Kara Golding x hint
“The most healthy thing you can do when you are trying to actually change your lifestyle and get healthy is drink clean water.”
Kara Golding is the founder of hint, inc., a healthy lifestyle brand based in San Francisco that is well-known for its flagship product, hint water - a delicious, unsweetened flavored water. It has since branched out into manufacturing natural sunscreens and deodorants, all whilst staying true to Kara’s philosophy of simply creating products that people love to use, so that they can live healthier lives.
After leaving her job as a tech executive at AOL, Kara found herself overweight, constantly low on energy and struggling with adult acne. She embarked on a lifestyle change, but still found it hard to achieve her health goals, until she found the main culprit: diet soda. Upon doing more research, she realized that the artificial sweeteners found in diet soda actually cause you to crave sweet things more than usual, and wreak havoc on your metabolism and insulin resistance. However, she hated the taste of plain water, so she began cutting up fruit and throwing it into pitchers of water at home. Her kitchen experiment soon became a hit among her family and friends; she realized that she had created a product that she and others would actually buy. With that, hint was born.
Today, hint is the largest independent, non-alcoholic beverage company in the States that does not have a relationship with Coca Cola or Pepsi. They sell their products nationwide and have a good partnership with both Google and Amazon. They have even launched a direct to consumer business - which is rare for a beverage company. Their flagship product is their fruit-infused flavored water which are available in still, sparkling and caffeinated varieties, and are all free of sugar, artificial sweeteners and preservatives.
Besides artificial sweeteners, Kara realized that there was another hidden enemy in a product we commonly use: oxy-benson in sunscreen. After having several run-ins with precancerous cells on her nose, she realized that she had to stop relying on the SPF in her make-up, but disliked the consistencies of mineral-based sunscreens. She came across an article on oxy-benson, a common ingredient in chemical-based sunscreens, and found out that the CDC had actually recommended the FDA not to approve that ingredient back in the 70s, because it could exacerbate pre-cancerous cells under the skin layer. From there - she tried looking for an oxy-benson free, non-mineral-based sunscreen - but existing products that fit that criteria did not come cheap. What follows is a similar story to hint water; she started experimenting in her kitchen, creating sunscreen that she used hint water scents for. Once again, she started as a consumer of her own product, and realized that it needed to hit the shelves.
“For us it’s really ‘stay simple’. My goal is not to develop 2,000 different categories, my goal is to develop great products”.
Although hint has started expanding beyond flavored water into the production of sunscreens and deodorants, Kara continues to differentiate her brand from other products in an extremely competitive marketplace by staying true to a very simple ethos: producing great, reasonably priced products that people love. According to Kara, the most important criteria for consumers today is that her products taste good - so that’s what she focuses on. hint uses real fruit, and constantly innovate their flavors. “You’re not going to taste the deodorant or sunscreen (hopefully)”, Kara jokes, “but you’re going to have a great experience with them”.
“We will roll with it and do what we can.”
When asked how hint coped with the COVID-19 pandemic, Kara had two main responses. Firstly, she highlighted that they were able to react swiftly. Even before working from home started becoming the new normal, Kara anticipated that her food service corporate business (hint water is sold directly to Google offices) would be badly hit, so she started brainstorming what could be done. Secondly, having multiple channels of distribution meant that even though some channels were at risk, other channels could still work and get the products sold.
She was able to reach out to Amazon to make sure that her product was framed as an “essential” good, so that the shipments won’t be delayed. She also made sure that all consumers were aware of the option to order hint directly instead of relying on retailers; since the pandemic, direct to consumer sales have gone up by over 100%. On top of the importance of having sales across multiple channels, Kara notes that the pandemic taught her how important spending on manufacturing was - manufacturing in the US may be more expensive, but in trying times like this, lots of industries face issues with foreign manufacturing when they cannot access certain components.
“As we are coming out of this, I think that everyone should look at their business and figure out those areas where they could really improve. Even if it’s expensive, it’s more expensive to not be able to sell.”