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How the Branded Erewhon Smoothie Became the Unexpected Gold Standard in Beauty Marketing

A closer look at the most coveted collaboration in wellness right now.

Nestled on Beverly Boulevard, across from the Post Office and Pan Pacific Park, a stone’s throw from The Grove and nextdoor to CBS’s Broadcast Center is the wellness-focused sanctuary known as Erewhon. The original Los Angeles location, which opened in 1969 after relocating from the east coast in 1966, is a haven for anyone seeking nirvana in vitality, or, alternatively, anyone who wants to be seen carrying an Erewhon cup or wants to make content for TikTok. 

Erewhon touts itself as not just a grocery store, but rather a “community of people who are united in our love for pure products that protect the health of people and our planet.” Think: Whole Foods before Amazon got involved and it became a household name. The Erewhon logo has become a status symbol both locally and online. Its stores are hotspots for tourists, as popular as taking a star tour or reading your order as an affirmation at Cafe Gratitude. 

The retailer now boasts eight locations around L.A, has been featured in The New York Times, Vanity Fair and Vogue, is B-corp certified and sells branded merch that ranges from a $55 cap to $185 hoodies (the latter completely sold out). Devotees can purchase a $200 a year membership that offers 10% back on every purchase in points that don’t expire, a free drink from the tonic bar each month and perks at approved affluent lifestyle partners. (For example, Alto rideshare members receive $15 a month — or $180 annually — in credit toward rides as an Erewhon member and 50% off the annual membership at physical wellness studio MyoDetox). The original location offers free valet parking.

“It’s also a really great place for discovery,” says Marianna Hewitt, co-founder of skin-care brand Summer Fridays and veteran content creator. “I find a lot of new brands there all the time.” She name checks cookie dough brand Deux and the supplement line Cymbiotika. “It’s a great place to find brands before they then expand into Whole Foods and other places.”

“Let’s not lie, it’s fun to look at camel milk and rose water and all that stuff,” says Christina Najaar, known as Tinx to her millions of social media followers. “It’s the difference between going to a really cool boutique and a department store that’s a chain — they’re both good. They both have their place, but [Erewhon] feels curated.”

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In addition to its beloved hot bar, freshly packaged sushi, expensive organic produce, aisles of supplements and juice bar, the stores offer a booming beauty section. While it’s not the largest section of the store by any means, many “clean” makeup and skin-care brands — particularly those that market themselves as being “non-toxic,” “free of chemicals” and/or “good” for the planet — are keen to get into the grocer. (Writer’s note: “Clean” does not have a standard definition; it’s up to the brands to decide what this actually entails.)

For instance, Uni, a body-care brand which launched direct-to-consumer in 2022 and touts itself as being “closed loop” and “zero-waste,” is launching at the luxury supermarket this month. It offers a return program for empties that was inspired by Erewhon’s Bottle Deposit Program, in which customers pay a deposit for glass containers and can return soup and juice containers for cash back.

Brands with cult followings, such as makeup artist staple Weleda, Cocokind, Aztec Secret Indian Healing Clay and Osea are also offered in the beauty aisle; similarly, brands you could pick up at Ulta Beauty or Sephora are starting to infiltrate, presumably in hopes of proving to customers how truly “good for you” their products are.

“Their customer is different from whom we currently speak to, so it allows us to reach a wider audience,” says WLDKAT founder Amy Zunzunegui. The brand’s retail partners include Ulta Beauty, Credo, Target and now, Erewhon. “I think it gives even more legitimacy to a brand like WLDKAT. We are found in mass, the largest retailer beauty retailer in the country, the retailer that sets the gold standard for clean beauty and now the coolest grocer.”

Even if securing Erewhon as a retailer isn’t a priority for some beauty and wellness brands, there are other ways to get prime real estate in the store and align with the type of customer it attracts. Enter: the branded smoothie. 

There’s been an influx of them this year, including the Coconut Cloud smoothie created by Hewitt, Hailey Bieber‘s Strawberry Glaze Skin smoothie (which coincided with the launch of her skin-care brand, Rhode, in June) and Kourtney Kardashian’s Poosh Potion. Bella Hadid’s version is reportedly coming soon. Some smoothies highlight a celebrity or influencer; others are presented by a brand featured at the store. Hewitt’s version was her own because Summer Fridays is not sold at the grocer, but it still included a nod to her brand.

“I wanted to make it blue so it alluded to the Summer Fridays Jet Lag Mask,” says Hewitt. (The Jet Lag Mask was the brand’s first product when it launched in 2018.)

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The History of the Erewhon Smoothie

You could say that Najarr is responsible for the smoothie frenzy. In February 2021, she launched the Tinx Smoothie with Erewhon: essentially, a healthy chocolate shake, which came as a result of her routine posting about visiting the supermarket. She caught the attention of Vito Antoci, the retailer’s executive vice president.

“[Antoci] was like, ‘You’ve always been so nice to us, is there anything you want?'” Najarr tells Fashionista. “And I said, ‘I really want to have a menu item. I want to have a Tinx smoothie.’ I’m really into curating things; I’m into specific orders. I didn’t have that many followers at that point, but they knew me for the specific things that I would order. And they were like, ‘Really, that’s what you want? We were thinking more like a sweatshirt.'”

When shoppers purchase a smoothie at the bar, there’s now a plaque at the register advertising the month’s collaboration; an email blast is sent and publishers tend to cover it. But for Najaar, it was entirely grassroots. “It was not advertised — there was no email, there was no little placard. It was on the secret menu,” she says. Despite the lack of marketing, it performed well.

“Tinx was the Erewhon customer through-in-through, creating content on a day-to-day basis for us,” says Antoci. (Antoci is brother to CEO Tony Antoci, who bought Erewhon from The Kushi Family in 2011). “I wanted to give her something back as a thank you. We have a real direct relationship — I have a relationship with everybody I’ve done a smoothie with personally, and I wanted to give something back to the influencer or, in this case, Tinx. So she started the craze.”

Tinx’s collaboration became an Instagrammable sensation whose success was repeated when Hewitt launched her offering: Marianna’s Coconut Cloud Smoothie, a vibrant blue beverage with pillowy “clouds” of coconut cream, resembling a literal nimbus-filled sky and featuring ingredients like almond milk, blue spirulina powder, avocado, banana, vanilla collagen powder and vanilla stevia. The concoction’s appearance made it ripe for Instagram.

Hewitt had been shopping at the grocer for a decade before the collaboration came to fruition. “It was definitely not the cool grocery store,” notes Hewitt of Erewhon’s earlier days. “It was your healthy place to go to get snacks, and it evolved over the years.”

The vision for the smoothie’s picturesque pour was Hewitt’s own. “I had written in an email to them when they approached me and I was like, ‘This is exactly what I want for this smoothie.’ I make smoothies at home every day by myself, so I know what ingredients look like in a smoothie. I was like, ‘It needs to be Instagrammy. We need to put a little dollop of something on the top and then sprinkle a little blue powder.'” Eventually, Hewitt went to recipe test the concoction with the Erewhon team, and they landed on the exact recipe she had initially put together.

Photo: @jenatkinhair/Instagram

How to Get a Branded Smoothie

Erewhon’s signature smoothie business now has a nine-month waitlist.

“Erewhon’s intentions have always been to provide something that’s good and healthy. And that’s really it,” says Antoci of vetting potential collaborators. “You could be any race; you can be any gender; you could be a vegan; you could be a full-on meat-eating person, [but] you have to believe that health is good, and health and wellness is better. Then we try to do some background into that person — have they ever shopped at Erewhon?”

If they reach out to a potential collaborator and they’re not familiar with the grocer, it’s not a fit. Not everyone with influence who comes knocking gets a collaboration — even if they are the matriarch of a billion-dollar dynasty.

Kris Jenner contacted me many months ago and said, ‘I want to create a smoothie,’ and I said to her team, we don’t really see an alignment between Erewhon and Kris — find one of [her] daughters,” says Antoci. “Kourtney and Travis [Barker] were shopping at Erewhon forever in Calabasas.” The Poosh Potion was then born from that conversation.

Each smoothie holds a special place in Antoci’s heart: Tinx’s for starting the craze; Hewitt’s for blowing up on TikTok and her being a longtime customer. But Bieber is the Smoothie Queen. The Rhode founder put in work ahead of time to drive her fans and followers to the grocer, says Antoci, which helped catch their eye and warm them up to a potential collab.

“Two weeks before Hailey’s team contacted us [about a collaboration], she went to an Erewhon and bought a smoothie and tagged it saying ‘My go-to’ with an Erewhon cup,” recalls Antoci. “People started coming in [the day she posted] saying, ‘Hey, can we have what Hailey’s drinking?'”

Because of this, even though Erewhon’s smoothie collaboration lineup was booked for June, Antoci says he moved the schedule to accommodate Rhode’s launch the same month. “[Bieber’s smoothie] legitimately created history in our smoothie business,” he says.

History indeed: Erewhon sold 36,000 units of Bieber’s blend within the first month, according to Antoci, mirroring the success of Rhode’s well-aligned debut product range. The brand marketed its three-piece lineup as a way to “glaze” the skin, even incorporating a serum named the Peptide Glazing Fluid; the smoothie included ingredients that tout skin benefits like collagen powder, sea moss gel and hyaluronic acid. USA Today, Newsweek and the Food Network each taste-tested or recreated Bieber’s libation.

After the first 30 days of a smoothie’s launch, the grocer has no obligation to keep the celebrity or influencer’s name on it, but it can remain available for purchase as, for example, the Coconut Cloud smoothie or the Skin Glaze smoothie. With a packed schedule of co-branded smoothies, Antoci wants each collaborator to get their respective shine. 

The Business of a Social Media Smoothie

One major point of discussion around these smoothies is the price: around $17, minimum. Erewhon is aware of the discourse, but maintains that these prices are in fact perfectly reasonable. “KTLA actually recreated Kourtney’s drink, where they bought all the ingredients, and the ingredient costs were $176 and you could make 10 smoothies — which was $17,” says Antoci. “When you buy organic, high-end ingredients, that’s what it costs. You could create a smoothie for a lot less, but that’s the big thing. People have been talking about price… it costs a lot of money to make a very good, high-integrity smoothie that’s not just pure sugar.”

There’s a revenue share between Erewhon and the personality the smoothie is centered around, and brands also buy into the smoothie as a featured ingredient. “That’s a whole other piece of the business — that these brands really want to align with the Mariannas, the Haileys, the Bellas of the world, to be a part of that drink, so that when it’s recreated in TikTok world, people are looking for those specific brands to create that drink,” says Antoci.

Kourtney Kardashian Barker’s Poosh launched the Poosh Potion Detox Smoothie with Erewhon in October, which generated revenue in various forms for the lifestyle site and grocer. Antoci says Erewhon had ingredient brands pay to be featured in the Poosh Potion, such as Harmless Harvest coconut water and Malk Almond Milk; Poosh also charged brands to be featured at the annual Poosh Poolside event and in editorials on the site as branded content.

While the smoothie business is still booming, there’s more on the horizon for Erewhon. According to Antoci, there are talks of an East Coast pop up; the retailer has also done collaborations for its cold-pressed juice bottles with brands like Lacoste and Netflix.

“Quite a few clothing designers, car companies — a lot of people want to do special juice editions with us,” says Antoci. “And we do have to say no more than yes, just because we do not feel we’re aligned. We never did these smoothies to go viral. We had no idea there would be billions of impressions. We’re just looking for those people to just spread that good word through health and wellness.” All that celebrity attention, social media clout and buzz? That’s just the blue spirulina sprinkle on top.

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Source: Fashionista.com

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