The encyclopedia · Strategy & Leadership · Strategic decision · 2016–2024
Care/of built a $225M personalized vitamin brand, then shut down in a year
Bayer paid $225M for the quiz-based vitamin subscription in 2020; four years later it canceled every subscription and laid off all 143 staff.
Care/of · 2024-06-17
What happened
Care/of launched in 2016 in New York with a novel pitch: answer a quiz about your diet and lifestyle, and it ships a personalized pack of daily vitamins tailored to you. The direct-to-consumer model grew fast, and in 2020 Bayer bought a controlling stake for $225 million, betting the brand's data-driven personalization would anchor a new health division.
The category then crowded. Big retailers pushed their own supplements, rivals like Persona and Nutrafol chased the same personalization story, and the direct-to-consumer brands that had grown on cheap Facebook ads found acquisition costs climbing just as funding tightened. Care/of's subscriptions stopped growing.
On June 17, 2024, Bayer said it would close the subsidiary's U.S. operations, and Care/of canceled all subscriptions that day. A WARN filing showed all 143 employees at its Brooklyn headquarters would be laid off effective July 3, 2024. The company's own announcement was blunt: it no longer had funding to continue.
Why it happened
- The personalized-supplement category exploded with competitors at the same time that cheap digital-ad acquisition dried up, so the growth engine that justified the $225M valuation stalled.
- As a majority-owned subsidiary of a pharma giant, Care/of was vulnerable to a strategic pivot: when the unit stopped growing, Bayer's decision to cut it was a line-item call, not a rescue.
- The subscription model carried high churn and acquisition costs, so stalling growth turned into a cash drain that the parent was unwilling to keep funding.
The lesson
A direct-to-consumer brand is only worth as much as its cheap growth. When the category fills and acquisition costs climb, the math the valuation was built on unwinds.
Aftermath
Care/of shut its U.S. operations in mid-2024 and laid off its entire Brooklyn staff. The case became a marker of the broader pullback in personalized-supplement and direct-to-consumer health brands after the funding boom ended.
Sources
- Retail Dive — Care/of is shutting down (all 143 employees laid off, WARN filing)
- NutraIngredients — The rise and fall of Care/of: A financial perspective (June 28, 2024)
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