Growth is usually the goal. More funding, more customers, new services, bigger partnerships and new markets are all signs that something is working.
But we’re seeing another kind of growth happening across women’s health. Companies that started by solving one very specific problem are beginning to expand well beyond it. A company built around one test becomes a diagnostics platform. A fertility brand expands into hormonal health. A telehealth company adds menopause care. A product company starts generating research and data that may eventually become as important as the product itself.
It’s exciting to watch, particularly in a category that has been underfunded for so long. But it creates an interesting brand challenge. What happens when the company has evolved, but the brand is still telling the story of the business it used to be?
We’re seeing this across women’s health
Evvy is a good recent example. The company started with at-home vaginal microbiome testing and has since built a significant dataset around an area of women’s health that has historically been understudied. In September, it announced a $40 million Series B to expand its research and move further into fertility.
That changes the story. Evvy isn’t simply talking about an at-home vaginal health test anymore. The bigger picture includes diagnostics, fertility, research and data, with the potential to contribute to a much broader understanding of the vaginal microbiome.
Wisp has been evolving too. What started primarily as a sexual and reproductive telehealth company has expanded into other areas, including diagnostics, fertility and menopause.
These aren’t unusual trajectories for successful companies. You start with a very specific problem because that’s often exactly what an early-stage business needs to do. You build expertise, learn more about the market and discover opportunities you couldn’t necessarily see at the beginning.
Eventually, though, the brand needs to catch up.
The positioning that got you here may not get you there
Early-stage brands benefit enormously from focus. Being able to clearly say this is the problem we solve and this is who we solve it for makes it easier for people to understand and remember you.
As the business grows, that same positioning can start to feel restrictive. Maybe you’ve added services. Maybe the technology now has applications beyond the original problem. Maybe you’re starting to work with health systems instead of selling directly to consumers. Or maybe the company that once needed to speak primarily to patients now has clinicians, researchers, investors and strategic partners sitting around the table too.
This is where branding in women’s health needs to evolve with the business.
That doesn’t automatically mean a rebrand. Sometimes it does. More often, it’s an opportunity to step back and look at the bigger story. Is the way you’re describing the company today still accurate? Does your positioning leave room for where the organization is headed? Can someone encountering the brand for the first time understand the bigger idea, or are you still leading with the product you launched three years ago?
Those questions become particularly important as the number of audiences grows.
A women’s health startup might begin by speaking almost entirely to consumers. As it scales, physicians may need to understand the product. Researchers may become involved. Investors and strategic partners need a different level of information. Employers, insurers or health systems may enter the conversation.
We’ve written before about why a clear picture of your audience matters, and growth makes that clarity even more important.
The challenge isn’t that you suddenly have too many audiences. It’s figuring out what all of those audiences need to understand about you first, before the story branches into what matters specifically to them.
Your website is usually where the cracks start to show
This is often where we see the problem first.
A new product gets added to the navigation. Then another service needs a page. Then there’s a section for clinicians, one for research, another for partners, a resource hub and maybe a portal somewhere in the mix.
None of those decisions is necessarily wrong. The problem is that websites tend to grow incrementally while the thinking behind them doesn’t always get revisited.
Eventually, the website starts mirroring the internal structure of the company rather than helping an outsider understand it.
That’s when a website project stops being about redesigning pages and becomes a brand strategy exercise. Before thinking about navigation or page layouts, you need to understand what the company is now, how the pieces relate to one another and what someone needs to understand before they start exploring individual products or services.
We dealt with a version of this in our work with Auxita, a healthcare platform with a sophisticated offering that needed to be much easier for physicians to understand.
The answer wasn’t to strip away the complexity of the business. The complexity was part of its value. The job was to organize and communicate it in a way that made sense to someone who wasn’t living inside the company every day.
That’s an important distinction, particularly in healthcare. Making something clear doesn’t mean making it simplistic.
Brand architecture isn’t just for big companies
This is also where brand architecture starts becoming important, often earlier than companies expect.
Brand architecture is really just the relationship between your company, products, services and programs. When you have one product, it’s fairly straightforward. As the business expands, the decisions get harder. Does every new offering live under the master brand? Does something need its own name? Are these actually separate products, or different ways of accessing the same solution?
Those decisions have a direct impact on how easily someone can understand the business.
Good brand architecture makes growth feel logical. A new service or product feels like a natural extension because people can see how it connects to the larger idea. Without that structure, even a very innovative company can start to feel like a collection of unrelated offerings.
The trick is not to make the brand so broad that it means nothing. A company shouldn’t position itself around every possible thing it might become in ten years. But there needs to be enough room for the business to evolve without rebuilding the brand every time it does.
We think about this a lot in healthcare because the companies we work with rarely stay still. Our work with Hike Medical, for example, needed to make its initial offering clear and accessible while building a brand that had room to grow with the business.
Finding that balance between being specific today and leaving room for tomorrow is one of the harder parts of brand strategy, but it’s also one of the most valuable.
Sometimes outgrowing your brand is a good problem to have
If the brand that worked when you launched no longer quite fits, that isn’t necessarily evidence that something went wrong. It can be evidence that the company has become something bigger than you originally imagined.
The important part is recognizing when that has happened.
As women’s health continues to attract more investment and companies move from single products into diagnostics, platforms, research, clinical care and partnerships, we’re going to see this challenge more often. The organizations themselves are becoming more sophisticated, and their brands and websites need to keep pace.
At BOLD LIP, that’s often where our work with healthcare brands begins. We look at what the business has become, where it’s headed and whether the brand and website are still telling the right story.