How Free Soul launched CreaGlow with 536 ads and women who say it worked

Category introduction

Supplements aimed at women in the UK have moved from the pharmacy aisle to the feed. Brands sell on trust, and trust comes from three places: an expert, data, or other women. Wild Nutrition, founded in 2013 by Henrietta and Charlie Norton, is the expert route. The Yahoo Finance profile of it reports a latest turnover of £30 million and a forecast of more than £40 million for 2026/27, with retail partners and in-store “Wild Experts”. Form Nutrition, a plant-based brand, looks to us like the data route.

Free Soul takes the third route, and it sells in Boots, Tesco and Holland & Barrett as well as online.

Brand introduction

Free Soul was started in 2017 by a mother and son, Rohini and Arjun Sofat. London Business Journal reports revenue of £42.3 million in the latest financial year, up from £1.2 million in 2022, and says it serves over four million women. It ranked tenth in the Sunday Times 100. Its Instagram account has about 261,000 followers. The range covers protein, hydration and CreaGlow.

Summary

Free Soul pushes one new product with a very large number of ads, and lets other women make the case. CreaGlow is pitched as a “3-in-1 blend: strength, beauty and hydration”. The product is easy to explain in one line and hard to prove in one, so the ads use real faces, many at once.

It is a volume strategy. 478 ads from one team look like a lot, but 264 share the same title, so most of the library is many versions of one idea.

Problem statement and objective

This is our reading of the ads, not a brief Free Soul has published. The problem looks like this. A new product that mixes creatine, collagen and hydration is unfamiliar. A woman has to be told what it is, then believe it works.

The objective that follows: explain the benefit quickly, build belief through people who look like the buyer, and convert with a discount. September looks like the launch month.

Execution: what the ads actually do

We read 478 of Free Soul's 536 live ads on 28 September 2026, about 89% of the library, and decoded 428 creatives from them. This is a large sample, not a full count.

One product, with tested landing pages

Source: Meta Ad Library, United Kingdom, read 28 September 2026. 478 of 536 live ads. Sorted by the address each ad links to.

The CreaGlow links come in several versions of the page, which looks like landing-page testing. 436 of the 478 ads started in September and 33 in August.

The story is the proof

Of 428 creatives, 218 (51%) use a creator testimonial as proof and 91 (21%) use a statistic. 151 (35%) feature an everyday user, and 307 (72%) have a woman on screen. 146 (34%) are a person talking to the camera. The opening lines are about a symptom or a worry: 130 (30%) start from a pain point, 100 (23%) from personal experience (“Puffy fingers. Swollen feet. For you.”).

Problem, then fix

206 creatives (48%) follow a problem-then-solution shape, against 69 (16%) that pitch the product directly. Another 48 (11%) are testimonials or reviews and 32 (7%) bust a myth.

A discount closes it

171 creatives (40%) carry a discount and 169 (39%) ask the viewer to buy now. Creators often bring their own code: 143 of the 250 creator posts in our file mention a code or a discount in the caption.

The brand's own feed is modest

Free Soul posted 116 times between 1 June and 27 September 2026: 73 carousels, 35 reels and 8 images. The 102 posts with like counts drew about 68,000 likes in total. Creator posts reached much further: 186 with view counts total 1.29 million views, the top post 177,000, and the top three about a third. So no single post carries the programme. We classified 7,854 comments across 149 posts: 91% carry no product signal, 4.7% speak well of it and 3% show buying intent.

What the competition is doing

Source: Meta Ad Library and Instagram, read 28 September 2026. Percentages are shares of decoded creatives. Organic windows run from June to late September 2026.

Wild Nutrition: the expert and the product

Wild Nutrition is the quieter, more clinical voice. 177 of its 327 creatives (54%) show no person, and 71 (22%) use an expert endorsement. One ad line reads “Formulated by nutritional therapists”. Discounts are rare, and bundles (43 creatives) are used more than percentage-off offers (36).

Form Nutrition: the numbers

Form is smaller and drier. 120 of its 187 creatives (64%) offer a statistic as proof and 125 (67%) have no person in them. It almost never discounts: 2 creatives. All 107 ads link to its own site. It is the opposite of Free Soul's approach: facts first, faces second.

What other brands can take from this

• Put the weight behind one launch. More than half of the ads we read sell the same new product.
• Let users carry the proof. If a benefit is hard to verify, other women saying it worked can do what a claim cannot.
• Test the landing page, not just the ad. Versions of the CreaGlow page point to a team that tests the click as well as the creative.
• Know the cost of a discount-led model. Free Soul's 40% sits against 1% and 11% for rivals that sell trust first.
• A modest feed can still sell. The brand's own account is modest; the weight is in paid and in creators.