The Art of Clicking With Customers: Ardis Health

It was while e-marketing an herbal stop-smoking product in 2000 that Jordan Finger had an entrepreneurial epiphany. A dot-com bust survivor who had started his own interactive media agency, he knew a lot about driving consumer actions—subscriptions, registrations, purchasing—online. But the results of this project were different.

“The client’s stop-smoking system included pills, a booklet and audio CD, and you could order with a credit card online,” he recounts. “When they first came to me, they were doing maybe a couple of hundred bucks a week in sales. Within 10 days of my marketing efforts, they had orders in the six figures.” Finger, founder of Ardis Health, saw the confluence of several factors that added up to a huge opportunity.

First, it became clear that e-commerce was coming into its own, as customers were developing a greater comfort level with it. Second, a product with unique attributes that was pitched at the right time—the stop-smoking product was launched in the fall, right before New Year’s resolution time—could take off fast and be very lucrative. He also knew that demand for beauty and health-related products was only going to grow with the country’s aging demographic. Here, too, was a chance to control his own destiny. “It opened my eyes,” Finger says. “I saw that I would be in a much better position if I were not just marketing a product, but if I developed it myself and owned it.”

And so Finger’s company, Ardis Health, has evolved over 10 years into a vertically integrated business that develops health and beauty products, which it markets and sells throughout the US and Europe. Ardis Health creates separate fulfillment sites and operations centers in each country. Then the company develops multiple websites across each market, with the images and words for each site painstakingly translated for the local audience. No matter where the selling takes place, the key to launching a successful product remains in the strategies for driving consumer action that Finger first honed in the early dot-com days.

Here are some of Ardis Health’s basic operating principles:

Create customer-centric communities

Finger sees Ardis Health as a sort of holding company of consumer brands. “We don’t have to win over a whole bunch of new people every time we launch a product; we can tap into people in our existing audience who might be interested in a given product,” Finger says. “We are developing product-centric and interest-centric communities. It’s not always just about ‘buy our product.’” For example, Dermify, a new Ardis Health product, is an organic, all-natural acne treatment. In a nod to the interests of this product’s market, a percentage of sale proceeds goes toward green development efforts such as Trees for the Future, which plants trees in third-world countries. Dermify’s website also links to a natural health blog. “Ninety-nine percent of people who go on the web are looking to find information, not to buy a product,” Finger says. “A site shouldn’t be just ‘click and buy,’ but also ‘click and give me information on what I’m interested in.’”

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