Genexa is cleaning up the medicine aisle.
During WWD’s annual Beauty & Wellness Forum, the company’s cofounder and chief executive officer David Johnson took the stage to discuss how he started the clean medicine brand and how it’s grown.
While Johnson grew up in a family of naturopathic physicians and was always reaching for clean products, the genesis for Genexa came about after he had his first child. Upon finding out his child had a fever and running to the drugstore for medication, Johnson was stunned by the amount of unpronounceable and unnecessary fillers and additives he found in the products. A few months later, Johnson touched base with his friend and now cofounder Max Spielberg, also a new dad at the time.
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“The more we talked about it, the more we realized that there’s probably a lot of parents that share the same frustrations of not understanding the ingredients in their children’s products,” Johnson said. “Why was every other category from food and beverage to supplements to cosmetics shifting, but no one was taking on this multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry?”
According to the brand’s stats, over-the-counter drugs drive “2.9 billion trips to the store annually, $41.2 billion retail sales in 2022 alone, and 60 million people in the United States 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 gap in the market for clean medicine, which Genexa defines as “medicine made with the same effective active ingredients as other brands but without any 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 help bind the products.
However, reaching the point of manufacturing and having the brand on retail shelves was difficult. The team had to fly across the country to seek out manufacturers and financing, ultimately being met with 60-plus “nos.” Finally, the idea started gaining traction, and Genexa was able to raise $60 million in Series A funding in 2021 including celebs like Donald Glover and Gwyneth Paltrow. “We wanted individuals who’d invest in the business to not only be a part of the business and invest but also go out of their way to help with the disruption of the space,” Johnson said.
As the brain grew, so did customer loyalty. Customers took to social media and the brand’s chat feature to tell their story, suggest new products and flavors and ask questions. Both Johnson and Spielberg respond directly to customer queries and feedback, even as the business has grown. “We take the faceless out of this industry and really try to be there for every single consumer,” Johnson said, noting they donate samples to nearly every pediatric office in the country. “Without consumers, we wouldn’t be a brand so we have them at the center of everything.”
Today, Genexa continues to disrupt the space, primarily through its retail presence; in all, it’s in more than 60,000 doors with Walmart as its largest retailer. While Johnson expects the clean space to continue to evolve — new players to market, new guidelines to clean and an overhaul of the prescription space — the mission is always at the forefront: to provide customers with clean alternatives.
“This is why I started Genexa because I want [our] kids to have options to choose clean…and their kids to have an option to choose clean when they’re in the aisle,” he said.