If you have ever ventured onto the influencer side of TikTok, where manufactured “get-ready-with-me” videos and faux-authentic apartment tours reign supreme, there’s a non-zero chance that you have at least heard of Bloom Nutrition.
Bloom Nutrition, often referred to as “Bloom Nu” or just “Bloom” for short, is a relatively new supplement brand that has taken the internet, and the health-food industry, by storm. As perhaps their most well-known product, the Greens and Superfoods Powder has been a staple in many social media gurus’ coveted morning routine vlogs.
Popular lifestyle influencers like Summer Ford and Samantha Jo have been partners with the brand for over a year, promoting Bloom’s various supplement powders and energy drinks to their legions of devoted fans.
The company’s social media-centric marketing strategy paid off; in 2024, their three-year growth capped off at a staggering 1,224%.
Well, how did we get here?
Bloom’s founder Mari Llewellyn launched the supplement brand in 2019 alongside her husband, Greg LaVecchia. Llewellyn’s venture into the world of wellness began two years prior in 2017 when she began posting on Instagram to document her impressive weight loss transformation (with LaVecchia’s encouragement).
To meet the demands of her health-obsessed followers, and commemorate their own success, she and LaVecchia decided to launch a supplement brand. And thus, Bloom Nu was born.
Bloom’s overwhelming success has come, in part, from the brand’s robust advertising strategy. Llewellyn has stayed true to her influencer roots and, quite smartly, utilized social media darlings to advertise Bloom’s wide array of wellness products.
The fact of the matter is, in the world of health-food and supplements, the products themselves doesn’t really matter.
They’re selling an image.
Health and wellness brands have used the cultural dominance of social media to capitalize off of today’s American ideal – to achieve the impossible, living as extravagantly as celebrities and influencers.
Gen-Z, for the most part, understands that what is put onto social media is not always as it seems. Overly critical and chronically-online though we may be, a lifetime of war, economic upheaval and political instability have left us yearning for some kind of escapist fantasy – one being the idea of a soft life.
When some viewers see an influencer – thin, beautiful, wealthy – effortlessly frothing their morning elixir as they trill on about their schedule for the day (typically consisting of some variation of reformer Pilates, meal prep, two hours of sorting through emails, and, of course, ending the night with a Patrick Bateman-esque skincare routine in anticipation of their “morning shed“) envy understandably begins to creep in. Then, desperation.
Perhaps, if we buy so-and-so’s product, we can be happy, too. Skinny. Successful.
And influencers are not the only ones participating in performative wellness: mainstream celebrities like Kourtney Kardashian have begun to peddle their own health products. Her supplement brand, lemmelive, has even jumped on the Ozempic craze with its own GLP-1 weight management supplement (in addition to its other offerings of debloating gummies and vaginal probiotics). They even offer a generous 10% off.
Meanwhile, Khloé, in true enterprising, Kardashian style, launched her own “guilt-free” brand of protein popcorn just last week. Of course, it’s all the “good stuff,” so we mere mortals can strive to achieve the socialites’ level of fitness and beauty (minus the plastic surgery and expensive personal trainers).
For us twenty-somethings, the outside world has been largely unforgiving throughout our entire lives; it’s not hard to understand why some may fall prey to clever advertising from supplement brands or the latest TikTok diet-craze.
But, if drinking a concoction of mango-flavored powdered greens or popping a mood-boosting gummy is what you need to get through the day, so be it. The half-full plastic bottles will just wind up in a landfill when “perfection” stops trending, anyway.