In a not-so-long-ago era, my recent experience at The Vitamin Shoppe in Santa Monica would not have been a blog-worthy experience. Once upon a time it was common to walk into a retail store and engage with someone who was well versed in the company’s products and cared enough to impart their knowledge. The person behind the counter, who viewed their position as a job, not a gig, was simply known as a salesclerk, and their role, if they hoped to keep it, was to drive sales.
Alas, those days are long gone, a topic I’ve touched on before. One of my first posts was about a guy named Cyrus, who was the manager of Road Runner Sports, a California-based sporting goods chain. What distinguished Cyrus was his detailed knowledge of running and other athletic footwear, and he knew the products best suited for my wide and flat feet. Alas, Cyrus left to join Amazon, and my recent visits to Cyrus’ former store have been miserable experiences.
My tender tootsies will forever mourn Cyrus’ abandonment of their care and well-being.
My recent trip to The Vitamin Shoppe last week was triggered by an energy drink called Update, which my trainer gave me to try because he had been given free samples. He said that Kim Kardashian was involved in the product, which I considered a negative, but it was free, so I tried it.
To my surprise, the drink made me incredibly alert without giving me the jitters. I wanted to buy some, and the only store that sold it near me was The Vitamin Shoppe, which has an outlet in Santa Monica that’s 10 minutes to nearly an hour away from my home, depending on the time of day (that’s life in Los Angeles).
I headed over to the store and befriended a “health enthusiast” named Malachi, who clearly looked the part. Malachi was fit and lean with bulging biceps. I’ve long perceived the unregulated vitamin industry as being somewhat sleazy, and for reasons I’m not certain, I harbored a particularly negative perception of The Vitamin Shoppe.
But Malachi engaged with me, and it was clear he knew his stuff. He was familiar with Update’s ingredients and Kim Kardashian’s involvement. When I asked if he recommended the drink, he steered me to another energy drink I never heard of called Neutonic. Malachi said the ingredients were healthier.
Malachi’s knowledge impressed me, so I shared that I had recently begun working with a trainer who worked me hard and asked if he might recommend a product to help me with my off-days recovery. He recommended creatine.
“Creatine is for bodybuilders, isn’t it?” I said. “Should someone my age be taking creatine?”
“Creatine is actually really good for someone your age,” Malachi said. “It helps prevent muscle loss.”
I was suspicious, so I pulled out my phone and asked Dr. ChatGPT for an opinion. According to the National Institutes of Health, creatine not only is effective at preventing muscle loss, there’s also some emerging evidence that it benefits brain health, memory, and cognitive performance in older adults.
Without missing a beat, I asked Malachi for the creatine brand he’d recommend. He pointed me to a display product called BodyTech.
Ka-Ching! $27.99.
Malachi converted a walk-in customer looking for an energy drink and made a high-margin sale of BodyTech (I’ve since learned BodyTech is The Vitamin Shoppe’s proprietary brand, so likely it’s more profitable for the company).
I then asked Malachi if there was a hydration powder supplement that wasn’t laden with sugar and unhealthy chemicals. He knew all the brands and steered me to a product made by Transparent Labs.
Ka-Ching! Another $32.00 sale.
While ringing up my order, Malachi emphasized that if I didn’t like the products, I could return them within 30 days, even if they were opened. It made me trust him.
I mentioned to my trainer, who owns a gym specializing in training people over 40, that I had begun taking creatine. He was already familiar with the potential cognitive benefits and recommended that I also explore taking whey protein to aid my recovery. I returned to The Vitamin Shoppe, where fortunately Malachi was behind the counter.
Ka-Ching! $39.99 for a bottle of BodyTech chocolate whey protein isolate, which happened to be on special.
On reflection, I marveled that Malachi had leveraged a brief interaction about an energy drink into a sale of about $100 worth of merchandise. Malachi’s training and knowledge were evident, and I wondered who was behind it.
And that’s how I stumbled upon Sharon Leite, one of the most impressive CEOs you’ve never heard of, unless you are deeply familiar with the retail industry.
Leite is on her second tour of duty as CEO of The Vitamin Shoppe, a company that fell on hard times after being acquired in a leveraged buyout by a firm that later collapsed into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The once publicly traded business was doing just fine after Leite assumed command in 2018, executing a major operational overhaul, introducing tech-driven store layouts and scaling up highly profitable private-label brands like the BodyTech line of products that Malachi sold me.
The corporate parent company that took The Vitamin Shoppe private landed in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, but Leite had the prescience and wisdom to bail out about a year before the ship sank. Two Los Angeles-based private equity firms—Kingswood Capital and Performance Investment Partners—scooped up The Vitamin Shoppe in May of last year, but unlike most predatory PE firms, Kingswood and PIP were looking to restore, rather than milk, the business.
Among their first moves: reinstalling Leite as CEO.
Leite has escaped the corporate media limelight, which is surprising given her extensive and successful career in the retail industry.
Leite learned the operational mechanics of the business from the sales floor up, starting her career as a store manager at Express in the late 1980s. She spent the next two decades cutting her teeth in leadership and operational roles at a murderers’ row of iconic consumer giants, including The Walt Disney Company, Gap Inc., and Bath & Body Works.
Leite’s success wasn’t predicated on flashy tech disruption, empty corporate buzzwords, or pontificating about AI—her career was built on scale and real estate logistics.
By the time she spent nearly a decade at Pier 1 Imports, rising to Executive Vice President, she was overseeing sales, customer experience, and real estate for a massive nationwide footprint. She followed that by running Sally Beauty as President of the US and Canada—a specialty behemoth with over 3,000 stores—and later served as President of North America for Godiva Chocolatier.
When you manage thousands of physical storefronts and millions of moving inventory pieces across low-margin, hyper-competitive industries, you don’t have the luxury of hiding behind PR hype. You either understand the micro-economics of a retail floor, or you get crushed.
My encounter with Malachi no doubt reflected Leite’s understanding of retail floor economics and how to drive sales.
Despite maintaining a low media profile, Leite is willing to step into the limelight when it serves her business interests.
In 2022, she appeared on CBS’ Undercover Boss, where she donned a brunette wig, fake glasses, and a new persona to embed herself anonymously within her own rank-and-file. The show generated considerable free—and favorable—publicity for The Vitamin Shoppe.
More importantly, it allowed Leite to experience firsthand some of The Vitamin Shoppe’s operational issues. Standing on the retail floor under a pseudonym, she watched her “Health Enthusiasts” navigate the ultimate retail nightmare: sudden point-of-sale (POS) system outages that left cashiers stranded and customers waiting.
I particularly enjoyed watching the accompanying video where Leite was schooled by a warehouse employee on interacting with the “dancing robots” and learning why the technology wasn’t functioning according to plan. I wonder how many CEOs would be willing to be featured on national television being told by an underling they needed to pick up the pace.
Given her success, I was disappointed that Leite sometimes channels her inner Mary Barra and waxes on in consultantspeak about how technology will drive The Vitamin Shoppe’s success.
“We’re evolving our business to be truly digital first, and then use the stores as the force multiplier, because we have incredible expertise in our stores,” Leite told WWD in an interview earlier this year. “What you’ll see over the next six to nine months is this merging of our digital channel and our store channel, and how it will become seamless for the consumer. It’s not there today, but that’s where we’re headed.”
One Vitamin Shoppe innovation is an AI-powered, interactive digital touchscreen for detailed product information and wellness content. The value of that “innovation” makes no sense to me. ChatGPT already has detailed knowledge of my health and wellness issues, which provides a more valuable framework to assess the suitability of products for me.
I’m also surprised that Leite hasn’t made more of an effort to better target baby boomers with a line of products aimed specifically at this demographic.
Obviously, Leite doesn’t need advice from my humble corner of the internet. Still, I’ve learned there’s one area of retail that appears even she possibly hasn’t solved:
Turnover.
While preparing this article I called my local Vitamin Shoppe to confirm a few details with Malachi. Turns out, the day I went to buy my whey protein was his last day. The manager told me Malachi had moved back to Seattle.