The idea for Seattle Gummy first took hold while Connie Wan was struggling to administer a dose of antibiotics to her two-year-old son. As she held the cup of medicine to his lips, he squirmed, spilling a portion on his clothes. She had no way of knowing how much of the dose he actually ingested.
“It’s just not an effective way of feeding medicine to a young kid,” Wan said. “The next day I was shopping at Costco when I saw a bottle of gummy vitamins, and a lightbulb went off.”
Wan, who holds a law degree, a Ph.D. in organic chemistry and worked as an investment banker, has a unique background that made her unusually well-placed to realize what many saw as an impossible idea: FDA-approved medicines delivered via a flavorful gummy. Putting her investor training to good use, she did a market analysis and discovered no one else was creating medicines in gummy form. She started the process of seeking FDA approval for gummy versions of common kids’ medicines and opened up her first office in Pioneer Square in Downtown Seattle in 2017.
“Almost no one thought we’d get FDA approval. About 80% of the people I talked to said the FDA would never approve gummies as a drug delivery format,” she recalled, though she would soon be proving the nay-sayers wrong. In 2020, Seattle Gummy made history by becoming the first company ever to secure gummy drug approval from the FDA.
While awaiting that approval, Wan wanted to demonstrate the effectiveness of Seattle Gummy’s patented technology to investors. She created a caffeine gummy that provided the mental stimulation of a cup of coffee without any of the jittery physical side effects. Her method, which she’s since applied across Seattle Gummy’s product line, was to mix ingredients found in both traditional Chinese medicine and pharmaceutical science.
She packaged the gummies as Mocca Shots and started selling them in the Amazon store in 2019. To her surprise, sales quickly took off.
“The first month we had $300 worth of Amazon orders, then $500, then $2,000. It was pretty surreal how quickly it ramped up,” she recalled.
That success gave her the runway to expand the product lines to address beauty, wellness and sports performance, with gummy supplements for sleep support and hair, skin and nail health. Today, Seattle Gummy is a multi-million-dollar company with 27 employees, operating out of a factory in the Seattle suburb of Renton. Its products are carried nationally in retailers like Walmart and Target—success Wan says that wouldn’t be possible without Amazon.
“Amazon really gave us the infrastructure to play. The truth is, we’re just a bunch of scientists. We don’t know anything about building a website or setting up an ordering system or fulfillment,” she said. “With Amazon, you just list the products and that’s it. Everything is taken care of.”
As a scientist, Wan appreciates how Amazon’s customer reviews give her the data to test and iterate her products in near real-time. With each new product, she uses Amazon Vine, a program that connects brands with high-quality product reviews.
“I love how transparent Amazon reviewers are,” she said. “It’s great, because if we see customers aren’t liking a product, we know to kill it. It’s a really fast way of understanding the market and locking down our formulas.”
Wan’s team also uses Amazon research tools, like Product Opportunity Explorer, to zero in on what Amazon customers are searching for. It’s how Seattle Gummy decided to create creatine gummies.
“Two weeks after doing product research on Amazon, we were able to add a new product to our store. Almost immediately, we had more orders than all our other products combined,” she said. “Our fulfillment guy was like, ‘what did you guys do?’”
Wan has big goals for Seattle Gummy, including one day taking the company public.
“Without Amazon, I can’t really imagine Seattle Gummy being where it is today,” she said. “We wouldn’t have been able to serve our customers as well as we do, or provide job opportunities for people here in Seattle. I don’t see how any of that would have happened.”