Ideas Fest gave our Commercial Strategy Lead, Tara Lumley, a stage to talk about something companies don't often discuss in public: the honest story of Klario's earliest community. We sat down with her afterwards to go deeper.
Why focus on your first 100 people instead of just chasing volume?
We didn't want the question to be "how quickly can we find a hundred people to buy this?" It was more, "how do we build enough trust and understanding that people want to come with us?" Before we'd sold a single bottle, we'd already done surveys, interviews and community sessions where we openly shared and discussed the research behind Klario. Trust matters in this space, because you're asking people to bring something new into a routine they've often been managing for years.
How do you make sure you're reaching people in the way they actually want?
We've learned quite quickly that not everyone wants the same relationship with us. Some are happy to hear from us through email or Instagram, and get on with their day. Others want to be much more involved, through calls, panels and detailed feedback. So we've built different levels of engagement to match.
A lot of our communication is also educational rather than sales-led, we spend time talking more broadly about hypoglycaemia and what good recovery should look like based on clinical and lived experience insights, not just about Klario itself.
We also started seeing something we hadn't really planned for: some of our earliest orders were being placed by someone else on a person's behalf - a parent, partner or friend. We'd written almost all of our communication for the person using the product, and suddenly realised the person ordering might have quite different questions and needs.
One of the big lessons has been not to assume who's on the other end, how they want to hear from us, or how involved they want to be.
What surprised you most?
Probably the bottle. Once Klario was out in the world, we started hearing that people wanted clearer measurement markings on the packaging. So we changed the design. It was a relatively small adjustment, but a useful reminder that there are some things you only discover once something is being used in everyday life.
What has this feedback changed about how you think about Klario?
We've learned to pay attention to both what people tell us and how they actually use Klario, because the two don't always point the same way. We introduced a smaller, lower-cost pack thinking it would make trying Klario easier. But we found people were also opting for the larger pack. It's a good reminder that everyone's starting point is different, and it's shaped how we think about offering options that fit different routines rather than assuming one size fits most.
How did that early listening keep shaping things as you grew?
It's never too early to start speaking to the people you're building for. We never assumed our earliest community was representative of everyone who might use Klario, but they gave us incredibly useful early signals about who they were, how they were using it and what they needed from us.
One person who regularly sails, for example, told us that different situations can call for very different formats. Feedback like that is already shaping our thinking.
Rather than designing those in isolation, we want the people who want to be more involved to help us work out what comes next. Staying close to our earliest believers is partly about maintaining that willingness to change, rather than assuming we've finished listening just because we've launched.
What's next for that listening process?
We're working with researchers at the University of Surrey to understand the real-world experience of managing type 1 diabetes hypoglycaemia, what recovery actually involves and where current approaches fall short. It's the same principle we started with, just extended out to the wider community.