Designs For Health Creates Beauty Supplement Range To Support Aesthetics Procedure Results

Functional medicine doctor-beloved supplement brand Designs for Health has designs on the aesthetics space.

The 35-year-old family-owned brand has introduced Designs for Beauty, a sleek 11-item range of 10 ingestibles and one topical product addressing common skincare concerns and supporting aesthetics patients in achieving optimal post-procedure results. The range presents an opportunity for Designs for Health, which is sold by tens of thousands of medicinal practitioners across the United States, to significantly broaden its business by entering aesthetics destinations, increasingly an attractive distribution route for brands responding to the proliferation of aesthetic procedures.

According to the American Med Spa Association, there were 10,488 med-spas in the United States in 2023, up from 8,899 the year before. The association’s med-spa estimate doesn’t include doctors’ offices with aesthetic treatments, another distribution target for Designs for Beauty. The brand provides a three-hour online training course to aesthetics destinations carrying its products that taps its deep bench of medical and health experts to dive into the relationship between nutrition and skin health.

Designs for Beauty brand manager and nutritionist Ginger Downey says, “Medical aesthetic practitioners don’t have a professional-grade supplement line to offer to their patients and especially not one with a whole practice solution like ours.” After going through the three-hour training, she adds, “Everyone is speaking from the same educated place of facts about nutrition for healthy skin. They learn about that and we teach them about how to have conversations with clients.”

Unlike at doctors’ offices, where patients generally get 16 minutes or less with their doctor, aesthetics practices tend to spend greater amounts of time with their clients, opening up the possibility of conversations about Designs for Beauty. The brand teaches aesthetics practitioners to conduct a quick dietary assessment and recommend products based on it. In addition, it has a proprietary saliva-based genetic test, Spotlight on Skin Test, to uncover genetic factors that influence clients’ skin health and guide lifestyle and nutritional recommendations.

Designs for Health’s no-frills branding reflects its focus on what’s in the bottle rather than the bottle itself. However, because Designs for Beauty is heading to stylish med-spas, a glow-up was in order. The brand was fashioned to fit in sitting alongside the other beauty products typically sold at med-spas. Designs for Health used the agency Front Row for Designs for Beauty’s concept development and brand guidelines, but marketing materials and social media assets were handled by its internal creative team.

Designs for Beauty’s range is priced from $39 to $98 and features products for hair, skin and nail health, hormonal balance, sleep quality and more. It won’t be sold on Amazon, at least initially. Designs for Health products are on the platform. 

Designs for Health was able to bring Designs for Beauty to market in nine months. Select Designs for Beauty formulas are reimaginings of existing or retired Designs for Health products. At $98, the peptide lotion Dipped in Gold is the priciest product and the one topical product. It’s an upgraded version of Dermaveil, an earlier topical product from Designs for Health.

Dipped in Gold’s hero ingredient is PeptiYouth, a patented peptide Designs for Beauty describes as the first artificial intelligence-discovered anti-aging peptide verified to clinically improve the skin’s visible signs of aging. It comes from AI-powered ingredient supplier Nuritas. Dipped in Gold pairs PeptiYouth with vitamin E tocotrienols, annatto seed-derived geranylgeraniol, CoQ10, stabilized vitamin C and polyphenols.

“Think about, in the past, all the eyeballs that have to be researching and reading papers and trying to determine what peptides would work for what indication,” says Downey. “With AI, we can comb through volumes and volumes and volumes of research and narrow down on what we really want.”  

Designs for Health was founded by Jonathan Lizotte in 1989 long before the contemporary wellness craze spawned supplement brands like Moon Juice and Rituals. Lizotte originally started it as a nutritional counseling and education service with ambitions to revolutionize the natural medicine industry. 

“We were doing this when it wasn’t the cool thing to do,” says David Brady, a naturopathic medical physician and Designs for Health’s chief medical officer. “We helped make it the cool thing.” 

When Brady joined Designs for Health more than 20 years ago, the brand sold about 20 stockkeeping units. Today, it sells roughly 300 products and 400 SKUs. Brady reports that Designs for Health has averaged over 20% year-over-year annual sales growth during his 20-plus year tenure. Part of its growth is due to new ventures such as Designs for Beauty. Designs for Health also owns Fx Chocolate, a maker of handcrafted chocolate packed with supplements.

“I’ve seen the company rise from a smaller professional line that was sort of niche. We had some really cool products, but they were in very specific domains,” says Brady. “When I came in, we set about making Designs for Health a major player in the field to compete with the big dogs at the time, which were companies like Metagenics. Here we are some 20 years later, and we passed them right by. We’re the most trusted brand in functional and integrative medicine.”

Lizotte was CEO of Designs for Health until last year, when its chief commercial officer Amardeep Kahlon moved into the role. Lizotte continues to serve as chair of its board. In 2020, private equity firm Roundtable Healthcare Partners secured a minority stake in Designs for Health.