Why Prima is Creating DTC Solutions for Stress and Sleep

Today Prima launched two new products: supplements called No Worries and Sleep Tight, made with a blend of active botanical ingredients and hemp CBD to target two of the most pressing issues we face: stress and sleep. These products complement our bestselling CBD softgel, The Daily, and round out our DTC supplement portfolio with synergistic and clinically-validated formulations.

As we celebrate launch day, we also embark on the journey of attempting to market and build awareness around two products that we can’t accurately describe in ads on Facebook, nor sell in mainstream retailers yet, because of the lingering and longstanding ambiguity around CBD legality — despite deriving our CBD from the federally legal hemp plant and making products with 0% THC.

So why are we so committed to creating products that we can’t freely market and distribute? It comes down to one word: stress.

Prima was founded by three clean beauty veterans who have spent our careers redefining the word “toxin” and helping people understand the potentially toxic ingredients in our everyday products: from phthalates in nail polish to heavy metals in antiperspirant and carcinogens in baby shampoo. My business partner, Christopher Gavigan, founded The Honest Company in 2011 and started working on the idea in 2008, long before “clean” was a mainstream word used to describe products. At the time, the best thing we could do to protect consumer health was advocate for the use of safe ingredients and create better alternatives. One decade later, “clean” is almost expected as a product feature across the entire cosmetics and personal care products industry, and we’ve now adopted baseline consumer safety standards as the norm.

When Christopher Gavigan, Laurel Angelica Myers (an Honest Company alum) and I collided in 2017, we decided to take a new approach to “clean”, and build a brand and Certified B Corp. focused on the human body’s ability to heal itself. Society has shifted, and rather than creating products without the use of toxins, we are creating products to provide solutions for the biggest toxin of our time. This toxin affects every single person, every single day, with multiple points of exposure, and it can impact our physical, mental and social health. That toxin is: stress.

Stress is widely considered the “social toxin of today” by doctors and medical experts; it is responsible for an estimated 75 to 90% of all doctors visits, manifesting in the body in many different ways. Though we all experience moments of stress daily, many of us deal with long-term and constant stress, and we may not realize that certain negative health outcomes, like sleeplessness and moodiness, are a direct result of stress. In some ways, greater awareness and the normalization of stress can help to perpetuate relief, as the understanding that one’s health issues are an outcome of stress, and not something more serious, is comforting, helping to normalize the experience of stress. But due to the vastness of symptoms related to stress, including things like skin, sleep and digestive issues, it’s often an indirect or disconnected cause-and-effect. With more stress education, we’re hoping to change this, and our solutions-first approach to products is helping people connect the dots between their stress symptoms and botanical solutions.

No Worries and Sleep Tight are the culmination of over two years of planning and 18 months of research and development, which is expected in the supplements category to ensure the health and safety of ingestible products. These supplements combine our organically-grown hemp CBD (sourced from a network of family farms in Oregon) with clinically-validated active botanical ingredients to target stress at its source. When we heard from our customers that The Daily, our first CBD softgel, was helping dramatically with sleep and overall stress response, we decided to expand our offerings to include formulations with a baseline of concentration of CBD and specialized, synergistic plant-based actives that have been clinically studied for their role in improving stress and sleep specifically.

No Worries features CBD, Holy Basil, Ashwagandha and Saffron, and Sleep Tight features CBD, 5-HTP, Gaba and Passionflower. In the few weeks I’ve had access to take these regularly, I’ve noticed I’m feeling much calmer during the day with No Worries, and I’m sleeping longer and more deeply with Sleep Tight. We hope these products make it easier for consumers to access better days and nights easily in the comfort of their own home, without a visit to the doctor or a stress-inducing WebMD search — that is, if consumers can find them.

For now, we will continue to uplift, innovate and support, to make living a little less stressful and more restful. As always, we hope you join us.

Learn more about Prima at: www.prima.co