A New Brand of Supplements Goes After Millennials

After breakfast, I routinely try to swallow seven capsules, some as big as horse pills. Most of the time, I succeed; other times, the oversize pellets trigger my gag reflex. It’s not a pleasant way to start the morning.

I’m not the only one with pill sensitivity, says Brad Harrington, who has launched a new vitamin startup called Olly with Eric Ryan, a co-founder of the cleaning-products company Method. “We saw in research that most people felt swallowing pills was a chore,” Harrington says. So he and Ryan decided to make pill-popping more enjoyable by making most of their supplements into fruity gummies for adults. More specifically, the company is going after millennials, a cohort that, at 75 million strong, constitutes the most sought-after generation. It doesn't hurt that millennials, raised by health-conscious boomers, are at least 32 percent more likely than the general population to be open to alternative medicine, according to research from Nielsen and Natural Marketing Institute.