Creating Customer-Driven Healthcare with Hilary Coles, Co-Founder of hims & hers
Tags: Ecommerce, Health, Digital, Online, Business

Creating Customer-Driven Healthcare with Hilary Coles, Co-Founder of hims & hers

The fact of that matter is that the healthcare system was not built with the consumer in mind. That is, until hims & hers came along.

This three-year-old company has been making waves in the industry, and for good reason. Its platform has facilitated more than two million medical visits and is valued at more than $1.6 billion. And all of this in an industry that has been immune to disruption for decades.

hims & hers is the first true consumer healthcare brand that, through its platform, creates an easy, transparent, and high-quality experience for all those frustrated with their current healthcare option. Its mission is to help people finally feel empowered to talk about and get treated for certain conditions, and Hilary Coles, the co-founder and VP of Merchandising for the company, is responsible for making that happen. Clearly, she’s done a good job. But in the beginning it’s fair to say that some folks needed convincing.

“I remember in the early days, showing up to manufacturers in the middle of the country who looked at me like I was crazy,” Coles remembers. “And I was begging them to put our brand on the line and produce Minoxidil, which is generic Rogaine. And they basically said they felt bad for taking our money because this is an industry that hadn’t shifted in decades, and what were we thinking, and there’s no way this is going to work. And we were able to blow through what we had ordered from them in days, not months.”

With their first bit of success behind them,, Coles and her team went to work getting the word out to more people. The goal in the early days was to prove to the market that hims & hers was different than everything else available — and that it was going to stick around.

“Everything we prioritized from the beginning was our brand,” Coles says. “I think we knew that unlike 10, 15 years ago, when you had all of these ‘disrupting’ startups coming out, your brand wasn’t as important. But because the barrier to enter direct-to-consumer is so low these days with all the onslaughts of digital channels that you have, having a differentiating brand, having a point of view becomes so important and earning trust becomes so important. You need to have a deeply differentiated and personified brand today in a way that I think was not as urgently important 10 years ago.”

The way that hims & hers differentiated itself was through its creative marketing. Rather than rely on traditional channels, Coles says that taking big swings was more in line with how the company wanted to operate.

So whether it was putting out a seemingly random candle advertisement or branding urinals, hims and hers was willing to take risks in order to be noticed.

“Some of the bets we’ve taken with marketing channels have been more on the creative side like the urinal dominations, or we’ve sponsored corn hole tournaments, and all sorts of things that people haven’t necessarily tried before,” Coles says. “It’s because I think we have a really deep empathy for our consumers and we’re thoughtful about where are they spending time? Where are their eyeballs? I always joke with our team, if you try hard and believe in yourself, anything can be a billboard or a messaging opportunity for the company.”

Coles also says that at hims and hers, there are no bad ideas. Everyone is encouraged to have a seat at the table and throw the metaphorical spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Through this kind of social collaboration, Coles says more good ideas can rise to the top.

Ideas also come from the deep-seeded curiosity that lives within the company and everyone who works there. Coles says that the biggest reason they were able to disrupt the multi-billion-dollar healthcare industry was because they were constantly asking one question.

“Fundamentally why we’ve been so successful in a short period of time, is we’ve just asked why,” she says. “Because especially in established industries like health care, so much of it is just continuing on because that’s the way things have always been done. And a lot of it was just us asking naively, ‘Why? Why do you do it that way? Why is it done that way? Could it be done this way?’ And just having that endless capacity I think for curiosity.”

That curiosity has served hims and hers well thus far, and Coles says that the company is planning to expand even more in the coming years. To hear more about how, be sure to listen to her interview on Up Next in Commerce.