As this wave of herbal interest moves into the mainstream, what do you want your brand to stand for? What do you want it to contribute beyond another product on a packed shelf?
Over the years, I have casually studied medicinal plants, learned from local herbalists, and developed an affection for the useful plants that pop up in my yard. Many grow freely and carry histories of use that long predate our modern wellness industry.
That is part of what makes today’s herb and botanical category distinct. Its foundation isn’t clinical or commercial. It’s rooted in tradition, community, and the ancient relationship between people and plants.
As herbs began entering modern commerce in the 70s and 80s, the early botanical category retained much of that communal character. Pioneering companies like Nature’s Sunshine, Traditional Medicinals, Solaray, Herb Pharm, WishGarden, and Gaia Herbs grew through independent retail, practitioner networks, and direct selling. Founders knew one another. They learned from many of the same herbalists and built the industry’s early institutions together. They saw themselves as participants in a movement, not simply competitors within a market.
These early herbal companies were businesses, but they were also part of a culture that believed plants had something important to teach us about our health and relationship with the natural world.
The cost of going mainstream
By the 90s, botanical brands were reaching a much broader natural-products market. The following decades brought standardized extracts, practitioner protocols, branded ingredients, clinical research and greater national scale. Then digital commerce dramatically lowered the barriers to entry. Today, a botanical product can travel from a supplier catalog to an Amazon listing before its founders have developed much of a relationship with the plant itself.
Half a century later, herbs and botanicals have become an approximately $14 billion U.S. market, growing at roughly 6% annually, according to Nutrition Business Journal. This is no longer a peripheral corner of the supplement industry. This is no longer a peripheral corner of the supplement industry.
There is much to celebrate in this renewed interest in herbs. More people are discovering the potency of plants, and more practitioners are incorporating herbal protocols into integrative care.
This market expansion has created extraordinary access. It has also weakened the assumption that a company selling herbs necessarily has a meaningful relationship with them. Plants are increasingly being reduced to isolated ingredients. Traditions are being compressed into benefit claims. Complex systems of medicine are being translated into influencer soundbites, social hooks, and Amazon search terms.
For leaders of botanical businesses, this creates a stewardship imperative. As barriers to entry fall and newcomers flood the market, it is no longer enough to sell an effective herbal product. Every brand is also shaping what consumers understand—or fail to understand—about the plants behind it.
Legacy herbal companies must determine what is essential before growth and modernization slowly erase it. New companies must establish a credible relationship to the plants before appropriating the language and symbolism of herbal traditions. In both cases, the question is the same: how do you expand access without allowing the plant to disappear?
As ingredients, claims, and even formulations become easier to replicate, the brand’s relationship to the plant may be one of the few things competitors cannot quickly copy. So as this wave of herbal interest moves into the mainstream, what do you want your brand to stand for? What do you want it to contribute beyond another product on a packed shelf?
When a plant becomes commoditized
Traditional herbalism begins with the plant. Where does it grow? What are its properties? How is it harvested and prepared? What systems of the body has it traditionally been used to support?
The supplement market often begins somewhere else. What problem does the target consumer have? What ingredient is gaining attention? What claim can be made, and how quickly can the product go to market?
The distance between those two starting points is one of the central tensions facing the category.
Ashwagandha is one of the clearest recent examples of a botanical successfully entering the mainstream. Nutrition Business Journal estimates that U.S. ingredient sales are approaching half a billion dollars, making it one of the country’s top-selling single herbs. Its recent profile of Ixoreal Biomed traced much of that growth to the company’s sustained work building both the KSM-66 ingredient and the broader ashwagandha market.
Founder Kartikeya Baldwa recognized that Western consumers did not share India’s generations-deep familiarity with Ayurveda. If ashwagandha was going to earn trust in the U.S., its traditional use would need to be translated through forms of evidence and quality assurance familiar to Western consumers.
Ixoreal supported the ingredient with extensive clinical research, organic cultivation in India, and a root-only extraction process grounded in traditional use. And, unusually for an ingredient supplier, the company invested in educating both the industry and end consumers.
The result is a genuine category achievement. Millions of people have experienced the benefits of a plant they may never otherwise have encountered—and Ixoreal demonstrated that mainstreaming does not have to sever an ingredient from its source.
But once an herb becomes a superstar, a different question emerges for every brand that wants to participate: what does ashwagandha mean through the lens of your brand? A liquid-herbal company may have permission to emphasize taste and direct experience with the plant. A practitioner brand may show how it fits within a broader protocol. A vertically integrated brand may have an evocative sourcing story. The opportunity is not simply to add the ingredient while demand is high, but to interpret that demand in a way that feels unmistakably your own.
That is the risk of breakout ingredients: the more widely they travel, the easier it is for their meaning to flatten. Many consumers now know ashwagandha primarily as an answer to stress, without understanding where it grows or how it has traditionally been used. Ashwagandha is now nearly a household name as an ingredient, but still largely anonymous as a plant.
Commercial success requires clarity: a shopper needs to know quickly what the product is for, a retailer needs to know where it belongs on shelf, an algorithm needs a phrase it can recognize. But this simplification can easily become disconnection.
Earlier generations of botanical brands often taught through the senses. Herbalists were perhaps more like sommeliers than salespeople. They expected the product to reveal something through its taste, aroma, color, and feel. Educators carried liquid extracts for shoppers to taste and, in some cases, feel the effects immediately. The plant was not merely described through a label claim. It was encountered.
As more of the category moves into capsules and digital discovery, consumers increasingly encounter the ingredient and structure-function claim without the sensory experience.
The brand takeaway:
When a botanical becomes widely known, start with the brand, not the trend. What can your company credibly add to consumers’ understanding or experience of the plant? That is the difference between riding a wave of demand for a commodity and building lasting brand value.
Branding beyond the symptom
The familiar over-the-counter model exerts a powerful influence on the botanical category. A symptom appears and a named ingredient is presented as the solution. The product is then evaluated primarily by whether it addresses that immediate need.
Clear need-state positioning can make botanicals easier to understand and buy. But plants do not always fit squarely within a one-symptom, one-solution framework.
Many botanicals support health more foundationally, with effects that extend across multiple systems. Their value may arise from the interaction of many constituents rather than one isolated compound. A plant used for one acute need may also offer broader health benefits when used long-term.
In the early herbal market, companies often led with the name of the plant itself. That made sense in a niche market where retailers and consumers were more likely to know what ginkgo, echinacea, or valerian were traditionally used for. As the category broadened, brands increasingly shifted toward structure/function naming that made the benefit more explicit: brain support, immune support, sleep support. That helped make herbal products more accessible to non-herbalists, but it also flattened the plant into one problem it was meant to solve.
We confronted this tension directly in our recent rebrand of Biopure Health. The company’s products are often used within complex practitioner protocols addressing chronic health challenges and environmental stressors. Reducing that portfolio to a collection of symptom-based solutions would have missed the deeper philosophy behind the business
Instead, we built the brand around the founder’s guiding philosophy of salutogenesis: the conditions that support resilience and well-being. This allowed Biopure to communicate the practical relevance of its products while placing them within a larger idea of health creation over crisis management.
Salutogenesis also gave the portfolio a stronger organizing idea. Instead of asking each product to stand alone as a discrete intervention, the brand could present its formulations as part of a coherent approach to strengthening the body’s capacity to adapt and recover.
The visual identity made that idea tangible. The new packaging gives each formula a distinct botanical presence, using vivid plant imagery and color to keep the living source visible rather than allowing the product to read as another anonymous clinical intervention.
The brand takeaway:
The acute symptom or need may be what gets the consumer’s attention, but it shouldn’t carry the weight of your brand. Use the immediate benefit as the entry point, then connect it to an underpinning philosophy of health that can hold the portfolio together.
A clear brand platform gives consumers a reason to stay, building a relationship that can outlast the next TikTok-fueled run on berberine.
The power of provenance
It seems every consumer category is talking about transparency. In herbs and botanicals, however, transparency can carry emotional weight because it reconnects the finished product to the living plant.
In our work with Gaia Herbs more than a decade ago, we helped bring that idea to life through Meet Your Herbs, the industry’s first herb traceability program. By entering an ID from the package, consumers could see evidence of how the herbs were cultivated, harvested, extracted, validated, and tested for purity.
The functional value was clear: traceability provided reassurance. But its deeper value was relational. The program reminded consumers that the capsule in their hand began somewhere.
Our work with Gaia helped surface and articulate a belief that had long lived inside the company but had not yet been fully expressed: that people and plants exist in a living relationship, and that Gaia’s role was to steward that connection. Meet Your Herbs gave consumers a tangible way to experience that idea.
The market was ready for it. In-store herbal educators could immediately understand and extend the idea. Gaia’s deepest belief and an emerging cultural appetite for transparency met at the right moment. The timing was right, but the rebrand endured because it was rooted in a deeper truth that was evergreen.
Herbal medicine researcher and Sustainable Herbs Initiative founder Ann Armbrecht takes this inquiry much further in The Business of Botanicals. Following medicinal plants from seed to shelf, she reveals the global network that remains largely invisible by the time an herb reaches the consumer. Behind every finished product is a chain of growers, collectors, processors, and communities. Each shapes the integrity of what eventually appears in the bottle.
Her work makes an important distinction for brand leaders: traceability is not only about verifying identity or purity. It is also about understanding what the ingredient’s production—and growing demand for it—may ask of people and landscapes. Her work broadens the definition of transparency from a consumer promise into a leadership responsibility.
It is relatively easy to tell a compelling story about connection to nature. It is much harder to ensure that the commercial decisions behind the brand support it. Companies entering the category should understand what lies beyond the first-tier vendor. They need to know whether increased demand can be supported without degrading the source, destabilizing supply, or harming the people who depend on it.
The brand takeaway:
Responsible growth may require choices that hurt the short-term bottom line. But those same choices can protect supply continuity and make the brand’s quality claims credible. Our research has shown that greater transparency can increase consumers’ perceptions of product efficacy—so demonstrating how a plant makes its way into a bottle is not merely an exercise in disclosure.
This kind of stewardship begins inside the business: asking how the plant was produced and whether the supply can withstand growth. In a plant-dependent category, asking these tough questions is important for commercial resilience.
Authority in the age of the algorithm
The early modern botanical movement was shaped by a relatively small circle of trusted authorities: recognized herbalists, practitioners, founders, and knowledgeable retailers. Consumers often encountered products through someone they trusted.
Not long ago, the knowledgeable natural retailer was one of the most visible guides for the botanical consumer. Store staff could introduce an unfamiliar plant, explain its traditional use, distinguish among formulas, and sometimes invite you to experience it. That human layer of interpretation was part of the product experience and brands understood the importance of their role. Herbal companies often invested significant time in educating retail staff so they could represent the products accurately.
Today, consumers are more likely to first encounter an herb through an online creator. While influencers have in some ways stepped into this space between brand and consumer, the training model has not followed. The result is that someone with enormous reach may be interpreting the product with far less context.
While the shift toward DTC and the influencer economy has scaled herbal education, it also makes credible authority harder to identify. Credentialed expertise, personal anecdotes, brand promotion, and outright misinformation now appear side by side in our feeds.
The brand takeaway:
Botanical brands should not select creators based on reach alone or treat them solely as media inventory. The strongest programs will give these modern-day brand ambassadors enough context to communicate with care. These creators increasingly function as the brand’s modern educators and front-line interpreters.
Aiming for mass influencer reach through thousands of TikTok videos might generate trial, but credible interpretation helps determine what consumers believe, what they expect, and whether the relationship survives beyond the first purchase.
Science as a bridge
The expansion of clinical research has been one of the most important forces shaping the modern botanical category. Public research has grown alongside substantial private investment from botanical suppliers and brands.
Decades before many of these topics entered the broader supplement conversation, botanical companies were debating whole-plant preparations, standardization, and the downstream impact of organic and regenerative agriculture.
More research can support claims and earn confidence among practitioners and skeptical consumers alike. That is progress. But the relationship between tradition and science is often framed too narrowly, as though a plant becomes legitimate only when modern research confirms it.
Our work with Nature’s Sunshine brought this relationship into sharper focus. Through its Hughes Center for Research and Innovation, the company had sophisticated scientific capabilities sitting alongside decades of herbal knowledge. We articulated that connection as Dynamic Herbalism: the idea that modern science and traditional herbal wisdom can work together to create breakthroughs.
What made that especially compelling was the possibility of modern research validating what herbalists had long observed through generations of use. Science was not replacing traditional knowledge. In some cases, it was helping explain why certain traditional uses had endured.
Our rebrand for Biocidin also helped reconcile this tension. The company had adopted a serious, highly scientific posture in part because it needed to establish credibility with practitioners in a field often dismissed as unscientific or overly alternative. That rigor was valuable, but it also obscured some of the founder’s vitalist view of health and her conviction behind the formulations.
Our role was not to soften Biocidin’s scientific credibility, but to reconnect it to the philosophy of health that had made the company distinctive in the first place. The brand became more fully itself without becoming less clinically rigorous.
The brand takeaway:
Science may get a product taken seriously. But it does not, by itself, make the brand memorable. The brand still needs to explain why this formulation exists, what philosophy shaped it, and why its approach is meaningfully different from another clinically supported option.
Strong botanical brands don’t need to choose between celebrating the science or celebrating the tradition. Both forms of knowledge can work together to tell a complementary story that creates a more durable brand.
Building brands that stay rooted
The opportunity in front of botanical brands is enormous. More people are open to herbs than at any point in modern history, and the pathways to reach them have never been more direct. In a culture moving at warp speed, where so much of life is now mediated through screens, algorithms, and AI, plants offer us something real, tactile, and deeply human. Botanical brands have an opportunity to offer more than another product or benefit claim; they can help preserve and restore that connection.
This will require more than telling a superficial story about being “powered by plants,” “rooted in nature,” or “inspired by ancestral wisdom.” It means making daily business decisions that make those promises true. This discipline can make brands harder to imitate and better prepared to grow as the category matures.
The goal is not to keep botanicals on the cultural margins. It is to help them reach more people without stripping away the relationship with plants that gives these brands their meaning and distinction. Few can express this responsibility more eloquently than Robin Wall Kimmerer in her beloved book, Braiding Sweetgrass: “All flourishing is mutual.”