It’s good to have celebrity boosting your brand.

That’s what self care wellness brand Asutra, which sells products like soaps, sleep aids and anti-aging serums, learned when Venus Williams reached out to the company asking how she could be involved. After some meetings, Williams became the chief brand officer and the company’s most prominent spokesperson. “She talks a lot about active self care and Asutra in the press and on social and makes big announcements for us,” said CEO Stephanie Morimoto on the Modern Retail Podcast. She added, “we obviously did not set out to have a celebrity partner -- we frankly would not have done it if Venus had not come to us.”

Celebrity spokespeople aside, Asutra has had a wild few years. In 2018, Morimoto bought the company, which first launched in 2015. She described the original owners as “serial entrepreneurs” who put the business up for sale when she was looking for her next business venture. At the time, Asutra sold most of its products on Amazon, and she believed she could help transform it into a DTC wellness player. Part of that has been about rebranding the company as “active self care,” as she described it.

Another big part has been on diversifying channels. “Our big focus as a team has been to diversify our revenue channels so that we’re not so reliant on Amazon,” Morimoto said. “Hopefully, depending on how a couple of retail partnerships go this year, we’ll probably go from 99% Amazon to about 60% Amazon -- with a good chunk coming from retail, and then also from what we consider DTC, which is our own website.”

Retail has certainly been an interesting nut to crack. Asutra’s first major retail partnership was with CVS. While it gave the brand widespread distribution, Morimoto learned a few things about matching customers with products. “People mostly go to CVS to fulfill their prescriptions and use the pharmacy,” she said. So it was hard to catch shopper’s eyes when they weren’t necessarily thinking about self care products.

But one recent retail partnership is proving to work better: Target. “We just launched in Target about a month ago, which has been awesome,” she said. “Target was really our holy grail goal.”

Now, the focus is on making the Target partnerships work, as well as inking more retailers as well. Two new retailers Asutra is working with are Athleta and Grove Collaborative. But, for now, she’s thinking about making current partnerships work.

“The rest of the year, we’re really focused on making Target a success so that we can continue to grow with Target over the next couple of years,” Morimoto said