Cindy Gustafson has checked off a laundry list of accomplishments during her first 18 months as CEO of Nutrafol.
This includes an app launch designed to improve retention and a product release tailored to reach one of its smallest customer demographics in men over 50. These rollouts happened while she led the team toward double-digit growth during 2025, her first full year as CEO, on a path to soon reach $1 billion in annual sales.
“You need a real commitment to delivering on something someone actually needs [in order to win this category],” Gustafson told host Lexy Lebsack. “We actually have quite a small portfolio of products, [unlike our competitor] brands that have hundreds and hundreds of SKUs. We are not that kind of a brand. We are not that kind of a business.”
Instead, Gustafson has stayed hyper-focused on delivering on its main promise of improved hair growth. “We have been so fixated on really delivering against what a customer needs and what a customer is looking for, and staying very, very grounded in that,” she said.
Gustafson is a veteran exec whose CV includes Weight Watchers, Bark, Mindshare and Unilever. She spent 18 months as chief marketing officer of Nutrafol before taking over the CEO role from Nutrafol’s co-founder Giorgos Tsetis after its Unilever acquisition.
In today’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Gustafson unpacks her secret sauce for growth, how the supplement consumer has evolved and much more.
On the evolution of the supplement consumer
“The evolution [of the supplement customer] since 2023 is [one of the biggest things I have learned since taking over as CEO]. Just how much more educated people are and how more interested people are in supplements as a whole, but also in their own health and really taking control of their own health. So, saying, ‘Alright, I’ve got something I need to do. I want to think about how I can address it. Where should I go? What should I do? What’s the first thing I should consider?’ So, I would say just even in my time here, between 2023 and now, there’s been just such a catapulting of people’s understanding that they can do things to help themselves feel better, and that has been probably one of the biggest shifts that I’ve seen in the past few years.”
On launching an app for retention
“When we first launched the app, it was for customers only — so if you were a customer and you came through dot com, you would be offered to join the app. We then launched the guest experience several months later, where, if you were to buy somewhere else, and then you were to come in, you could say, ‘OK, I want to really understand what’s going on [with my hair growth]’. We don’t push it out broadly. It’s really people finding it organically. It’s not built to sell a product, it’s not built for that. It’s really built to help nurture the journey. And so that’s how we really think about it. But, yes, we’ve just lapped our kind of three, six, 12-month users, and so to understand their LTV, versus where you would normally see a falloff of month one to three, is exceptional, and we are, I would still say, we are just getting started.”
