Who is Ankit?

Meet Ankit Patel, Co-Founder and Chief Brand Officer at Obvi!

About Obvi

Obvi is a health and beauty company that offers a range of products, including Super Collagen, Kid’s Complete Proteins, and a patented Collagenic fat burner. Their products are made with simple formulas, ensuring quality, results, and taste.

Ankit’s Journey

Originally from Seattle, WA, Ankit moved to New York City for college where he majored in finance with dreams of landing a job on Wall Street. He soon realized that finance wasn’t him and decided to study art, his passion since childhood. Ankit recalls. “I was always experimenting with design software, anything in the Adobe Creative Suite. Art school gave me the opportunity to refine my craft.”

After graduating in 2013, Ankit started working for an e-commerce start-up that sold various brands including sports supplements. “Instagram was just getting started, and there were no paid ads on Facebook at the time. Building a page and following was about organic reach.” He went on to lead a 20-person creative team, designing ads and content for social media. “Ultimately, I reached the point where no one was teaching me, but I knew I still had much to learn. A couple of other guys and I ended up leaving to start a consulting agency for e-comm brands. We eventually wanted to start our own brand, and this gave us a chance to learn as much as possible while using other people’s money.”

Ankit points out that a consulting agency’s shelf life is about 3 years. “We would build these brands up from making $0 to $30k, even $50k a day online. Once you’ve built a brand up through ads, you’ve essentially given them the tools and they don’t need you anymore.” 

They shifted energy to making their own brand with focus on supplements. “Collagen was trending at this time, but there were areas for improvement. We asked, ‘how can we make this better?’ Collagen was unflavored and mostly marketed to older people for skin and nails. But we stop producing collagen in our early twenties. Our next question was ‘how can we make collagen more deployable to a younger demographic?’”

Launching Obvi: Brand Identity and Strategy

First Introduced to the supplement market during his first post-college job, Ankit knew it was competitive and deep. Their collagen must offer customers something exceptional to be noticed. Ankit recalls the moment when Obvi came to him while watching ‘Mean Girls.' “One of the characters said ‘obvi.’ A lightbulb went off, I designed our label that night and sent it to my colleagues at 3 am in the morning.” With its bubble-gum pink colors and bold font, Obvi’s bottles vibrate against the still sea gray and white lining health store shelves.

Ankit was just as confident in the product behind the label. He began formulating collagen flavors inspired by nostalgic childhood breakfasts and treats. “‘We resonated immediately by disrupting the playing field. We looked nothing like a supplement company. Our presentation deck popped making it easy for Obvi to get into small distributors and independent shops. Using this momentum over the next 5 years, we were able to grow the brand.”

Obvi’s Team Structure

In addition to Ankit, Obvi’s lead team includes Ron Shah, CEO and Ashvin Melwani, CMO. “Ron is the glue guy who handles finance and operations. He oversees our supply chain and steps in wherever we need assistance. Ash is a whiz kid. Facebook algorithms are constantly changing. Ash is great at keeping up on these changes, and staying in tune with how it works. Creative and brand runs through me. I work with our designers and videographers to create ads and content,” Ankit says. They are supported by 15 in-office members and 2 to 3 remote members.

Obvi relies on creating a large amount of fresh, engaging content to grow and reach new customers. “At first, I was creating everything including our ads and brand material,” Ankit notes. “It wasn’t sustainable. We eventually hired some cool agencies to help us out. Now, we work with 2 to 3 agencies that create different types of content – mainly studio and UGC. Our goal is to have an immense work chest of content in house that can be edited, cut up, combined, and distributed in numerous ways.”

Increasing AOV and LTV

Obvi has found that bundling and promoting products as sets leads to increased AOV (average order value). Ankit elaborates, “One of our highest selling products is a collagen infused fat burner, but it’s cheap. So, we came out with two additional fat burning products – one to take at night, the other during fasting. They can all be used in combination with each other. We’ve created landing pages on our site, selling them as a set. We’ve also marketed a two-step system in which a starter burner is taken the first month, then followed by our elite burner.” 

When asked about LTV customers, Ankit says that they focus on subscriptions while acknowledging that getting customers to commit to buying supplements is difficult. “It takes time for a supplement’s benefits to take effect. People are hesitant to sign up when they don’t see results ‘right away.’ Our demographic is young, which also means they are not high spenders, making them weary of subscriptions.” Obvi understands that a sense of satisfaction comes with control, customers can manage and pause subscriptions. Vita-sample packs and new bundle variations are being tested to increase subscribers.

CX and Driving Retention

Obvi established itself as a fresh and fun alternative to your everyday supplements. Carrying this sentiment over to its CX approach, the brand wants to make customers feel valued for buying their products. “Every few months, we give our subscription customers a gift. We continually change it up, but the first gift may be frother. The next gift is a little bigger such as a backpack followed by 2 months free subscription. The incentive is for them to stay subscribers, but it also uses ‘surprise and delight’ as a cool way to say, ‘thank you.’”

Building Community Around CX

“Our community is huge, it’s one of our key assets. Our Facebook community page has over 80,000 women – it’s the biggest collagen-based community on Facebook,” Ankit points out. He goes on to say that Obvi’s community grew organically – members first joined to talk about collagen supplements, but eventually started talking about their interests and personal lives.

Community acts as the frontline where the brand gets direct customer feedback. “Anytime there is a problem or when someone has a suggestion, they post it. It’s easy for us to get information. Ron, Ash, and I go on Facebook daily to respond to comments. It takes a lot of guesswork out of whether customers are going to buy a new flavor.”

Transparency is important to CX at Obvi. Ankit explains, “If we are having issues with supply chain or shipping, we can go into the community and let our customers know. We have 6 to 7 moderators daily, if someone is having a personal issue with our product, we can reach out directly and solve the problem.”

Live chat is also available for website customers during business hours. Ankit is exploring the idea of turning Obvi’s live chat agents into sales agents.

Looking Ahead

After launching Obvi in Walmart in 2023, Ankit is looking forward to continued retail expansion over the next year. “We just launched in Rite Aid nationwide, and we are talking to Target right now.”  Also excited for product innovation, he says, “We’re going to expand on the products that we are seeing success with. We believe that some of these products are going to change the landscape in certain supplement categories.”

Tech Stack

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