Photo courtesy of Rae
Rae supplements
After a 15-year corporate career between Microsoft and Target, Angie Tebbe, who was also raising two kids during that time, realized her own well-being wasn’t on the priority list. She decided to go back and honor her holistic upbringing. “I was that weird 5-year-old kid meditating on the lawn in North Dakota,” says Tebbe, whose mother was a nurse and whose father was an avid practitioner of Reiki and homeopathy.
Throughout her soul-searching, Tebbe entertained ideas like yoga and meditation clinics and spent months exploring better solutions when it came to her own hormonal rebalancing and reduction of cortisol levels. “Women put out so much energy on a daily basis—and diet just doesn’t always cut it anymore,” she says. Two things that struck her while on her own wellness journey? The majority of products and services were either too expensive or jam-packed with non-holistic ingredients like sugar.
In 2019, Tebbe, who spent a great deal of her career launching brands from scratch in the private-label space at Target, debuted Rae. It’s a Minneapolis-based direct-to-consumer collection of vegan, non-GMO, and gluten-free supplements in six categories—whole body, skin, sexual wellness, digestion, stress, and hormones—without the all-too-common high price tags.
It wasn’t long before she received calls from a number of stores interested in carrying her products. The general consensus from retailers: Rae filled every gap they had in their assortments. And fortunately, Rae launched during a time when women were starting to put themselves on the priority list. “I think many started realizing they needed to take a different approach,” says Tebbe, who reports that brand growth has skyrocketed since the start of the pandemic.
For Tebbe and her team of mostly women, it was always about putting brand first while making products that uphold its mission. “We wanted a truly unique voice around standing for the well-being for all women,” says Tebbe. She believes wellness doesn’t have to be a full-time job or expensive and that it should cater to a younger, more diverse consumer.
But Rae isn’t the only brand in our very own backyard catering to what women want—and need. Just last year, Target also took on Womaness, a new wellness line tackling the multibillion-dollar menopause market catering to women over 50 with a range of products that account for the unique ways women go through this transitional time. Co-founder Sally Mueller, another former brand strategy executive at Target, was inspired after having an “aha” moment during her own experience with menopause. She found that products were really designed around the major symptoms of menopause and made it her mission to make solutions more accessible through information and a line of products like the “Let Me Sleep” supplement, “Daily V Soothe” vaginal moisturizer, and “Gone in a Hot Flash” cooling mist.
Leave it to women from Minnesota, long a hotbed of entrepreneurship, to create innovative products to fill an important need and to Target to make room on the shelves.
