How Novomins sells one problem per ad against a rival four times its size

Category introduction

Vitamins are an everyday habit in Britain. One industry summary says 71% of UK adults take food supplements, and puts the narrow retail market at about £568 million in 2023, using Mintel's figure. The old guard is Vitabiotics, founded in 1971 by Kartar Lalvani, which Wikipedia reports became the largest vitamin company in the UK by sales value in 2013. Its brands include Wellwoman, Pregnacare, Perfectil and Wellkid.

Newer brands come at it from two sides. Myvitamins belongs to the sports-nutrition group Myprotein, owned by THG, which opened a partnership with Holland & Barrett in October 2024. Gummy brands such as Novomins make the product easier to take and talk about it in the language of daily life, not the pharmacy shelf.

Holland & Barrett, Boots and Superdrug are where most people meet these brands. But the first meeting increasingly happens in a phone feed, which is why the Meta ad library is a fair record of each brand's plan.

Brand introduction

Novomins was founded in March 2020 by Dr Peter McQuillan, a dental surgeon, and Akil Memishi, a pharmacologist, with £70,000 of their own savings. It reported £3.5 million in revenue within two years. It sells gummies for adults, women's health and children, and says it is the first B Corp-certified gummy brand in the UK and Europe. That is the brand's own claim. It is stocked in Holland & Barrett, Boots and Superdrug, and its Instagram account has about 36,000 followers, so our reading is that the paid ad has a lot of work to do.

Summary

Novomins cannot out-shout Vitabiotics, so it out-specifies it. Each ad names one small, real problem and points to the one gummy that answers it. It does this over and over, for children, for women and for sleep.

The result is a library with fewer ads but more ideas. 226 ads hold 390 creatives, and they land on 47 pages. The oldest ads still running are all for children, which suggests that is the audience the brand has kept returning to.

Problem statement and objective

This is our reading of the ads, not a brief Novomins has published. The problem looks like this. A younger brand faces a rival with four times the ads and long-established retail trust. A “good vitamins” message would lose.

The objective that follows: make each viewer feel the ad was written for them, and get a first order of a gummy for a specific need. Several of the ads send people to a bundle or a 3-for-2 offer, so it also looks like a plan to raise the size of the first basket.

Execution: what the ads actually do

We read 226 of the 255 live ads on 25 September 2026 and decoded the 390 distinct creatives inside them: 289 stills and 101 videos. We asked the same questions of every one.

Start with the problem

155 of the 390 creatives follow a problem-then-solution shape, and 76 open on a problem statement. 134 lean on a pain point as the hook. Headlines read like things a parent says out loud: “No more 7pm meltdowns”, “Bedtime shouldn't be the hardest part of the day”, “TTC? You've got this, and we've got you”.

One page for each need

The 226 ads send people to 47 different pages. 76 go to kids' or family pages, 33 to collection pages, and the rest to single product pages. The three most-used product pages take 19 ads each. This is the opposite of a brand that sends everything to one shop front.

Real people, mostly at home

183 of 390 creatives show a person, 169 of them women. 128 look like user-made footage, against 214 studio-made. 193 are shot at home. A doctor appears in some ads (46 creatives use expert endorsement) and 102 use a creator's testimonial.

Source: Meta Ad Library, United Kingdom, read 25 September 2026. 390 decoded creatives from 226 ads. Two more are labelled mixed.

Offers are used lightly

100 of 390 creatives carry an incentive: 61 a bundle, 37 a discount and 2 a free sample. The other 290 carry none. Offers such as “3 for 2 on All Adults Gummies” and “35% off the sleep bundle” sit beside the problem-led ads, not instead of them.

Kids are the long-running audience

The five oldest ads in the library, live for 233 to 235 days, are all for children (“Kids After Focus Gummies”, a calm-by-day, rested-by-night bundle, a homework ad). We cannot say these ads sold well. We can say the brand has kept them running longest.

What the competition is doing

The two rivals show two very different ways to use Meta.

Source: Meta Ad Library, United Kingdom, read 25 September 2026. Vitabiotics decoded from 150 of its 1,034 ads, Myvitamins from 60 of 61. Counts are creatives, not ads. The call-to-action row counts creatives with any button or ask other than none.

Vitabiotics: one offer, repeated

Of the 150 Vitabiotics ads we read, 61 are headed “3 for 2 on All Products” and 60 are an automated product feed. Its hooks lean on authority (36 creatives) and urgency (34), and 88 of 120 creatives use a statistic as proof. It is the brand your parents know, and its ads behave like a shop window: one offer, many products. On Instagram it posts creator content (a recent post carries the tag #MaintainWhatMovesYou) and prize giveaways.

Myvitamins: lifestyle, with no push

Myvitamins has just 61 live ads and uses them softly. 78 of its 86 creatives have no call to action and only 4 carry a discount. It leans on aspiration (32 creatives) and shows creators in 31. Our reading is that the group's retail and sports-nutrition reach does the selling and the ad just keeps the brand present.

What other brands can take from this

• Out-specify, don't out-spend. A smaller brand can beat a bigger one by naming a smaller, more real problem. Novomins gets 390 creatives from 226 ads.
• Send each problem to its own page. 47 landing pages for 226 ads means the message and the page match.
• Pick your steady audience. Children's products hold the five oldest ads. Find your version and keep it on.
• Use offers as support. 100 of 390 creatives carry one. Vitabiotics' share is 97 of 120.
• Let people talk to camera. Where trust is the issue, a doctor or a parent on screen does what a pack shot cannot.