How Hiya Health Built a Kids' Brand Parents Can't Stop Trusting

Hey everyone,

Welcome back for another bite to chew on.

Most kids' wellness brands operate with a quiet tension at their core: the customer who buys is not the customer who uses. Parents hand over the product, kids decide whether it stays. That means trust has to travel through two completely different people. One of them is six years old and suspicious of anything that tastes like broccoli.

Adam Gillman and his co-founder Darren started Hiya the way the best consumer companies start: with a personal problem they couldn't find a good answer to. Their own kids were one and two years old. They were buying children's vitamins off the shelf and couldn't get comfortable with what was in them: the sugar, the fillers, the cheerful packaging designed to obscure rather than inform. They had experience building consumer brands in regulated categories, but this was different. This was their kids.

What they built over the next several years was not just a better vitamin. It was a set of decisions on product, retention, and growth that turned a series of apparent constraints into a brand that big competitors find genuinely hard to replicate. Each call looked like a sacrifice at the time. Each one became a wall.

On the Menu:

BTW, this is just a taste of our chat with Adam. Listen to the full recording here.

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The supplement industry is one of the more structurally unusual spaces in consumer goods. As Adam pointed out, it is technically monitored by the FDA, not governed by it, which creates both genuine opportunity for good actors and real risk from bad ones. 

The category is "riddled with uncertainty and a lot of really bad players," and because the end user is a child, the scrutiny lands harder than it would for almost any adult product.

Hiya's response was to treat that scrutiny as a brand brief rather than a compliance hurdle. The question at every decision point: "Would I give this to my own kids every day?" It was not marketing copy. It was actually how they made product decisions. The reusable bottle and refill system was proof of that orientation: it signals environmental care, but on a deeper level it turns vitamin time into a moment of connection between parent and child. 

Even the brand aesthetic, minimal and color-forward, designed to speak to the millennial parent without talking down to the kid, was a deliberate rejection of the category's status quo.

The sugar-free commitment was the most consequential early decision Hiya made, and it made everything harder for longer than it needed to be. Early adoption slowed. The gummy vitamin category runs on palatability, and sugar is palatability's best friend. Hiya said no anyway.

Adam described it as "a hill we will die on." Not metaphorically. Operationally. They moved slower as a result. But the principle behind the decision is worth understanding: speed is only valuable if it doesn't create future rework or regret. 

Fixing a mistake in kids' health later is not really an option. The brand has to be something parents can trust before they ever find out about a problem, which means the time to make the hard call is before you have an audience, not after.

Holding that line, staying committed to the values even when iteration would have been easier, is the same discipline that kept them from launching a protein powder in month three, chasing an X account trend, or adding sugar "just for the early days" with a plan to remove it later.

Walking through the vitamin aisle at Whole Foods and pointing out what was on the label: that was Hiya's launch ad. Not shaming any brand, just encouraging parents to take a look. A pointed move, deployed once, for a specific purpose.

Beyond that first moment, Adam was emphatic about what happens to brands that lean on fear. It works in the short term the same way it works in political advertising: it spikes attention, it drives initial action. But it quietly erodes the trust it appears to create. 

Parents who are repeatedly made to feel like they've been failing their kids will eventually resent the brand holding up the mirror.

Hiya's alternative was education-first positioning: give parents information they can use, whether or not it relates to what Hiya sells, and become the expert they trust. "Parents don't want to be reminded that they're failing," Adam said. "They just want clarity and truth." The goal is to make them feel empowered, not alarmed.

What you can do: Identify the one non-negotiable your brand can stake its reputation on. Not a trend. A conviction. Then audit your last ten pieces of marketing. Are they making customers feel capable and informed, or quietly suggesting they've been getting it wrong? The former compounds. The latter leaks.

Hiya's cancellation policy has always been the same: cancel anytime, full refund, for any reason, no hoops. At a time when the subscription industry was moving toward harder cancellations and longer hold windows, Hiya went the other direction.

The logic is less idealistic than it sounds. Customers who leave because the timing was wrong (a difficult month, a product that didn't fit quite right, a kid who went through a phase of refusing anything) remember how they were treated on the way out. A frictionless exit keeps the door open. A maze slams it. Adam put it simply: "When you treat them well, they remember that."

The easy cancellation policy is also a signal. It communicates that Hiya believes the product will speak for itself. Brands that make cancellation hard are, implicitly, admitting they don't believe that.

Every cancellation at Hiya becomes a real conversation. Not a survey flow. Not a "tell us why you're leaving" dropdown. A human being asking why, listening to the answer, and logging it somewhere it can actually be used.

That data became the product roadmap. Flavor preferences. Kids going through phases. Households with two kids who had different taste profiles. Delivery timing mismatches. Issues that would never appear in a cohort analysis but showed up over and over in individual conversations. Hiya took that data seriously and made changes.

It is worth saying plainly: most brands that claim to be customer-centric are customer-centric at the level of NPS surveys. Hiya's commitment was operational: it cost money to staff, it was harder to scale than a chatbot, and they did it anyway.

One of the most common cancel reasons Hiya discovered: the child didn't like certain flavors in the mixed pack. Not the vitamins. Not the price. A specific color gummy.

Hiya's solution was to let customers text customer service and request a fully customized pack. Only green apple. No red. Whatever the kid would actually eat. This was, as Adam acknowledged, "a logistics nightmare" at the time. But they built the capability anyway, and it became one of the most defensible parts of the business. 

The really big competitors, the ones with the distribution advantages and the marketing budgets, could not replicate it. Operational complexity, at sufficient depth, becomes a scale barrier for incumbents who are optimized for volume, not customization.

"It's one of the things I'm proudest that we put into place," Adam said. The pride was not about logistics. It was about the decision to solve a problem that was hard to solve because it mattered to customers, not because it was easy to build.

What you can do: Treat every cancellation as an interview. The most valuable product intelligence doesn't come from surveys. It comes from someone who has already decided to leave and has nothing left to lose by being honest. Make it easy enough to cancel that they actually tell you why.

Hiya has a saying they use constantly: what got us here won't get us there. It sounds like a motivational poster. It is actually a systems philosophy.

Adam's point is that the processes, tools, and structures that work at a given stage of growth are not necessarily the ones that work at the next stage. The right response is not to defend existing systems out of familiarity or pride. It is to build them, obsess over them, and audit them on a regular cadence, asking seriously whether the system is still serving the mission or whether it has become the mission.

Quality control and feedback loops are the two structures he called out as most important to establish early. Not because they are glamorous, but because they are the mechanisms that tell you when something is going wrong before it becomes a brand problem. You can move fast in messaging and creative. You cannot move fast in product integrity.

Three years between Hiya's first product and their second. In a category where brands routinely launch a new SKU every quarter (protein powders, sleep gummies, whatever is trending in the health subreddit), Hiya waited until they had something that deserved to exist under the same brand.

The instinct to add products is understandable. Adam described recognizing it clearly: "It's very easy and very attractive to cut corners." Every founder who has been through a period of early momentum knows the pull of the shiny object, the feeling that adding something new will generate the next wave of growth. 

What Hiya understood was that the trust parents had placed in them was more fragile than the revenue opportunity from the next product launch.

The discipline that kept them slow was the same discipline behind every other decision in the company. Slow down when you make decisions. Ask if the tomorrow version of your brand will be proud of what the today version is doing. The answer should be yes before you move.

Hiya eventually partnered with USANA, a company that has spent close to thirty years building a large business internationally through an MLM model. On paper, an unusual pairing. In practice, a nearly perfect puzzle-piece fit: they do what Hiya cannot (international scale, distribution networks), and Hiya does what they cannot (DTC, brand-driven direct relationship with the consumer). Neither encroaches on the other's domain.

The vetting process was what made it work. Adam's criteria were simple but hard to satisfy: values and incentives aligned, partner would expand the mission rather than constrain it, clear agreement on who controls what. The first meeting was posturing. The second was where the real alignment became visible.

He was direct about the emotional difficulty of the decision. "Very hard," he said. And direct about what made it easier: knowing it was the right thing for the brand's future, not just the founders' liquidity. The partnership was not a transaction. It was a judgment that Hiya would flourish more with USANA than without.

The leadership insight underneath all of this: as you grow beyond the founding team, the job changes. It stops being about doing everything and starts being about creating environments where good decisions can happen: clear culture, selective hiring, autonomy for the people you let in.

What you can do: Before approaching a partner or investor, map out with precision what they do that you cannot, and what you do that they cannot. If the answer isn't obvious and distinct on both sides, the deal probably isn't right. The best partnerships are puzzle pieces, not overlapping circles.