We recently connected with Phene Wardlaw and have shared our conversation below.

Phene, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

My whole life, I have struggled with mental health and anxiety. In 2018 my anxiety was at a high, and I started a prescription to try and manage it. But then my good friend, Alex Valley, told me about CBD. I tried it and found that it was a much more natural and effective way to manage my symptoms. He let me know that he was planning on starting a business around it. CBD possessed all these amazing benefits, but it wasn’t mass marketable. There were tinctures, pills, and gummies, but there wasn’t something approachable or friendly to the average human. UNITY came to fruition when we realized we could make CBD taste good, look pretty, and feel premium with a glass bottle but at a competitive cost to what was on the market. But, we didn’t stop there. At the time, I also took adaptogens (which taste awful) for all their amazing health benefits. By incorporating three adaptogens into our formulas, we could capitalize on and highlight the benefits of CBD.

So after moonlighting for a few months with UNITY, I decided that it was going to take off and I didn’t want to miss that train. Was it terrifying to leave my cushy corporate job? Absolutely. But honestly making that jump, reignighted my passion for creativity that I was lacking. I have always had an entrepreneurial mindset but was always so scared to take that leap of faith. And now…I wouldn’t change a thing!

Phene, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

You don’t know what you don’t like until you try it. When I graduated from college in 2016, I was unsure what I wanted to do, so I tried working in various industries. I was helping to get UNITY off the ground, and I realized it was the first time I was truly motivated and passionate about what I was doing. We originally launched a small run of our products in Los Angeles in 2018. Our product sold out much faster than we had planned, and that’s when I realized it was something I wanted to do full-time. After that trial run, we went back to the drawing board, reformulated, modified the branding, and created more flavors. In February 2020, we relaunched, not knowing there was about to be a worldwide pandemic. While that could have hindered our growth, we chose to persevere. In uncharted territory, anxiety and stress were at an all-time high. UNITY quickly became more than just a brand. It was about creating a community that champions mental health, connecting people, and uniting one’s mental and physical health.

We have coined the term liquid-to-lips marketing or getting people actually to try our products. If someone has never tried us, they aren’t very likely to order a 6-pack or a 12-pack on our site. So for this relaunch, we decided to prioritize retail and distributor relationships over eCommerce. We are now in over 1,600 stores across the US and have seen exponential growth in our website sales.

I am so proud that the business has grown to what it is today. One of the most validating feelings is that we have closed our seed and series A funding. It’s one thing to believe in your company, but it’s another when complete strangers want to be a part of the journey with us…and we are just getting started!

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

As the CMO, I had my work cut out for me. Due to the gray area of paid ads and promoted posts for the CBD space, we have had to jump through many hoops to build a social media presence. While CBD was made federally legal in 2014 with the farm bill, the likes of Facebook and Instagram still view it as a recreational drug, probably due to the lack of regulation in the CBD industry itself. So while we can’t do paid promotions, we have forged our path with influencer marketing, strategic partnerships, events, and collaborations. Unfortunately, we were also bootstrapping and self-funded until our funding round in Nov 2020. So we simply did not have the budget to compete with larger companies and therefore just had to make it work. Honestly, it’s been a great test to see what I can do without a sizeable budget or paid ads. It just gets me excited for what we can do going forward!

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

The CBD space is an interesting one because many companies offer white-labeling of their products, but we wanted to manufacture our own. We needed our CBD to work, be cost-effective, and taste good, so we decided to formulate our own drinks and source our own vendors. Did we have any idea what we were doing? Not really. But we learned quickly along the way. After formulating the drinks, we had to find a manufacturer that could work with CBD and our minimums and scale with us as we grow. Getting started is difficult because there isn’t a handbook on it. You just have to be eager to learn and comfortable in the unknown.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://unitywellness.co/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unitywellnessco/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/UnityWellnessCo/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tryphenawardlaw/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/UnityWellnessCo
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC950U18_NyW5w7MnMcbkC4g

Image Credits
Headshot: Jared Olsen Studio shots: Daily Post Media