Going natural means lush business for Nutramedica

MANILA, Philippines - A pioneer in commercializing VCO, the all-Filipino firm is poised to grab the global market with its all-natural hairgrowing products.

Is your hair thinning as fast as the world’s rainforests are? Are you health conscious or at least beginning to see the value of wellness? Do you opt for natural over chemical-based products? Then you might find yourself patronizing Nutramedica, a 100 percent Filipino firm that makes beauty and healthcare products out of natural and mostly indigenous ingredients like virgin coconut oil.

“We see a growing demand for alternative and all-natural products, as consumers become more and more health-conscious,” says Nutramedica’s founder, President and CEO Sheila Mae Velilla.

Focusing on natural-made products is a business tack her seven-year-old firm intends to use.

Nutramedica was one of the first to commercialize virgin coconut oil (VCO) in the local market when it started operations in 2004.

“The biggest challenge at that time was to introduce the product to the market,” recalls 40-year-old Velilla, who first worked as a medical representative for multinational pharmaceutical firm Glaxo before putting up her own business. “It was difficult for us to convince consumers to use our product, as this was something new to them.”

But soon enough, the VCO became a fad – at least in the Philippines.

“Our VCO product became so successful that a big company bought our brand,” discloses Velilla. She refused to say the brand name, though, as this was eventually changed by the buying corporation.

Nutramedica, however, has continued to develop more VCO-based products, both for ingestion and skincare. The company’s latest, and now banner product, is the Novuhair product line. This consists of a herbal shampoo and a topical scalp lotion made from a mix of various herbs that pomote hair growth – moringa (malunggay), panax ginseng, centella asiatica, zingiber officinale, aloe, biotin, peppermint, lemon grass, rosemary, and lavender.

Velilla says Nutramedica introduced its Novuhair brand only last year, but the company has already been getting inspiring feedback from consumers inside and outside the country.

Locally, the product is carried by Cory Quirino World of Wellness stores and Mercury Drug Stores nationwide. Hair and scalp specialists at St. Luke’s Medical Center have also attested the product’s effectivity in combatting hairloss.

Last year, Velilla recounts, Nutramedica presented its Novuhair product line in a trade show of Philippine-made products in New Jersey and got some resellers to test the products in the US market. According to Velilla, the Nuvohair brand almost instantly picked up sales in the US, at least in New Jersey.

Velilla says they had similar taste of success in Hongkong, where a wholesaler of natural products tried Novuhair in the Hongkong market after seeing the product also in a trade show last year in Hongkong.

Meanwhile, a consolidator in the Philippines has expressed willingness to export Novuhair to the Middle East, according to Velilla. Another Filipino entrepreneur based in Singapore, she adds, is also interested in marketing the product in Singapore.

“We’re so happy with these developments,” beams Velilla. “We strike while the iron is hot.”

Nutramedica, she says, plans to export in full blast this year.

Aside from hair and skin care products, Nutramedica also deals in food supplements and slimming juices, as well as antibiotics, multivitamins, and antihistamines. But going natural is the direction the company intends to take.

“Although we also have pharmaceutical products, we are inclined to focus now on the niche market of natural-made products,” says Velilla, who took MBA at the Ateneo Graduate School of Business and a short course on Integrated Marketing at the New York University.

Velilla explains: “The pharmaceutical industry is too dominated by multinationals, it’s practically harder to survive. And pharmaceutical products take too long to develop that you need bigger capital.”

According to Velilla, biocosmetics like Novuhair would give her company better chances of succeeding and penetrating both the local and global markets.

“Our company has grown more than 10-fold over the past seven years,” she says. “From only four employees when we started, we now have 35 employees, including chemists and researchers.”

Velilla says bulk orders for Nutramedica products have also increased over the years.

Next product in the pipeline: an anti-aging soap.