Spotlight: Tierney Wilson of Sakara

Tierney Wilson is a marketing leader with a long track record of scaling and transforming diverse businesses within the retail, fashion, beauty and CPG sectors. Now as Chief Marketing and Digital Officer at Sakara, she and her team are growing a whole body wellness brand dedicated to creating products that empower people to nurture their physical, mental, and emotional health.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Highlight: Let’s start with Sakara. How do you think of the Sakara brand? Is it CPG? Is it F&B? Lifestyle? 

Tierney Wilson: Sakara is a whole body wellness company. We make wellness products that nourish and activate your whole body’s systems to function at their most powerful. Our high-quality and efficacious nutrition and supplements products seduce you into caring for your whole body, turning wellness into elevated, sensorial experiences.

Sakara exists out of the belief that consumers deserve the highest quality ingredients to nourish themselves, and that those ingredients can be delivered in innovative, beautiful formats that makes taking care of yourself a ritual to look forward to versus a chore or something that is paralyzing. We seek to help our clients take control of their wellness by reconnecting with their bodies–without any of the gimmicks that have plagued the wellness space over the last 10 years. 

Really, at their core, Sakara products are very simple. They're whole food-derived ingredients that are uncompromisingly clean, because we believe that health starts with  nourishment. So our products are built to help you feel rooted in your body, to help you nourish your body's innate power so you can feel and look your best.

Highlight: You came to Sakara with a variety of experience across CPG, personal care, fashion, apparel and beyond. What was it about Sakara that spoke to you and grabbed your attention? 

TW: There are two key things that attracted me to Sakara. 

First, I'm an extremely active person and have always been personally passionate about wellness, but more specifically holistic wellness. I had an eating disorder when I was younger. Fortunately, I overcame it with the help of lots of therapy and educational guidance about how my body works, how my body is unique, and how to listen to my body versus trying to force it to be something different.

Later, I was a client of Sakara. I was very familiar with the brand, had watched it grow, and I had come to respect Sakara’s brand philosophy, because it’s all about listening to your body, celebrating its uniqueness, and giving your body the highest quality, whole food ingredients and the tools to nourish. 

Second, Sakara is at a transformational moment after several years of immense growth through COVID-19 and the continued consumer focus on wellness. We are working on several key innovations that got me excited and piqued my curiosity, and which I also felt I could positively contribute to and influence. So joining the team was an easy decision. 

When it comes to work, and especially when you work in marketing, if you love something, it’s really easy to market and to talk about. 

“If you love something, it’s really easy to market and talk about.”

Highlight: You touched on some of the issues the wellness space has grappled with in the past decade. How do you think about wellness from the Sakara perspective? What does “wellness” mean to you?

TW: For me, wellness is all-encompassing. It intertwines physical, mental, and emotional well-being with an emphasis on nourishment from a holistic perspective. It’s about balance more than anything. While staying healthy is key, wellness isn’t just about immunity or not getting sick—it’s about thriving and feeling good in my body as I age.

At Sakara, we are committed to restoring wellness to the very basic concept that what you put in your body matters, and that cultivating vitality is all about balance.

Sakara is a digital-first brand with a beautiful and impactful online presence. How does building an ecommerce product experience differ from what it takes to build a traditional CPG brand?

TW: Sakara is a digital-first brand in that Sakara’s website and Amazon are key distribution channels. However, as we think about future growth, distribution and channel expansion are key parts of our strategy to bring Sakara to more people and more places. We are excited to show up in more places for our client soon! 

One thing about being digital-first is that it’s so “in our bones” of how we operate, which is great when it comes to things like building a compelling social media feed and content. Because we are digitally native, it often times enables us to move much faster to stay ahead of our client. A perfect example is all the interest in AI over the past two years. A lot of companies are asking themselves how they can incorporate AI or what they can do with the tech, whereas at Sakara, we’re able to just integrate new technologies into our ways of working. There isn’t that kind of friction that exists at older or bigger companies; it’s just inherently in our culture to be creative and innovative and get excited about new technologies.

It helps that we’re still a relatively small emerging brand; we have less layers to get things done. Maintaining our nimbleness as an organization is really key to our culture—even as we ensure a really tight regulatory team to work closely and quickly on product development.

Highlight: Are there any challenges to being digital-first?

TW: I'm a big believer that if brands are not evolving, they are dying. We saw a lot of natural demand for Sakara through the core COVID years of 2021 and 2022 when a lot of direct-to-consumer businesses saw growth. But as a lot of consumers have gone back to their pre-COVID habits, we have to evolve how we show up, how we message, the channels we invest in, and beyond. 

“I'm a big believer that if brands are not evolving, they are dying.” 

What that means for us is re-centering on who our client is. Where is she and how can we serve her better? YouTube is a perfect example of one of these changes; we’re going all-in on our video content, and there’s still so much more to come. But our efforts are already bearing fruit because we have taken the time to better understand our client and how to reach her. 

In-person events has become a key channel for us as well. Our clients want the chance to connect with the Sakara brand “in real life,” and to connect with one another–our wait lists have exceeded 1,000! So that has been exciting to see, and gives us motivation to keep extending where and how Sakara shows up. 

Distribution is also a key piece to our evolution. We’ve been expanding into omnichannel and wholesale distribution–which is extremely exciting! And a perfect example of how even though we are digitally native, when you set out to serve your consumer, you have to evolve with them.

Highlight: Is that another benefit to working with a smaller brand? Staying close to your consumer?

TW: We have direct access to our client. As we develop products, we ask her what is important to her, and what isn't important—an initiative we partner with Highlight to run. We do focus groups on different ingredients and different use cases. We can get a focus group live in 24 hours.

Even though we have these advantages as a smaller company, we don’t have the same purchasing powers or access to resources that larger organizations do. So leveraging the advantages we do have to really understand our consumer and bring products she loves to market quickly is how we can stay ahead of more traditional, larger businesses.

Highlight: How do consumer insights inform your product innovation or brand and marketing efforts? 

TW: We put our client at the forefront of everything we do. We learn from her in real time through survey data, transactional data, site behavior data, and more, and we have structured our analytics and marketing systems to be able to engage with our clients constantly. 

For example, when we are creating a new product we always start by asking our clients what they want, what is missing in their life, what formats they prefer or don’t prefer. While our internal team might have a good idea for a product, if the client doesn’t think it is a good idea then it isn’t going to be a success. 

 “While our internal team might have a good idea for a product, if the client doesn’t think it is a good idea then it isn’t going to be a success.” 

Consumer insights like these are invaluable for our omnichannel strategy, too. Our client isn’t just buying direct from Sakara.com. She wants to see our products in more places, and it's our job to make sure we are where she's buying, and show up as the same brand she has come to know and trust.

Highlight: Before we spoke today, I had planned to ask you about how Sakara looks at trends and plans innovation cycles to stay ahead of the trend curve, but that seems like a misplaced question now that I better understand that Sakara stands for femme-focused whole body health.  

TW: Yes! Wellness is so funny. The advent of the internet has made trends go viral so much faster, but also die faster, too. We are building a business and a brand that intends to be around for a really long time. Trends might inform how we message to our client or get creative with our content or imagery, but we would never buy into product trends that we didn’t believe in. (And there are a lot of brands that do that and bring products to market in a matter of weeks.) 

But at Sakara, quality is everything. We have uncompromising quality standards. So yes, we look at the trends, but we’re so intentional about the trends that are important to us. We’re focused on those life-long “trends” about restoring wellness to the very basic concept that what you put in your body matters, and that cultivating vitality is all about balance.

Want to learn more about Sakara? Browse their website, or follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or YouTube.

Create products people love with data by Highlight