Creating Customer-Driven Healthcare with Hilary Coles, Co-Founder of hims & hers

The fact of that matter is that the healthcare system was not built with the consumer in mind. That is, until hims & hers came along.

This three-year-old company has been making waves in the industry, and for good reason. Its platform has facilitated more than two million medical visits and is valued at more than $1.6 billion. And all of this in an industry that has been immune to disruption for decades.

hims & hers is the first true consumer healthcare brand that, through its platform, creates an easy, transparent, and high-quality experience for all those frustrated with their current healthcare option. Its mission is to help people finally feel empowered to talk about and get treated for certain conditions, and Hilary Coles, the co-founder and VP of Merchandising for the company, is responsible for making that happen.

On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Hilary explains why humor really is the best medicine when it comes to marketing, and she talks about how brands should approach experimentation. Plus, she provides tips to anyone who is thinking about trying to disrupt a big industry, and why she thinks it’s a risk worth taking.

Main Takeaways:

• Everything the Light Touches: Talking about certain things is uncomfortable — especially when it comes to your healthcare. But for a brand to make an impact, it has to have a message, reach into those uncomfortable places, and make it okay for those you’re trying to reach to talk about them too. By embracing humor and truth in marketing, you create an authenticity that is often missing and you open the door for your target consumers to feel empowered to take action.
• Social Experiments: Making experimentation and ideation a social process is one of the best ways to bring the most creative ideas to the table. When you invite everyone to contribute, and when you are honest with everyone about what ideas worked and which failed, you create an atmosphere that encourages risk-taking and you are more likely to experiment in channels or with opportunities your competitors are overlooking.
• But Why?: Having an endless curiosity and need to ask “why” is the best way to disrupt an industry, and also to keep improving your processes. Too often companies or entire industries fall back on doing things the way they have always been done. The company that comes in and consistently questions how and why things are done a certain way and then changes them is the one that consumers will begin to take notice of.

For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

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Transcript:

Stephanie:

Welcome back to Up Next In Commerce. This is Stephanie Postles, co-founder of mission.org. Today, I'm really excited to be chatting Hilary Coles, the co-founder at hims and hers. Hilary, welcome.

Hilary:

Thank you so much for having me.

Stephanie:

Yeah, I'm really excited. I think we're going to have such a good conversation and there's so many areas where we can take it. I was doing a bit of research, and there are so many case studies built around you guys. Did you know that?

Hilary:

I didn't actually know that. Is that true?

Stephanie:

Yeah, I found at least three and so many articles diving into your business model. So, there's a lot of content I want to cover, and maybe first we need to start with what is hims and hers?

Hilary:

hims and hers is really the first consumer health care brand, and what that means is that we prioritize the consumer and really thought through every aspect of the business in order to suit the consumer, in order to give them choice, in order to give them control, in order to give them transparency into how they take care of themselves because we thought it was way too hard to take care of yourself today and navigating the health care system is incredibly difficult. And that's really because it's never been built with the consumer in mind, and so everything we've done from ...