Executive Briefing
What’s going on at AG1?
As its founder steps back — and Kat Cole takes over as CEO — has Athletic Greens hit its DTC growth ceiling?
By Dan Frommer on Tuesday, July 30, 2024 at 8:00 am
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One of the most successful consumer brand startups is AG1, the supplement business previously called Athletic Greens. Founded in 2010, it has grown dramatically over the past few years: The company expects to pass $600 million in revenue this year, profitably, it tells me — up ~4x from $160 million in sales in 2021.
AG1 has been able to grow this much despite having essentially only one product — a daily supplement powder — that it sells almost entirely in one place, its website.
I wrote about this a couple of years ago — How to make your brand feel alive when you only have one product — and little has changed. It’s still selling one kind of green powder for $79 a month, still boosted by performance-optimization podcasters like Tim Ferriss and Dr. Andrew Huberman.
Neither delicious nor repulsive, AG1 is weirdly habit-forming: After buying my first month’s supply while working on that article in early 2022, I haven’t skipped a day since. (More on that in a minute.)
But I noticed something a couple of weeks ago while I was researching supplement powder brands: AG1’s growth in the US seems to have rapidly decelerated over the past year. Here’s what AG1’s quarterly year-over-year sales growth curve looks like according to Earnest Analytics, which tracks US consumer credit and debit card spending.
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Hi, I’m Dan Frommer and this is The New Consumer, a publication about how and why people spend their time and money.
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