Hi all,
Very excited for this episode. I’ve been telling you about the changing face of healthcare brands for well over a year. Unsurprisingly, consumers want and expect more.
So I asked the folx at Jones, a brand that looks nothing like a healthcare product, if they’d chat with me about it. I expected a fun chat, what I didn’t expect was how great Hilary Dubin and Caroline Vasquez Huber, the founders, were going to be.
Meet Jones
In short, this is not your uncle’s Nicorette. Jones, the smoking and vaping cessation brand, is all style and a lot of substance. One look at their little sterling pill box and you’ll get it.
In this episode, we chat with Hilary and Caroline about how they’re re-imagining the healthcare space (spoiler: they consider themselves a wellness & beauty brand). And along the way, we get into some of our favorite topics: shame (a topic we also tackled in a recent episode with strategist and cultural futurist, Jasmine Bina), gratitude, and vulnerability.
Jones is building a suite of cessation products, from mints to an app, but it’s bigger than that. They are re-defining what it means to be a Quitter. And giving us a great example of how healthcare is changing.
This episode is a fun one. Enjoy!
Hit the links to skip to the bits you fancy
01:20 — QUITTING, BUT MAKE IT A MOVEMENT // Jones is not just reimagining nicotine cessation. It’s building a quitting lifestyle that you’re proud to be a part of.
05:13 — FOUNDER STORIES // How Hilary and Caroline use their own quitting stories to build something honest, relatable, and refreshingly human.
14:28 — FLOWERS & PUPPIES // IRL quit circles, but make it a vibe.
17:10 — THE APP // From an early text experiment to a full platform. What they built and why it doesn’t feel like “just another app.”
19:21 — THE SHAME GAME // Uncovering a shame under another shame and why quitting is often (incorrectly) linked to weight gain. Jones is tackling shame head-on. We get into what brand dealing with “taboo” should be thinking about.
22:17 — LOOKS MATTER // Jones knew if it looked like like your uncle’s Nicorette, people would keep hiding it. So they tackled that problem head on.
36:01 — FIND YOUR PEOPLE // All about the art of consumer interview. Listening, adapting, and co-creating. There’s an excellent tip in this section, don’t miss it.
37:40 — RAPID FIRE: BRAND TRUTHS
3 things every brand should do?
“Number one, customer interviews. Number two, build a community and create interesting conversations even before you have products. Give kudos and gratitude to your team. It keeps people motivated and makes it fun to come to work."
Bonus! “Have a lot of fun at work.”
What’s your biggest learning / what would you do differently?
“We used a team of overseas developers who built a quick MVP of our app, but it has a lot of scalability issues, and now we're running into a lot of technical debt. I wish we had built the app in a more scalable way from the beginning and potentially brought on a technical co-founder or an engineer into the team much earlier.”
If you could collaborate with one other brand on something, who would it be and why?
“Dries Van Noten just because it's the best brand there is.”
If there were one celebrity spokesperson for the brand, who could it be?
“We would love to work with Emma Chamberlain because she has been very open about her quitting journey. She's done multiple podcasts about how she quit vaping and then she switched to Zyn, and then she got gum recession from her Zyn use and had to get a gum graft. We've spoken already about how much authenticity is so important to our brand and destigmatizing this experience. And I think she's already been a great spokesperson in that way.”
One word that sums up your brand, what would it be?
“Authentic.”
45:37 — THE UNPACK
We debrief on what makes Jones work and what every brand should take away from this episode.
Huge thanks to Caroline and Hilary for chatting. Give Jones a follow on Instagram and TikTok. Of course, if you happen to know Emma Chamberlain and want to put the Jones team in touch, ping me! And if you happen to be looking to quit, this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of resources:
And the ultra taboo question: Will I gain weight?
And if you're building a brand, new or established, pushing things. Reach out! chris@weareingoodco.com
That’s all, folx.
-Chris
If you listened/read this and liked it, that little heart is there for that. The algo and I appreciate it.
PS. If you prefer Apple, Spotify, or YouTube, you can listen there too.
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