BeautyCounter alum and Ritual chief impact officer Lindsay Dahl on how to lead a mission-driven brand

“I never thought I would go to the corporate side,” Dahl told Glossy. “If I’m being honest, I really liked being a part of the nonprofit community where I felt like I could be both challenging companies and also challenging those in power in government.”

But then she got a call from BeautyCounter. “I sat down and talked to Gregg [Renfrew], the founder and CEO, and she said, ‘Look, I know how to start companies. But I don’t know how to do what you know how to do, which is … to use this business model to essentially see if you can do advocacy at the company level.’ And this was before corporate activism was cool.”

Dahl moved to the West Coast and served as BeautyCounter’s head of mission for seven years. In this new type of executive role, she created a blueprint for a company to have safe, ethically sourced and sustainable products, while also educating consumers about industry-wide issues and lobbying for better regulation and a more transparent industry. 

Today, Dahl is bringing those learnings to another trailblazing company: Ritual, an 8-year-old brand of supplements founded on a mission of transparent sourcing, efficacy and purity. For the past two and a half years, she’s served as chief impact officer where she oversees much of the mission-driven side of the business, including traceability and sustainability — which Ritual is known for — as well as advocacy, certifications, PR and community.

Dahl joined the Glossy Beauty Podcast to discuss her career trajectory, the ins and outs of running a mission-driven company, and her hopes for the future at BeautyCounter. She also speaks about the biggest issues plaguing the supplement space today, such as contamination, purity and unsubstantiated claims. And she shares the changes taking place at Ritual, including a recent shift from its DTC subscription model to an omnichannel strategy that includes retailers like Target and Whole Foods.

On lessons learned at BeautyCounter

“I learned how to prioritize. There are so many things we’re all passionate about, and in order to really have meaningful impact, positive impact — whether it’s on the product safety side or sustainability or climate or packaging — there has to be focus. … Telling the scary stories to the customer is actually a superpower. It’s not a weakness. And I also learned the energy and power of having a consumer brand be able to shape and change consumer behavior, which I truly think we did.” 

On the purity and efficacy problem plaguing the supplement space

“I can’t speak to other companies’ practices, but I can say on the efficacy side of things that two different things are happening. First, sometimes companies — very similar to the way beauty [brands do] — will ‘pixie-dust’, so to speak, small amounts of certain ingredients that are kind of sexy to the consumer [into products] at the time that it helps them, from a marketing perspective. … [But] over time, the ingredients degrade. So you could test for something that maybe you had a very small amount of when it first hit the shelf, but by the time it gets to the end of its shelf life, it’s not detected. … Companies should be planning for that — they can think about playing with the amount of ingredients that are in their product to account for this over time. …

“[The second issue is the term] ‘clinically studied,’ which is kind of thrown around a lot. What is happening is that companies will use ingredients that have been clinically studied, but they may not put the same dose that was in the clinical study in their actual product. That’s really important because the efficacy from that clinical was at that particular dose. If you’re just using a smaller amount of it, but then you say [the product features] clinically studied or clinically backed ingredients, that’s misleading to the consumer. … When people see the term ‘clinically studied,’ they kind of assume the whole formula, the whole pill, has been studied for efficacy.”

On the popular gummy vitamin format

“Gummies are great because they taste good; it’s like a treat. They’re also loaded with a lot of sugar. … But, especially in the beauty space, it’s been that kind of go-to format for beauty supplements. And there are a couple of interesting things we learned at Ritual when we went to launch our now HyaCera [Skin Supplement] product, which is in a single capsule. We wanted to have it in a gummy because we knew that’s what consumers were looking for, but the problem was that we have two ingredients — hyaluronic acid and Ceratiq — which are ceramides combined in this formula. And when we went to put it into a gummy format, if we had the level of the hyaluronic acid that was in the clinical study to show efficacy in the gummy, it would absorb water and the gummy wouldn’t stay together. One of the problems that’s not unique to Ritual but that we see in the marketplace is that gummies can’t hold the same [ingredient] doses that capsules can. … In some cases, you end up having less efficacious products simply because of the format. People don’t know that there’s a trade-off of taking a pill versus a gummy — of how much and what kind of an impact that particular product is going to have. So we made, at the time, what felt like a hard decision, and now it’s been kind of easy looking in the rearview mirror to do that formula in our nested capsule. 

“So [instead of a gummy, we take] two key ingredients — the dry and the wet, separated from each other — in one single capsule every single day. And people have been great at adopting it, even though it is not a gummy. We have a human clinical [trial] that was completed, and the results were absolutely stunning, showing a dramatic decrease in fine lines, wrinkles and crow’s feet. So the power of the efficacy has been enough to get consumers over that preference for a gummy format.”