The Secret to Subscription-Only Success in the DTC Wellness Space With Adam Gillman

Adam Gillman is the Co‑founder and President of Hiya Health, a children’s wellness company that reimagines kids’ vitamins by delivering sugar‑free, transparency‑focused nutrition through clean, science‑backed products. A seasoned entrepreneur, Adam has built and scaled consumer‑facing businesses in health and fitness, including CycleHouse. Motivated by his experience as a father, he teamed up with Darren Litt to disrupt the gummy vitamin market, creating Hiya’s signature chewables using real food ingredients and recycling‑minded packaging. Under his leadership, Hiya has grown into a fast‑scaling, subscription‑based brand that drew the attention of USANA, which acquired a controlling stake in late 2024.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [2:47] How Hiya Health scaled a wellness brand to a $260M exit using influencer marketing
• [4:24] Selecting creators based on trust, authority, and authenticity metrics
• [6:50] Balancing creative freedom with compliance in the regulated supplement category
• [8:39] Using evergreen intro offers to drive ROI-focused influencer campaigns
• [10:43] Why scaling creator-led marketing has gotten harder — but still works when done right
• [14:42] How committing to a subscription-only model fueled Hiya’s long-term success

In this episode…

Many brands invest heavily in influencer marketing, yet few see consistent, scalable growth. Despite having access to creators and content, campaigns may fall short due to misaligned messaging, lack of authenticity, or a focus on short-term wins. How do you build a long-term influencer strategy that converts and drives sustainable revenue?

Adam Gillman, an expert in DTC growth strategy, shares how his team scaled a wellness brand by rejecting surface-level influencer tactics and instead focusing on creator relationships rooted in trust, relevance, and storytelling. Adam emphasizes selecting influencers not by follower count but by credibility with niche audiences, especially in sensitive markets like children’s wellness. He advises brands to set clear creative guardrails while allowing influencers freedom in tone and delivery and to always tie campaigns to measurable, ROI-driven offers. By prioritizing authentic partnerships over ad placements and building a strong subscription model, Adam reveals a playbook for long-term customer retention and predictable growth.

In this episode of the Minds of Ecommerce podcast, Raphael Paulin-Daigle interviews Adam Gillman, Co-Founder and President of Hiya Health, about scaling with influencer-led marketing. Adam shares how authenticity outperforms reach, why UGC isn’t always effective on-site, and how a subscription-only model lessened Hiya’s market risk. Other highlights include creator compliance strategies, performance-focused partnerships, and long-term brand loyalty.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Raphael Paulin-Daigle: LinkedIn | X
• SplitBase
• Adam Gillman on LinkedIn
• Hiya Health: Website | Facebook
• “How To Grow Ecommerce Sales Through Lifestyle Marketing With Abby Fallacaro” on Minds of Ecommerce

Quotable Moments:

• “We aimed to build relationships, not ad placements — that was the biggest difference in our approach.”
• “We didn’t look at influencers based on vanity metrics like audience size or engagement.”
• “It’s not impossible, but it’s hard to do that without some type of promotional element.”
• “Subscription is helpful in that it gives highly predictable revenue, which allowed us to do meaningful R&D.”
• “UGC doesn’t always work to convert, but there’s no absolutes, right? Always worth testing.”

Action Steps:

1. Build long-term relationships with influencers: Partnering with creators fosters trust and sustained marketing success rather than using quick-hit campaigns.
2. Select creators based on authenticity and authority: Choosing influencers with real credibility ensures messages resonate with niche audiences and build brand trust.
3. Provide clear creative guardrails: Offering structure without scripting helps influencers stay compliant while maintaining their natural voice and tone.
4. Tie campaigns to specific, evergreen offers: Anchoring content to particular promotions, like a first-month discount, drives urgency and measurable ROI.
5. Commit to a subscription-first model when appropriate: Predictable revenue from subscriptions enables better forecasting, lower churn, and smarter product development.

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by SplitBase.

At SplitBase, we design, test, and manage high-converting landing pages and on-site experiences for fashion, luxury, and lifestyle ecommerce brands. Our optimization program pinpoints exactly where your store is losing money most, and then we help you fix that.

The result? Increased conversions and profits for our clients.

With our team of conversion optimization specialists, performance marketers, and conversion-focused designers, we've got your back when it comes to testing and optimization.

Request a proposal on SplitBase.com today, and learn how we can help you get the most out of your marketing spend.

You can find us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Don’t miss out on our exclusive podcasts at Minds of Ecommerce.

Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:06

Welcome to the Minds of Ecommerce podcast, where you'll learn one key strategy that made leading ecommerce companies grow exponentially. We cut the bullshit and keep the meat. In a 15-minute episode, founders and executives take us through a deep dive of a strategy so you get to learn and grow your online sales. In the last episode, you heard from Abby Fallacaro, senior manager of ecommerce at Edie Parker, and we talked about how to harness traditional marketing strategies to grow regulated ecommerce brands. Now, today on episode number 58, get ready.

We've got Adam Gillman, who's the co-founder of Hiya, a children's wellness brand that he scaled and sold for $260 million in 2024. And today, we'll be talking about how they've used influencer marketing as the foundation of their marketing strategy. And you bet that if they scaled that much that quickly, they've been doing a lot of things right on that end. So I'm your host, Raphael Paulin-Daigle, and I'm the founder of SplitBase. This is Minds of Ecommerce.

Now this episode is brought to you by SplitBase. At SplitBase, we help leading eight and nine-figure brands such as Dr. Squatch, Transparent Labs, and Ameca grow through customer-focused conversion optimization programs. Our programs pinpoint exactly where your store is losing money most, and then, well, we help you fix it. So the result you get is increased conversions, higher AOV, and of course, more money, which in turn allows you to scale advertising profitably. We've been at it for over a decade and can help you manage CRO from A to Z, from customer research, conversion design, strategy, copywriting, and development.

We focus on growing your ecommerce sales while you get to focus on what you do best. So request a proposal today on SplitBase.com to learn how we can help you get the most out of your marketing spend. All right, Adam, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 02:08

Thank you so much for having me.

Adam Gillman: 02:09

Yeah. As you know now, this podcast is all about going deep and dissecting one key growth strategy so our listeners can get the most value right away. And, well, you guys have done a lot of things pretty well when it comes to influencer marketing. There's also a lot of brands, you know, that hasn't necessarily been able to scale as fast as you guys and sell for such an amount, and they've been doing influencer marketing as well. What would you say is the difference between how you've done influencer marketing at Hiya that's allowed you to achieve that scale, versus maybe what people think is the right way of doing influencer marketing?

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 02:47

Yeah, that's a great question. I would say that a big part of what makes us different doesn't necessarily sound as exciting in 2025 as it did in 2020, which is when we started this strategy. But it's still nonetheless is a very powerful and effective and in my opinion, one of the only highly scalable strategies that DTC brands can pursue in this day and age. And I don't paint that as a universal truth because nothing is a universal truth. There are a lot of product categories, price points where going all in on meta advertising from day one works and makes a lot of sense.

This has just been my experience for a product with a pretty large total addressable market, but a pretty specific use case at the same time. And a price point that was, you know, in the $50 price range for the average car.

Adam Gillman: 03:51

What do you think? You know, I think a lot of brands that are listening to this have potentially been around since, you know, the day you founded Haya as well. What do you think are the primary things that changed over time? Because, you know, five years is very long in B2C, but it's also not that long, and there's still a lot of advice that people are listening to that might date from that time. And so let's say if we kind of sort out the good and the bad, how has it evolved over the years, and what's working now?

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 04:24

Yeah. So we didn't just hand product out to influencers and hope for the best. And we didn't look at influencers or creators based on vanity metrics like audience size or engagement. We really built it around a long term orientation, a long-term engine oriented around trust, storytelling, and authority in that space. Right.

Being in the wellness space for children, which is very much a trust-first category. We learn that parents don't just buy what looks cool, they buy what feels safe. What's backed, what's real. So we knew early on that traditional performance marketing in and of itself wasn't going to be enough. We needed creators, especially moms and dads, although not necessarily moms and dads who had real trust with their audience on wellness, nutrition, wellbeing, health in general.

They also really needed to be people who didn't shill ten brands a week. They needed to genuinely care about these topics and have a high degree of authenticity as their currency, really. So this took a lot of upfront work in terms of doing research on the people we were aligning ourselves with, making sure that we felt strongly, and granted, you can never know until you try. But making sure that those. Each time that we made a bet that it was very calculated and we felt very strongly that it was going to be in alignment with all those principles that I outlined.

And over time, we got better and better at it, obviously.

Adam Gillman: 06:09

I'm curious. So when we're talking about, you know, those influencers, you said it's really not about the size of their audience. It's about, you know, relevancy. How much of that nature and authenticity.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 06:24

And authority.

Adam Gillman: 06:25

How much of the narrative do you want to control as a brand? Because obviously there's a lot of ways it can go wrong. There's a lot of ways where, you know, but you also want that authenticity. So when it comes to working with those creators, how much freedom do you give them? How much of that message is calculated beforehand as well?

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 06:50

Yeah, we operate in a category where we can't give a ton of slack on the leash, if you will, in that we are a supplement and supplements, unless they have clinical trials, cannot make health claims. Right. So if a creator wants to upload a video saying, I gave this child my highest multivitamin and it solved when they had the flu, that was a big problem, right? So what we really focused on was like I said before. So first off, it starts with the creator and the corresponding audience and community that goes along with it.

Once you check that box, giving them guardrails to play within. So these are the talking points that we need to make sure that we cover in terms of this is what makes Hiya a differentiated product. These are the things we cannot say. But then besides that, really enabling them and empowering them to do the audio in their own voice and the video in their own voice as well.

Adam Gillman: 08:05

Now you've got that part, now you've got the message, you've got the actual creators. Now, how do you turn or that content into website traffic? Was there a strategy to, you know, for affiliates? Was there a strategy to give limited edition things or anything of the sort to incentivize people to then go and buy? Or would we be a bit more general and just hope people come to the website and look at the total ROI at the end of the day?

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 08:39

Yeah. So we were very much always oriented around ROI. And so to this day, with everything that we do, we're balancing. Saying performance marketing with maintaining an elevated and authentic brand. But we were always making sure that whenever there was a piece of paid content that was going out. So, a sponsorship with an influencer that there was a very specific, excuse me, specific call to action and drive to site oriented around what was kind of like an evergreen intro offer that we used across all of our marketing channels, which was really 50% off that first month of the subscription.

And that was what everybody spoke to as it relates to creating some urgency around driving to site and making that purchase. I'm curious to do that. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I think. No. Go ahead. It's not impossible, but it's hard to do that without some type of promotional element or something to make it feel a little bit irresistible.

And I think there's lots of ways that you can do that. You can do that with a call to scarcity, right? It's going to run out soon. You can do that with a promotion or discount. We just kind of pursued that strategy really from day one.

And it always worked. And if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Adam Gillman: 10:07

Has it gotten harder, would you say, to get results out of this type of creator-led influencer strategy? One of the things I keep hearing, and I'm sure you know, our listeners are hearing this as well, is, you know, UGC and this type of content, you know, there's now just so much everybody's doing that. People know that their ads, and well, you know, obviously they're still efficient for a lot of brands. But I know that it's a little harder in some categories. What are your thoughts in general?

Is has it gotten a lot harder or is it just about figuring out the right strategy?

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 10:43

Well, it's about figuring out the right people to work with. Now, to answer your question, has it gotten harder? I think the reality of scaling any marketing strategy is it's always going to get harder, right? What worked to acquire ten customers is going to be a lot more challenging to acquire 100, and a lot more challenging, or maybe not even feasible to acquire 1000. So it's gotten more challenging to continue to find these pockets of opportunity where we can pursue these strategies.

That being said, when we find the right partners, is it still very effective? Yes, it's still very effective. And I would agree with you that there's a proliferation of kind of paid boosting of UGC content that's out there, but that's why it really comes down to the people that you align yourselves with and the nature of that relationship. We looked at our creator relationships as partnerships, not ad placements. So we really wanted to focus on long-term relationships with them?

Them really believing in our product and going all in on it so that we could continue to market to that audience over a sustained period of time, and making sure that they didn't come off right as as product shills, that when it came to children's wellness, Haya was the brand that they were aligned with.

Adam Gillman: 12:10

I love what you said. I just want to repeat it. We aim to build relationships, not ad placements. I think that is so, so key. What about you know, obviously we're, you know, looking at influencer marketing, creator-led marketing like this is a way to drive traffic.

But also, you know, it builds trust before people even reach the website. So there's some advantage on that end. What about using this UGC on the website, on the landing pages, how important is it? Does it work?

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 12:42

It's never worked for us. Using the UGC to amplify ads. So using it in kind of like more mass appeal, creative or specifically white listing against that creator's audience that that has been very effective for us. But having the UGC content live on our pages is never something that has worked for us.

Adam Gillman: 13:06

I had a feeling you'd say that, and I'm really happy that you did, because I think that's kind of the unexpected answer, right? In the sense people think that. UGC they kind of put it on a pedestal. UGC will always make you convert better. UGC is always this and that.

But, you know, we've also seen it as a Crow agency that sometimes it just doesn't work. And especially in your case, I don't think you have a product that is really worth like explaining, like, you know, there are supplements. It's not like somebody have to show exactly how to, you know, put a hair tie in their hair or how to use a complex product, where those are the brands that often benefit from the UGC. And maybe it's not because of the UGC, but just because of the fact that it's an explainer video. So it's it's it's I think that's a good takeaway.

UGC doesn't always work to convert, but there's no absolutes, right?

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 14:01

Yeah.

Adam Gillman: 14:02

There are no always worth testing. I we have a little bit of time left. And one thing that I always found really interesting with Haya was that you guys have been very, very, very adamant to only and only offering a subscription. Now, that's also slightly against the current and what we've seen with a lot of brands now, there's more and more brands doing it. But I mean, even I'm sure in 2020, 2021, it wasn't as common as it is today have how have you guys resisted to the temptation of offering one-time purchases?

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 14:42

Great question. So when speaking about one of the primary drivers of our growth and our business success. Commitment to the subscription business model would certainly be towards the top of that list. And I think the reason it was particularly effective for us is a lot of people try to subscriptionify businesses and product categories that don't make any sense for that to occur. When it's a use case where this is a product that is intended to be taken on a stable schedule, and it needs to be taken on a stable schedule in order to ultimately get the benefit.

It really just aligned with how parents wanted to shop for their family's health needs. And we focused on making it reliable, automatic, educating customers as to why taking it on a routine basis was important, and having thoughtful touchpoints at every time something was shipped. And I believe it was a combination of all of those things that enabled us to have strong retention rates and relatively low churn, and parents who would trust us to show up month after month. The last thing I'll just mention is from a supply chain standpoint, from an operation standpoint, subscription is also just very helpful in that it gives highly predictable revenue, which allowed us to do more meaningful R&D, negotiate better supply contracts, launch new products in a way that's sustainable and not hype driven. It made us a better company because we could take more calculated risks, whereas for other companies, investing in an entirely new product or spending a year on R&D, which is what we've done for some of our products.

Categories is something they couldn't justify because the risk of a flop was too real. We were really able to de-risk those things because of our 1:1 relationship with our customers, and knowing with a very high degree of certainty, what the real value of somebody signing up for our product looked like.

Adam Gillman: 17:01

Love it. Adam, this has been amazing. I think I'm just going to recap for our listeners a couple of things that I thought was super interesting. One, when it comes to influencer marketing, creator-led marketing, the key is really authenticity and building relationships, not ad placements that will allow you to go much further than you know any other brand. Just looking at influencers as another ad creative.

Number two, it's also about education, right? You have a product that requires a lot of trust. And when that happens, you have to show and give reasons to your audience to believe in your product and in your brand, and using product education along the way through those influencers, through your site content, but as a way as well, to reduce churn and retain those subscriptions has been really key to you guys. And obviously, well, just sticking to a subscription-only model has not only enabled more efficient forecasting, but also better planning and obviously quite a bit of growth. So yeah, Adam, thank you so much for being here.

And now if people want to learn a bit more about you or Hiya, where should they go?

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 18:23

www.hiyahealth.com

Adam Gillman: 18:29

Awesome. Adam, thank you so much.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 18:31

Thank you so much.

Outro: 18:36

All right. Well, that's it for today's episode. And thank you so much for tuning in. Now, if you like what you've heard, and you don't want to miss any of the new episodes that are about to come out, make sure you subscribe to the podcast, and well, bonus points if you also leave a review in the iTunes store or wherever you're listening to this. Now, if you're working on an ecommerce store that does over $1 million in revenue and you need help with conversion optimization or landing pages, well, I've got some good news because there's a pretty good chance we can help with that.

Go to splitbase.com to learn more or even to request a proposal. If you have any guest requests, questions, or comments, tweet me @Rpaulindaigle, and I'll be super happy to hear from you. And again, thanks for listening. This is Minds of Ecommerce.

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