Genexa is cleansing up the drugs aisle. 

During WWD’s annual Beauty & Wellness Forum, the corporate’s cofounder and chief executive officer David Johnson took the stage to debate how he began the clean medicine brand and the way it’s grown. 

While Johnson grew up in a family of naturopathic physicians and was all the time reaching for clean products, the genesis for Genexa got here about after he had his first child. Upon checking out his child had a fever and running to the pharmacy for medication, Johnson was stunned by the quantity of unpronounceable and unnecessary fillers and additives he present in the products. Just a few months later, Johnson touched base together with his friend and now cofounder Max Spielberg, also a latest dad on the time. 

“The more we talked about it, the more we realized that there’s probably a whole lot of parents that share the identical frustrations of not understanding the ingredients of their children’s products,” Johnson said. “Why was every other category from food and beverage to supplements to cosmetics shifting, but nobody was taking up this multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry?” 

In response to the brand’s stats, over-the-counter drugs drive “2.9 billion trips to the shop annually, $41.2 billion retail sales in 2022 alone, and 60 million people in the US go to the OTC aisle for symptomatic relief and self treatment.”

With these numbers in mind, it was clear that there was and still is a spot out there for clean medicine, which Genexa defines as “medicine made with the identical effective energetic ingredients as other brands but with none artificial fillers,” Johnson said.

With this, the brand removes all artificial fillers and replaces them with natural additives, like sunflower oil and agave syrup to assist bind the products.

Nevertheless, reaching the purpose of producing and having the brand on retail shelves was difficult. The team needed to fly across the country to hunt down manufacturers and financing, ultimately being met with 60-plus “nos.” Finally, the thought began gaining traction, and Genexa was capable of raise $60 million in Series A funding in 2021 including celebs like Donald Glover and Gwyneth Paltrow. “We wanted individuals who’d spend money on the business to not only be a component of the business and invest but additionally exit of their option to help with the disruption of the space,” Johnson said.

Because the brain grew, so did customer loyalty. Customers took to social media and the brand’s chat feature to inform their story, suggest latest products and flavors and ask questions. Each Johnson and Spielberg respond on to customer queries and feedback, at the same time as the business has grown. “We take the faceless out of this industry and really attempt to be there for each single consumer,” Johnson said, noting they donate samples to almost every pediatric office within the country. “Without consumers, we wouldn’t be a brand so we now have them at the middle of every thing.”

Today, Genexa continues to disrupt the space, primarily through its retail presence; in all, it’s in greater than 60,000 doors with Walmart as its largest retailer. While Johnson expects the clean space to proceed to evolve — latest players to market, latest guidelines to scrub and an overhaul of the prescription space — the mission is all the time on the forefront: to supply customers with clean alternatives.

“For this reason I began Genexa because I would like [our] kids to have options to decide on clean…and their kids to have an option to decide on clean after they’re within the aisle,” he said.