Herbalife CEO Stephan Gratziani sat down with Blake Mallen, Herbalife Chief Strategy Officer and President of Pro2col, and Brian Underwood, Co-Founder and CEO of Pruvit, for a candid conversation about Herbalife’s acquisition of Pruvit, and what their collaboration will mean for the future of their respective businesses.
As distributors first, all three executives have a shared experience of beginning in the field with dreams of retiring early. Gratziani, in particular, had a thirty-year career as a distributor before evolving his career to encompass the corporate side of the business. But all three found a passion in leading high-impact entrepreneurial businesses.
“None of us had planned on going into the ownership, founder or executive side,” Mallen said. “Sometimes doors open the way they’re meant to”
After meeting at a CEO Forum, the three hit it off as colleagues, and the origins of Pruvit and its biohacking science came up organically one evening after a meal while the three were waiting for an Uber.
“It’s interesting because it was so casual,” Mallen said. “It wasn’t strategic; it was a dinner over a social conversation.”
But as Underwood shared Pruvit’s approach to uniting science with technology and delivering personalized wellness at scale, Gratziani saw a massive opportunity. Because of the relationship and trust built between the three men, Gratziani shared that Herbalife was already making plans to build a front-facing commercialized wellness platform and was investing heavily in infrastructure.
“As an entrepreneur, you have to jump; you have to move,” Gratziani said. “You cannot wait.”
Two weeks later, Herbalife flew Pruvit’s executive team in to share what they were working on and the two companies considered if there was a way to work together. Beyond the cultural fit and the strong scientific research and innovation, the access to Link Biosciences manufacturing process provided opportunity for the company to protect intellectual property while leveraging emerging technology and position the company for the future.
In its multi-decade history, Herbalife had never looked at acquisitions as a strategy, but Pruvit’s “speed boat” trajectory was attractive to Gratziani as he prepared to steer Herbalife’s massive “cruise ship” organization.
“Especially when you look at a company that is 45 years old, where it’s the same marketing plan for 45 years, obviously technology changes and you’re always updating, but you should be looking at how things are happening in the industry,” Gratziani said. “That was an important move, to actually start looking at what’s happening outside of the walls of Herbalife. But it’s never been a strategy. It really happened because of the alignment. We started to understand what Pruvit was up to and where the industry was going.”
“You have to focus on the company that you are,” Underwood said. “You have to manage where you are, but there’s always two things taking place. You have to also manage and focus on the company you’re becoming because you’re always ‘becoming.’ And if we don’t have our eyes set on what we’re becoming, then we’ll get kind of left behind.”
After meeting with each other’s executive teams, it became clear that working together could be a viable option.
“It led us to say, we can either go and develop our own, or [could] we come together and do something much bigger?” Gratziani said.
“Even though we were, at that time, on different paths, we had a shared vision of where we wanted to go,” Mallen said.
The Pro2col platform is now in beta-phase, with expectations to roll out in the fourth quarter, potentially October 2025.
“The more I see within the global community, the bigger that vision or that dream gets of what we really have here and what this can be and will be,” Mallen said.
