Sean Frank (2:32)

I guess this is it. It's like, why pick health and wealth? Like, why pick this in the first place? Because, like, I look at it, I'm with him, man. Like, this is a really crowded category, categories.

Alice Li (2:44)

I'll talk about it from the business perspective first, since I think that's the orientation of the question. But I love red oceans that are highly fragmented, because what it means is, number one, there's a ton of consumer need for it, right? There's a huge market of people who desperately need something, and that's why that exists. And the fragmentation is amazing, because it means no one's won.

And it means that, actually, consumers are not happy with what they're getting from companies. And so it's an incredible opportunity to win.

Sean Frank (3:13)

Do you think you can win in consumer in that sense? Like in tech, where you have one player who owns a large amount of share of something?

Alice Li (3:23)

Across a couple of different categories in this market in particular, I actually do think certain brands become synonymous with ingredients. Like if you think greens powder, you probably think AG1, right? And so we want to be that for clinical family wellness. Like we want every parent in America to think of First Day when they need something for their family and to check us first. And we're actually not going to produce every product because there's a pretty high efficacy threshold that we look at and frankly supplements while they're an incredible category and they can do a lot for your health.

It's not medicine, right? It's not a pharmaceutical. And so a lot of things that people want to solve with supplements, it's impossible.

Sean Frank (4:06)