Seth Spears - Founder of Wellnesse

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom pod. We have Seth Spears with us today. Seth is a father, founder, outdoorsman, world traveler. He's a Sicilian American in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, runs a company called Wellness. Uh, he also runs a company called Rewild Gear, uh, which is very interesting. And yeah, previously, see here, Wellness Media, Wellness Mama, that one I've heard about, uh, before. Uh, so Seth, welcome to the pod. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you've been up to.

Thanks for having me, Charles. Happy to be here. Yeah, I've been involved in a lot of different projects over the years. I kind of got my start in entrepreneurship in marketing. I started a boutique digital marketing firm for several years and worked with a lot of small businesses and bloggers and content creators and really helped them to grow their following and their platform, really focused on SEO and social media. Then I had the opportunity to grow a company called Wellness Mama that I co-founded for over a decade and grew that into the largest health and wellness website and podcast for moms, which I exited a couple of years ago. I started an outdoor equipment company with my brothers called Rewild Gear, and that was really to scratch our own itch of creating really high quality and minimalistic gear designed for the outdoors and really just focus on sustainability and conservation. Creating really high-quality stuff. And that's the, that's the fun side project. But my primary focus these days is in e-commerce, and that's with Wellness. So we're a B Corp certified brand of all-natural, non-toxic oral care products that work better than those conventional and toxic alternatives that most people use every day.

Yeah, tell me about, uh, first your, uh, past, right? And your, your background at, um, yeah, I saw here you started like with normal job, acquiring home, uh, then education consultant, and then, uh, Wellness Mama. Maybe we can start there in 2009. Sure.

Um, as far as like getting started with Wellness Mama?

Yeah, your first entrepreneurial experience, how it happened. Sure.

Well, my first entrepreneurial experience would have been in the real estate world, um, and that's where I got into buying, fixing up, and selling homes. And that was right around the time when the market crashed. So, um, you know, that was an interesting time, and I did not make a lot of money. I didn't lose any money like a lot of people, um, but I got out with barely my shirts. And, uh, the timing was interesting for sure. So that would have been probably one of my first entrepreneurial ventures. Um, after that, I was The last real job, if you want to call it that, I was working for a college in Nashville, Tennessee, in the admissions department, recruiting students primarily. And so I had the distinction of being homeschooled all through my educational formative years. So from kindergarten all the way through high school. And so the first time I actually sat in a classroom and took notes was my freshman year of college. So I had this experience of being homeschooled and knowing what that process was like. And then after college, working for a university and recruiting students to prepare for college. So I started a business from that, doing consulting work for homeschool students preparing for college, because I realized what the things that I was missing and that I didn't know. And I also knew the things that colleges were looking for in order to get the best students, and so that they could get scholarships and financial aid and all of that stuff to help them really prepare for that. That was an interesting foray into the online world and also realizing that just because I saw there was an opportunity didn't mean that there was necessarily a demand for it. So I ended up selling that website that I built and the content and created some ebooks and stuff like that around it. So that was kind of my first successful exit, I guess, if you will. Very minimal for sure. Yeah. And then Wellness Mama, I actually started that with my ex-wife. And it was a hobby that turned into a business. She was a journalism major, would go back to school for nutrition, and so was trying to do the best things for our family. And as I was building out my marketing firm, I used that website as a testing ground for the paying clients, and a lot of those tests really work. And so I went all in on growing that for several years, um, before eventually getting divorced and then exiting out of the company.

Interesting. And what did you learn from Wellness Mama? Because I heard about it, right? So it must have scaled to a pretty high level. Any lessons from that?

Oh, where do you start? So many lessons. Yeah, I mean, in its heyday, it was getting 10 million page views a month, so it did very well. I mean, the podcast, which we started in 2014, um, it's had well over 100 million downloads, um, over, over 1,000 published episodes now. I don't know what the numbers are now since I'm no longer, um, actively involved over there. Uh, yeah, but there's so many business lessons. Um, a lot of them were, you know, just one of my lessons for business in general is do the right things long enough consistently. Uh, we love to idolize business owners and people that have created something and think that they were an overnight success, but often what you don't see is the 10 years before that that it took to build it and grow it, building that foundation, because it does take a long time to build something. You got to put in all those hours and that work so that you really understand it, so that when the time comes and you can really grow and scale. So there's definitely a lot of lessons there around that as far as just um, building and growing and those long nights of working and without any, uh, initial payoff.

And that's, that's crazy. Um, on the back of that, how do you recover psychologically from a divorce and starting from scratch again? Like, you must have gone through that phase.

Yeah, very much so. Um, I got divorced about 4 years ago, and one of the hardest things that I've ever gone through probably the hardest thing that I've ever gone through. When you build a life with someone and you expect that to be forever and you have kids together and businesses together, and then that falls apart and there's a sense of loss, a sense of the loss of what was, of what could become, the hope and the expectation for the future. And so it really took a lot of self-reflection, a lot of therapy, a lot of deep work, reading, listening, and just understanding who I am at my core and the reasons my own part that was part of the reason why the marriage didn't last. And so coming out of the other side of that, I'm just a lot more clear on what I want in the future and who I am as a person, because there's so many lessons that you learn in relationships. And whether that's romantic or friendship or platonic or even business relationships, people are designed for connection, for community and spending time with others. And so there's always something to learn, no matter what the type of relationship is.

And rebuilding the business, uh, how hard was it to start from scratch? Uh, did you have like an existing network, existing mental models and systems? Tell me about like the, the D-Day of restarting your own.

So with Wellness, um, we had founded that together, my ex-wife and I, um, and we launched that on the back of the Wellness Mama audience. However, that was the initial customers that we had, but she was never actively involved with the company. Like, she— we promoted it to email list that she had created and curated and that we had built up over, uh, 15 years or so. Um, so it was more of just me stepping into the ownership role and leading the vision for it, um, basically from the very beginning, because physical products were not something that she was that passionate about. Um, it was for her as more just an opportunity, just seeing that there was demand. For me, I've always loved the creation process of something tangible, something physical that you can touch and hold and feel, as opposed to just creating something digital that are just pixels on a screen. And this is where we were very different. She enjoyed that part more than I did, and I enjoyed the more— the physical product side. So yeah, I think it— again, this goes back to that philosophy of doing the right things long enough consistently over time, because in so doing that, that's how you're going to win. And as long as you're focused on quality and building something that will last and that is really high value. That's, uh, that's been the secret.

The business in itself, like, how does— how different is it from, uh, Wellness Mama? Last time we talked about toothpaste, right? Like, you're going with some specific products. What was your thesis behind those specific products and niches?

When we launched the company in early 2020, the goal was to become the best personal care brand on the market. Using the cleanest ingredients, using formulations that were— that worked better than those conventional and toxic alternatives, but they used ingredients that weren't bad for you. A lot of personal care products, and whether that is toothpaste or shampoo and conditioner and deodorant, all those things that we use every day, often the ingredients that they use, they're really bad for you. For example, if you pull out a tube of toothpaste from, say, one of the big, big boys and look on the back, there is usually a poison control label on it. Because if you eat too much, it's really, really harmful. They're using ingredients that you shouldn't be consuming at all, such as sodium lauryl sulfate and fluoride and carrageenan and a lot of things that are just not good to be consumed. So when we started, we wanted to do better. We realized that if we can create products that work better, work as good or better than those conventional ones, but they're clean ingredients, the ones that are actually beneficial and not detrimental to your long-term health, then that's how we win.. And so that's been the focus. Um, and though while we launched as just a general personal care brand of oral, hair, and skincare, over time oral care is what's really taken off. So we're basically just an oral care brand now.

Okay. And the numbers, how has it grown? I think you, it's like you started that one since 2019. What's your growth tips?

We incorporated in 2019 and actually launched products in 2020. We've done 7 figures every year in business and we are growing slowly and steadily. We're still, we're not where we want to be. You know, I never talk publicly about our very specific numbers, but yeah, but we are profitable and we are continuing to grow and it's a slower, slower slog than I would prefer. But I think sometimes that's what it takes and competition has gotten very fierce. When we launched, there was probably only 2 other oral care companies that were creating really high quality products like ours and now there there's 50 or 100. So it's just gotten harder and harder, especially when it comes to paid ads and scaling and acquiring customers profitably. Just the competition has gotten fierce.

Interesting. And what are your favorite growth channels in a very competitive B2C e-commerce world?

Word of mouth is my favorite channel because people do business with those that they know, like, and trust. And so if you can get a customer to make a recommendation just based on how much they love that product, that is the best type of referral, the best type of new customer we can ever get because they like it so much that they're willing to put their own reputation on the line to say, hey, I love this, I wish you would buy it as well. That said, that's not as scalable as I would like. So paid ads are our primary channel. So we focus on Meta quite a bit. We also have an affiliate and influencer program to create content and get our message in front of the ideal audience. And we're always looking to grow and expand into other areas as well.

And okay, word of mouth, but I'm guessing you must get your clients from top of funnel somewhere. You must have a preferred channel because of course they stay, of course they reorder, but is it still Facebook ads, Meta ads in 2026? What is it?

Yeah, Meta is definitely, uh, that's our primary advertising channel. We definitely focus on that. We're also using Google, we're testing out Applovin, we're trying a lot of different channels just to see what sticks. Constantly tweaking our messaging, tweaking our creative, uh, just to see what resonates because the algorithm is getting just so complex, um, that you just gotta constantly be testing to see what works.

Interesting. What's been the most challenging part of that business?

New customer acquisition profitably. I think that's the name of the game in most direct-to-consumer businesses because you can acquire customers, but at what cost? Because even if you're growing $1 million a year but you're spending $2 million to acquire those customers, you're going belly up, you know, unless you have taken on a whole lot of money from investors. And so you can continue to be upside down and just spend in order that they will be repeat buyers down the road and not hope to make that back right away. So because we are a small— smaller— I still consider us in startup mode, um, so it calls a smaller startup just getting started, and we don't have those deep we can't do that. So we have to constantly evaluate to see what's working and where are we acquiring those customers so that we're at minimal break-even, um, and hopefully profitable on the first order. But that's not always possible.

What about retail? Have you made efforts to enter specific stores?

A little bit. We work with a lot of holistic and biological dentists. They're really on top of the latest science and what's working from a more holistic perspective than your traditional dentist, although that's changing now too. So a lot of those biological and holistic dentists, they carry our products in their offices and recommend them to their patients. And then we also, we have a hospitality program where some boutique hotels and places will carry our products, and then a few health food stores and like local boutiques and things like that, uh, that really want high-quality products.

And, uh, influencer campaigns— does that still work? Like, uh, it's been clinically approved by a bunch of, uh, doctors, but, uh, yeah, I would love to hear your thoughts about that.

Yeah, we're in the process of kind of revamping our program now because it's changed a lot. Um, when I was growing Wellness Mama, one of the biggest profit centers that we had was affiliate marketing, where we would recommend products and services and things that we loved and were a good fit for the audience. And that was primarily either in email, in blog post content, maybe as a podcast sponsorship or mention. And so some of the social media, et cetera, those channels, but most of the market seems to have switched to more of an influencer model where a lot of those creators just want to be paid to create the content, but not based on the results. As a business owner, I hate that because I only wanna spend money where it's making us money. And so we're acquiring new customers profitably, like I mentioned before. But there's so many scams out there. There's a lot of these influencer networks where they all just follow each other and comment on each other's content. But it's one vicious circle jerk that is not actually creating any value or actually driving any type of revenue for the companies. So it's a whole big scheme. And so we're constantly looking to see how can we work with those types of creators who actually have influence, who they have real followers, who people actually listen to them and pay attention. And it's typically not the biggest ones, not the ones who have the most followers. And follower count is actually starting to become irrelevant now because Instagram and Facebook and TikTok as well, just the way the algorithms are working is it's more like a recommendation engine. So it's showing you content based upon your interests and the things that you're liking, sharing, saving, following, etc. And so it's more likely to show that content as opposed to just those people that you're following as it did in the past.

Interesting. Tell me about the ingredients. There are a lot, right? Like they're pretty much all natural. Like how did you choose all of these and put them all into one toothpaste? Yeah.

So I've been very health conscious my entire life. I grew up in an Italian-American family where looking at the labels and what we're putting in our mouth is just standard practice. My mom was into essential oils and natural health ever since I can remember. And so that was something I was always interested in and paid attention to. I haven't used a fluoride-based toothpaste probably since I was a little kid. So I always used products that were more natural. However, a lot of— there's a lot of greenwashing in the industry. And so we see a lot of companies that say that they're natural, but they're not, or some that are cleaner. They're not using the nasty chemicals and the nasty toxic ingredients, but they're also not using anything that's beneficial. So we just went down this rabbit hole of creating products in our kitchen. And because there wasn't a lot of great options out there, both to save money for one early on, and then to use something that would actually work and was beneficial and not just detrimental.. And so after just doing a lot of research and trying and testing and then launching Wellness and working with a formulator who specializes in these things, and we got a very winning formula that works really, really well that is both whitening, remineralizing. You know, we have thousands and thousands of comments from our customers where they've reversed cavities, where their teeth are whiter. And so it's just, it's turned into a great project and our products, people love them.

What are your top goals, uh, for that specific company this year?

Top goals is just continue to grow profitably. Um, you know, I would love to double our sales this year. Uh, we got a ways to go to do that. We're putting some stuff in place as far as focusing on subscriptions right now and to get people to consistently coming back and purchasing from us. That I think is going to really lead the way, as well as working with a lot of new influencers and content creators and affiliates to help promote and recommend our products.

Interesting. You've walked across US. What, uh, what was in your mind back then?

Oh yeah, that was shortly after college, and, um, I, I graduated and I was bartending, waiting tables after that, um, and there was this nonprofit where they had this walk across, uh, America, and so I decided to do it. We walked from California all the way to Washington, D.C. the summer of 2005. Amazing experience, got to see a lot of the country, and, uh I was down about 145 pounds, which is the most or the least that I had weighed since I think my sophomore year of high school. So I lost a lot of weight and got in really good shape.

What was, uh, what was the lesson behind that? What, uh, have gone through your mind for that very long walk?

You know, whenever I do hard and physical things, I get really mentally clear. Um, I think you have a lot of time to think, a lot of time to meditate, and just like it's whenever I'm doing hard things and whether I'm a big hunter as well. So I do a lot of backpack hunting out like in Colorado and Montana. And so whenever you've got weight on your back, you're, you're hiking up hills or, you know, you're walking a long distance, you're just thinking about the next step ahead of you, one foot in front of the other. And so you get clear and you just think about life, the meaning of life, what you're trying to do, the goals you're trying to accomplish, maybe steps you need to take or actions. And so it was really just getting clear on what I wanted in life and where I was going. Um, what I was doing. And every time I do hard things like that, I tend to get very mentally clear, and I'm able to focus on, on the next steps of my life. And then once that journey is over, then I'm able to begin implementing those things, right?

But this is a day in your life looks like as Mr. Healthy.

Uh, every day is a little bit different. Um, I usually get up and hop in my cold plunge. Um, I usually work out I don't, I don't normally eat breakfast, at least not during the day. I usually have some black coffee, maybe a latte. Um, usually get work done, usually have team meetings, handle emails, Slack conversations. I'm usually doing some market research. Um, sometimes I'll have a podcast interview. Sometimes I'm connecting with friends or with business colleagues. Uh, often I'll work from a coffee shop depending on what I have going on. Usually in the afternoon I'll, I'll sauna and I'll cold plunge, usually make dinner. And so every day is a little bit different. I travel a lot too, so when I'm on the road, it looks different than it does when I'm at home.

I love it. Where can people find out more about you, Seth?

Sure, my personal website is sethspears.com, and I got links to everything there. Instagram is my primary channel that I play around with, and that's @spearsmarketing. And if you're interested in learning more about Wellnness, it's wellness.com, so W-E-L-L-N-E-S-S-E.com.

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