Procter & Gamble acquired supplement brand Thorne last month for $3.8 billion. Founded in 1984, Thorne passed $500 million in annual revenue and grew direct-to-consumer sales 63% in 2025. Behind the deal sits a deliberate rebuild of Thorne’s brand platform around the consumer.
Thorne has a long heritage of working with healthcare practitioners and strong quality credentials. Yet until relatively recently, it hadn’t studied consumers’ motivations, questions and hesitations about supplements.
Chief Growth Officer Mary Beech, appointed in August 2024 to lead both marketing and e-commerce, took on that gap. She previously held roles at Scholastic, Sarah Flint, Kate Spade and Disney. “We were meeting a consumer who had an incredible sense of overwhelm and confusion in the market,” Beech said.
Thorne worked with brand consultancy Redscout, which built insights three ways:
The surprise: Thorne’s scientific rigor mattered less to consumers than the company assumed. “[We had to] pivot our thinking to being consumer-first versus being Thorne-first,” Beech said, “which is a hard change to make when you have so much potential to talk about.”
The resulting platform puts the consumer at the center. Redscout also helped create an internal communications guide called “know me, show me,” pairing consumer insights with the brand’s value propositions.
Thorne partnered with Project 3 Agency, founded by Kendrick Lamar, to launch the “Now I Know” campaign in January. After an anthem video, the work expanded into women’s health stories on perimenopause and libido with Misty Copeland and Lana Condor, and into sports performance with NBA star Cade Cunningham.
DTC brands have sometimes struggled to keep their identity inside large CPG companies, as Dollar Shave Club did under Unilever. Thorne will keep its platform next year, close this year with a second anthem focused on curiosity, and in 2027 focus on the middle of the funnel, educating consumers through partnerships with the Unrivaled league and the Miami Open.
Brands with the most to say often bury the consumer’s actual questions. Like Omaha Steaks dropping vague quality claims, Thorne’s turning point was talking less about itself and more about consumer confusion. A real platform is not a yearly slogan; it is a baseline that survives campaigns and even acquisitions. For brands weighing extensions, see When Your Brand Can Do Almost Anything.
P&G acquired Thorne for $3.8 billion. Thorne had passed $500 million in annual revenue and grew DTC sales 63% in 2025.
“Thorne rewards curiosity with excellence,” a consumer-first platform that answers consumers’ questions rather than leading with scientific rigor.
With Redscout, it used digital diaries, a nationally representative quantitative study and small group interviews.
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