However, we had started launching some of our transformation strategies in early 2020, and that helped us attract more consumers to the business around the world. Now, just through organic growth – people being attracted to the new branding, new practices being put in place that allowed us to be introduced to a new group of consumers – we saw steady growth and a steady increase in the number of consumers being interested in the Nature’s Sunshine brand. And it was global, too. Can you tell us more about the newAIVIA nutrition line? AIVIIA is a new line of nutrition products with some great technology behind it. The wonderful 40 www. ceotodaymagazine . com itself. It is hard to unwind any one of those things, but I would say that from a company standpoint the newest part of what we are trying to do is the latter part – managing investor relations – because it was the area that had been worked on the least. Previously, the strategy and results simply were not there. Now we have seen multiple years of significant results, and I am having to spend a lot of my time working with investors and analysts to talk about the business and to build out that shareholder base. That is something very different for Nature’s Sunshine. Again, we had shareholders out there, but there was not a lot of activity and activation involved in how we approached them. That stuff is not necessarily the sexiest; I would much rather be working on rebranding or working on our new campaign or new technologies from a digital standpoint, but that really is critically important to our investor base and I do enjoy working with them, because they are a helpful group of partners for us. They believe in the business and what we are doing. How has the COVID-19 pandemic impacted these investor relations and other aspects of your work? COVID has of course been a challenge for us. There were many companies that were able to benefit from people’s heightened awareness of their health and wanting to take care of themselves, especially those companies that had already built out a digital infrastructure. Unfortunately, that was an area of neglect for Nature’s Sunshine. When I joined in 2018 we had zero people focused on it – the IT team had set up a functioning website and that was as far as i could say Nature’s Sunshine was digital in that year. In 2019 we set our sights on becoming a digital, technology-driven company, but by the time COVID rolled around in early 2020, we had not launched our new website yet; that ended up launching in September of that year. Really, we got all the pain of COVID-19 without any of the other consumer benefits to put ourselves in a position to serve people well. CEO Today Gl oba l Awa rds 202 2
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