Almost every supplement brand starts on marketplaces, and the platforms hold their side of the deal: traffic and sales arrive. What never arrives is the customer. The platform knows who they are; the brand sees a row in a sales report. No base, no repeat contact, no community, and the commission grows with the category.
We have built the way out twice, for two brands with two different answers, which is what makes the pair interesting.
Healthis: the ecosystem answer
Healthis was already at the top of the large marketplaces when they came to us. The brief was an owned site that could move the audience into a direct channel and anchor the brand's ecosystem, with a revenue target measured in billions of rubles.
The centre of the build was a design system for a catalogue of more than fifty products. Gradients from the packaging became the visual logic: each product keeps its own accent inside one recognisable system, so the catalogue scales without redesign. From kick-off to launch took four months, with development by our partner Thunder Web.
The part that makes it an ecosystem rather than a shop window is the content layer. A vitamin compatibility calculator (pick two vitamins, see whether they combine and when to take them), guides, infographics. People return to the site to use it, not only to buy, and every return is a contact the marketplace would have kept for itself.
Rithem: the subscription answer
Rithem, a functional sports nutrition brand, faced the same two ceilings: commission eating the margin and customers belonging to the platform. Their answer centred on the product's own rhythm. Sports nutrition is bought monthly, so the site is built around a subscription, not a cart: pick a set, pick an interval, the delivery arrives on its own.
The details decide whether a subscription survives: pause, swap and cancel live in the account as self-service, so nobody writes to support to change a date, and nobody cancels out of frustration either. Payments, delivery and inventory run on an owned stack. Around the commerce sits the brand: ingredients explained without marketing fairy tales, usage scenarios, community channels as part of the product.
What the two stories share
Different mechanics, same three moves. Both brands gave the customer a reason to come directly instead of merely a place to. Both built around their product's natural rhythm: knowledge for a complex catalogue, regularity for a monthly one. And both kept selling on marketplaces; the owned channel is not a war with platforms, it is the end of depending on them.
The result in ownership terms is identical: the customer base belongs to the brand, repeat sales have a mechanism, and the margin stops being shared by default.
If your brand sells well on platforms and owns nothing, that is the exact problem we like. Send a link to your storefront and we will reply with an honest read on what a direct channel could look like for your catalogue.
