Labrada Nutrition

Case Study

Labrada Nutrition

This is well worth the time and effort and investment. The quality of photos was very, very high.

Martin Shephard - Art Director, Labrada Nutrition

About Labrada Nutrition

The leader in nutritional products that help people get into great shape and enjoy lifelong health.

Headquartered in Houston, Texas, and founded in 1995, Labrada Nutrition is the brainchild of IFBB Pro Bodybuilding Hall of Famer and former Mr. Universe Lee Labrada. Known for its e range of lab- and field-tested nutritional supplements, Labrada produces various products, including award-winning Lean Body® ready-to-drink protein shakes, meal replacement powders, and bars.

Labrada works with some of the top-performing athletes in the world. The brand’s mission is to “empower people with nutritional products and the knowledge they need to get into great shape and be healthy for life.” In addition to their supplements, Labrada also offers education on fitness, nutrition, and health through newsletters, videos, content, social media, online fitness contests, dedicated customer support, and more.

Labrada supplements contain proven active ingredients, not the “snake oil” solutions the fitness industry is sometimes known for. The brand prides itself on “truth in labeling” and consumer trust. All Labrada products are tested by third-party labs to ensure each supplement meets label claims and are healthy and safe for consumption by top performers.

Labrada is the leading name in high-performance nutrition products, and the brand was looking for a way to enhance their video marketing efforts. While they’d worked with several talented video editors over the years, consistency was a challenge, and they found turnover was hampering their video marketing efforts. So, they came to Snapwire.

Here’s what happened.

Martin Shephard

Art Director, Labrada Nutrition

Founded in 1995

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On Location Shoot in Sardinia, Italy

Completed creative briefs

Images delivered including 5 GIFs

The Challenge

Labrada had plenty of material to create great visual content. Still, they found that working with individual freelancers who moved away or became busy on other projects created a real lack of consistency.

Their expanding product lineup required extensive marketing, and Labrada found that working with so many freelancers created a challenging, piecemeal workflow that just wasn’t sustainable. They needed one visual content producer who knew what they wanted, knew how to deliver it, and wouldn’t ever move away.

Despite Labrada’s success, their in-house team is quite lean, which meant they often didn’t have the designated staff needed to create specific content.
They had taken to working with freelancers to get the visual content they needed.
The COVID-19 crisis presented another challenge— limiting Labrada’s ability to offer in-store samples. In place of sampling, they were forced to adapt to a new marketing style and do it rapidly.
However, before too long, they realized that going over individual creative briefs and scheduling with their team of freelancers took up too much bandwidth. Additionally, coordinating everything with so many different photographers was proving difficult. They needed a more streamlined solution.

This is where Snapwire came in

The Solution

As soon as Labrada onboarded Snapwire to create their visual marketing content, they enjoyed the streamlined simplicity of an all-in-one platform, plus a much broader library of available content. According to Martin Shepherd, Creative Director for Labrada Nutrition:

“One of the things that I liked about Snapwire is that I usually use local photographers. So I’m hamstrung to a point [when I want a shot that’s not local.] What was very attractive is that I was able to say ‘look, this is what I’m looking for – something different than what I’ve already done.’ And what I liked was that they were able to find the models. I like the flexibility and being able to have different locations, other than Houston or Dallas or somewhere in Texas, because those are basically the places that I have a foothold of photographers.

Because of the nature of Labrada’s goals, one of their KPIs was the diversity of the content they could create, and the simplicity with which they could create it. They wanted to expand their reach without also increasing their in-house workload.

The Results

While the COVID-19 crisis made it more difficult for Labrada to offer samples to consumers, partnering with Snapwire allowed them to pivot their marketing efforts wholly and gracefully. With Snapwire, Labrada succeeded in creating more visual content and branching out into content types they’d never made before. In the words of Martin Shepherd:

“We’re hoping to get back to boots on the ground marketing, but what we’ve been doing is sending out a newsletter every single week that has five articles every single week. The idea is to educate customers on how to get healthy. Before, we were just doing one new article each week. We’ve revamped it and made it all brand new. New look, new field, and so on.”