Preview: Post-pharmacy brands

Pharmacies and health stores give a sense of legitimacy to vitamin and supplement brands, but new offerings are increasingly foregoing physical stores in favour of online platforms that enable them to control the amount of information that is available to customers.

Feminine health brand Love Wellness offers boric acid supplements that cannot be found in ordinary pharmacies despite their effectiveness as an ingredient to fight vaginal infections.

Portuguese company Biocol Labs recently underwent a rebrand by Studio AH-HA, changing the brand’s tone of voice to emphasise its natural ingredients. Talking about a ‘post-chemical society’, Biocol Labs wants to position itself as providing natural solutions to the health problems consumers often try to solve with pharmaceutical products, and has switched its retail focus from pharmacies to juice bars, gyms and organic stores.

‘We have really changed our mindset over the last year, realising that we don’t need to draw our credibility from selling through pharmacies,’ Christine Pausewang, partner at Biocol Labs, tells LS:N Global.