Brand Development & Evolution of Vitacost
How Vitacost evolved from traditional supplement marketing into a warmer, more scalable, lifestyle-driven brand system.
Modernizing a Wellness Retail Brand Before the Category Caught Up
I’ve spent my career helping brands move ahead of their category. At Vitacost, that meant helping transform a major wellness retailer away from the clinical, cluttered, and promotion-heavy visual language that dominated supplement marketing at the time into something warmer, clearer, and more human.
The work wasn’t just a refresh. It was the creation of a broader creative system built around trust, approachability, and lifestyle-driven wellness storytelling. Over time, that balance of credibility, warmth, and commerce became much more common across the category. Vitacost was operating in that space early, and I helped shape the brand systems and visual strategy that made that shift real.
Client: Vitacost
Scope: Brand Evolution, Creative Direction, Photography Systems, Digital Brand Language
Role: Creative Direction, Brand Systems, Visual Strategy
Timeline: 2015–2025
The Category Context
In 2016, the supplement space was visually polarized. Brands tended to fall into one of two extremes: sterile and pharmaceutical, or loud, crowded, and aggressively promotional. Much of the category still relied on dated digital comps, hard-sell merchandising, and a visual language that treated wellness as either clinical utility or discount retail.
Vitacost reflected some of those same conventions at the time. The business had scale, credibility, and a broad assortment, but the brand itself felt visually behind where both the company and the customer were heading. That created a clear opportunity: build something that felt credible but warm, natural without feeling niche, and modern without losing accessibility.
A More Human Approach to Wellness Retail
The goal was never just to make the brand look newer. It was to create a design philosophy that felt more aligned with how people were beginning to think about wellness: more personal, more design-aware, and more integrated into everyday life.
Credible,
not clinical
The brand needed to feel informed and trustworthy without borrowing the cold visual cues of pharmaceutical marketing.
Natural,
not niche
It needed to reflect health and wellness in a way that felt fresh and accessible, not overly earthy, crunchy, or exclusionary.
Modern,
not trend-chasing
The goal was a cleaner, more current system built for longevity, not just a cosmetic refresh.
Structured,
but scalable
Every design decision had to work across real business needs: promotions, merchandising, content, email, site design, and packaging.
Logo Evolution
As the rest of the brand began to evolve, the original Vitacost logo quickly fell behind. It felt dated, visually unclear, and disconnected from both the product category and the direction the company was heading. I led the reinvention of the mark, with Jon driving the design execution, to create something that felt contemporary, recognizable, and flexible across applications.
The new logo was built from the ground up with usage in mind. The custom wordmark softened a generic sans-serif by subtly tweaking corners and edges to feel a little less polished and a little more human, almost like it had been imperfectly cut from paper. Internally, the company had also begun using the tree as a symbol of growth and change, so that idea was folded into the V form to give the mark more meaning and category relevance.
Scalability was a key part of the system. Instead of relying on a single accent color, the logo was designed to flex across four approved brand accents depending on context. A condensed mark pushed the natural language further, using a rough water-ring form around the V to create a shape that felt distinct, organic, and instantly recognizable.
2016 – Present
2011 – 2016
1994– 2011
Photography That Changed the Tone of the Brand
One of the biggest shifts in the brand came through photography. At a time when much of the category still leaned on obviously digital product comps and synthetic wellness imagery, I helped build an in-house studio approach that felt more artisanal, handmade, and rooted in real life.
That meant creating a studio setup from scratch, defining the art direction, and moving toward natural light, tactile materials, and everyday environments that made the products feel more human and more at home in a lifestyle context. There was inspiration in the broader rise of design-forward retail photography at the time, but that language had not yet been widely adopted in the wellness space.
The result was a visual tone that felt warmer, more editorial, and more grounded than what was typical in the category. It helped shift Vitacost away from transactional product marketing and toward a more approachable kind of wellness storytelling.
Photography direction in collaboration with Katelyn Hall
Color, Texture, and Tone
Color, texture, and typography became essential to shifting Vitacost away from a budget-driven promotional look and toward something more natural, modern, and emotionally resonant. Because the business carried such a wide range of products and required such a large volume of merchandising assets, the system had to do more than support a single visual note. It needed enough range to stay cohesive across categories, campaigns, and environments.
I helped define a broader palette built around four rotating brand accents, with green as the primary anchor. That gave the brand more flexibility while still keeping it recognizable. From there, the palette expanded to support digital, promotional, and content applications more fully, creating a color system that could move with the business instead of limiting it.
Texture played an equally important role. Rather than relying on flat digital color blocks, we introduced gritty overlays and neutral natural textures that made the materials feel more tactile and less synthetic. Typography helped complete that balance. Roboto Slab brought a contemporary, slightly expressive accent that felt warm and web-friendly, while Helvetica Neue provided clarity, system support, and the scalability needed across site content, promotions, and high-volume production. Together, these elements gave the brand a visual language that felt more human, more distinct, and built to hold together over time.
Visual direction in collaboration with Steven Porter, Christina Clevenger & Katelyn Hall
Across Web, Marketing, Social Media and Packaging
The brand shift was never limited to one expression. It extended across every major touchpoint, creating a more unified experience wherever customers encountered Vitacost. Web design, email marketing, social content, merchandising, and packaging all began to reflect the same core philosophy: credible, natural, modern, and scalable.
That consistency mattered just as much internally as it did externally. It gave teams a clearer system to work from, improved cohesion across channels, and made it easier to build new work without reinventing the brand every time. Over the course of a decade, that thinking scaled across thousands of assets and helped establish a more premium and recognizable brand presence.
Outcome
Over time, the work created a brand presence that felt more cohesive, more premium, and more internally usable across channels. It gave Vitacost a clearer visual identity, a stronger sense of consistency, and a system that could support real retail needs at scale.
Just as importantly, it shifted the tone of the brand. What had once felt more promotional and fragmented became warmer, more modern, and more aligned with the way wellness consumers were beginning to shop and engage. The system was adopted broadly, expanded over time, and laid the foundation for how the brand continued to evolve.
What eventually became common across the supplement and wellness space was still emerging when this work began. Vitacost helped define a visual language that later became much more familiar in the category, and I helped shape the systems that made that possible.
Project Credits
While I led the charge, this work was collaborative. I want to recognize the designers, photographers, and creative partners whose contributions helped bring different parts of the brand to life.
