Wellness brand Armra has tapped Hamid Saify as chief marketing officer.
Saify joins from Lucky Energy, where he was CMO. As an early employee at Liquid Death, Saify helped drive the brand from a disruptive challenger into one of the fastest-growing beverage companies.
In his new role, Saify will lead the company’s growth strategy, customer acquisition, market expansion and strategic partnerships. Founded by a physician, the DTC brand sells a colostrum supplement designed to strengthen the body’s gut and immune system. Brand Innovators caught up with Saify about the new role.
What attracted you to the brand?
I’ve been a fan of Armra for quite some time following along from the sidelines. I always felt the brand had such a clean aesthetic and scientific positioning, and what really interested me first and foremost was so much of the storytelling that can be done for this brand around how we impact people’s lives, the changes we’re making in their lives, and how it not only benefits just them but their friends and family and people around them at the core. Whether it was at Liquid Death or Lucky Energy, I always start from a place of “Does this marketing make people feel something?”
And if we can make people feel something, everything else becomes a bit easier and that’s what we’re trying to do here as the brand expands into new categories and expands into retail and bringing the ARMRA story to life in a completely new way. Moving into this next chapter of the business for a brand that really stands for something and develops loyalty beyond reason.
What are your plans for the role?
First as a marketer who’s done growth and been on the creative and brand side of marketing, for me one of the most important things was to flatten out the organization so it’s just one marketing department now. The siloes of brand vs growth don’t work in my opinion and I think brands can only go so far with that type of structure.
We’ve flattened out the organization and brought in all the different aspects that marketing truly touches across performance marketing, branding creative, Amazon, and business intelligence and insights. We’ve done a good amount of work in a short time to get the organization really set up for the next phase of success.
Ultimately, the goal for this role and the brand overall is we want to make colostrum a household name. We want to make it more approachable, and to have an impact in culturally relevant moments in time so that it doesn’t feel so niche or like a smaller segment in the wellness category. We want it to feel expansive and feel like something people can feel, understand, and truly have an affinity for the brand where it really represents them. What you pick up, what you put in your body, and what you have in your hand is a representation of you as a person and we want ARMRA to really establish a foothold in people’s minds when it comes to building out this brand in its next phase.
How are you hoping to grow the category?
We do think that there’s an expansion opportunity for this brand not just in retail but obviously as we think about new and exciting product as it relates to colostrum over the next year or so.
I think it just starts with getting more people aware and understanding what colostrum is and who ARMRA is as the market leader in the colostrum space. It starts from that perspective. When this brand does the education and does more work from the creative and brand side of things, there’s going to be more general awareness of colostrum and what this category is and represents within the overall wellness space. If we fuse that with boundary pushing creative and a disciplined way of working through this migration of going from a DTC and digital only brand to a full omnichannel powerhouse, that’s where we’re going to win.
Not only with how we show up with people on the digital side, but how we show up in real life experiences and bridging this gap between the digital and physical world with our retail partners, customers, and with prospects who’ve yet to hear about ARMRA but will soon hear more about us.
Those are the kinds of ways forward but beyond that we have a really disciplined approach for how we’ve rolled out products and flavors over the past six years and we’ll continue to be intentional about how we roll out new categories and formats and flavors.
