What Public Supplement Companies' Filings Reveal About DR Economics

which supplement and dtc companies publish their marketing spend?

Seven US-listed companies break out marketing or advertising cost in their annual filings: Hims & Hers Health, Celsius Holdings, BellRing Brands, The Beachbody Company, Herbalife, USANA Health Sciences and Medifast. Each files a Form 10-K with the SEC, and each uses a different line-item name — marketing expense, advertising expense, selling and marketing expense — so the ratios below are close proxies, not a single standardized metric. Three sell through subscription or e-commerce (Hims & Hers, Beachbody, and increasingly USANA via its Hiya and Rise acquisitions); three run multilevel distributor networks (Herbalife, USANA, Medifast); two sell through retail (Celsius, BellRing).

That split matters because a subscription brand's checkout is the whole funnel, while an MLM's advertising line only covers corporate spend and excludes what it pays distributors to recruit and sell — a distinction worth holding onto before comparing the ratios in the next section.

what share of revenue do they actually spend on advertising?

The share ranges across two orders of magnitude, from 0.8% of net sales at Herbalife to 39.2% of revenue at Hims & Hers, and it moved fast at both ends between FY2024 and FY2025. Hims & Hers cut its marketing ratio from 46.0% of revenue in FY2024 to 39.2% in FY2025 even as marketing dollars grew, because revenue grew faster still; Celsius Holdings cut from 16.3% to 12.7% of revenue over the same period. Both changes sit in the same filings as gross margin and subscriber disclosures, so the ratio alone tells only part of the acquisition story.

BellRing and Medifast sit at opposite ends for different reasons. BellRing sells protein shakes through grocery and club retail, where a national brand's advertising line buys awareness rather than direct-response acquisition, which helps explain its 3.2% ratio next to Beachbody's 37.2%. Medifast's FY2025 filing does not break out an advertising-expense ratio in the material reviewed here, so treat that figure as needing a fresh check against the primary filing rather than an omission from this page.

what gross margins do supplement brands report?

Gross margin among these seven companies runs from 33.3% at BellRing Brands to 78.3% at USANA Health Sciences, and most cluster well above 70%. Direct-to-consumer and multilevel-marketing models post the highest margins because they skip the wholesale and retail markup a grocery or club channel takes out first.

The one outlier worth flagging is Hims & Hers, where gross margin fell five points from 79% in FY2024 to 74% in FY2025 even as the marketing ratio dropped over the same year. The filing does not state a cause for the margin decline, so any specific explanation is inference, not disclosed fact, and should be checked against the underlying filing before being repeated as settled.

• Herbalife: 77.9% FY2025 gross margin on $5,037.5 million net sales
• USANA Health Sciences: 78.3% FY2025 gross margin
• Hims & Hers: 74% FY2025, down from 79% FY2024
• The Beachbody Company: 73.0% FY2025
• Medifast: 71.3% FY2025
• Celsius Holdings: 50.4% FY2025
• BellRing Brands: 33.3% FY2025

what do their filings say about customer acquisition cost?

None of the seven filings discloses a customer acquisition cost figure directly; the closest public proxies are subscriber counts, per-subscriber revenue, and third-party ad-tech benchmarks rather than a number the brand itself reports. Hims & Hers discloses 2,511,000 subscribers at the end of FY2025, up 13% from about 2,229,000 a year earlier, alongside Monthly Revenue per Average Subscriber of $83 in FY2025 versus $65 in FY2024 — useful for reconstructing lifetime value, but silent on what it cost to add each new subscriber.

Outside vendors fill part of the gap, with caveats attached to each figure. LocaliQ and WordStream's 2026 Search Advertising Benchmarks put the Health & Fitness Google Ads category at a $67.36 average cost per lead and a $6.17 average CPC, against a $5.42 all-industry average CPC. IRP Commerce's June 2026 panel puts cost per acquisition in the Health and Wellbeing e-commerce vertical at 10.98% of revenue on a 2.58% conversion rate, though that panel is UK-centric and reports in pounds sterling, so treat it as directional for a US operator rather than a direct read.

One more caveat belongs here: WordStream's Facebook Ad Benchmarks page reports Fitness-category costs, but its own methodology note traces the underlying data to $553,000 of spend across 256 accounts between November 2016 and January 2017. That makes those Facebook figures roughly a decade stale despite a recent page-update date, and no current CPM benchmark for health or supplement verticals could be verified as of this writing, so any Meta cost figure circulating for this niche needs a fresh source before use.

what refund and return rates get disclosed?

Only Herbalife publishes an explicit return rate; every other company in this set nets refunds and chargebacks against revenue without stating the percentage. Herbalife's FY2025 10-K reports product returns and buybacks of approximately 0.1% of net sales in both 2025 and 2024, with a dollar allowance of $2.0 million and $1.8 million respectively.

Hims & Hers states that its 'Online Revenue' is reported net of refunds, credits and chargebacks, but discloses no rate; Beachbody records revenue net of expected returns, discounts and credit card chargebacks, also without a rate; Medifast warns generically that failing to prevent fraudulent transactions could cause it to lose its ability to accept credit cards, again without quantifying exposure. Netting returns against gross revenue is standard accounting practice, not an omission specific to nutra, and a rate only becomes visible when a company chooses to disclose it or a regulator requires it.

Herbalife's visibility here traces to regulation rather than voluntary transparency. Under its 2016 FTC consent order, a US distributor does not earn Volume Points on a transaction until the product sells to a customer at a profit and certain sale information is collected — a compensation mechanic that forces return tracking into the open in a way most peers' filings don't require.

how does public-company subscription churn compare to dr assumptions?

The one filed monthly-retention figure in this set sits close to what a well-run subscription offer targets. Beachbody discloses average month-over-month digital subscriber retention of approximately 96.9% for FY2025, a churn rate near 3.1% a month, and its filing explains that even a 95% monthly retention rate still means losing roughly 15% of a quarter's beginning subscriber base by quarter's end.

Hims & Hers doesn't publish a churn or retention percentage at all. Its subscriber count grew 13% year over year to 2,511,000 while Monthly Revenue per Average Subscriber rose from $65 to $83, and net growth like that can mask a higher gross churn rate running underneath it. A private operator modeling a subscription funnel from its own checkout data can stress-test that compounding math against reconstructing a subscription brand's economics from its own checkout.

what can a private operator borrow from these benchmarks?

Three things travel well from these filings into a private nutra offer: gross-margin bands, compounding-churn math, and distributor or affiliate retention as a proxy for channel health. A capsule or tablet product priced like these companies' core lines should land in the 70%-plus gross-margin band that Herbalife (77.9%), USANA (78.3%) and Beachbody (73.0%) all report; one landing well under that on a comparable format and price point is losing margin somewhere in its supply chain.

Retention math is the more transferable lesson of the two. Beachbody's own explanation — that 95% monthly retention still sheds 15% of a quarter's subscriber base — applies identically to a nutra rebill funnel regardless of niche, and a buyer sizing an offer should run that compounding math before trusting a 'low churn' claim expressed only as a monthly percentage. The same logic scales down to the SKU level in a niche like prostate health, where buyer profile and claim ceiling are already mapped in the prostate niche's buyer, claim ceiling and offer economics.

Here is the claim worth sitting with: a low advertising-expense ratio, like Herbalife's 0.8%, is not evidence of cheap customer acquisition. It is evidence that the acquisition cost moved to a different line item. Herbalife pays sales leaders through commissions and overrides that its 10-K books as distributor compensation rather than advertising, yet those payments exist specifically to recruit and retain the people who sell the product; Herbalife's own sales-leader retention rate of 70.3% (unchanged year over year, 77.8% in North America) functions as a channel-health metric in exactly the way Beachbody's subscriber retention does for its funnel. Reading Herbalife's ad-spend ratio as efficient marketing misreads what the accounting is actually showing.

where do public-company economics stop resembling a dr offer?

Public-company economics stop resembling a private DR offer at three points: channel mix, regulatory exposure, and scale. These seven companies acquire customers mainly through retail placement, an owned brand audience, or a compensated distributor base, not cold traffic bought against a single VSL, so their blended acquisition-cost structure isn't a direct stand-in for a media buyer's CPA math.

Regulatory exposure differs in degree, not in kind. Hims & Hers' FY2025 10-K names as a risk that 'the Federal Trade Commission has sought enforcement action where an endorsement has failed to clearly and conspicuously disclose a financial relationship or material connection between an influencer and an advertiser,' and separately flags that Meta's 2025 platform changes affected its own digital-marketing performance — the same two risks a private operator running affiliate or paid-social traffic carries, just without a public filing forcing them into the open. That downside case reads closer to the enforcement pattern covered in the villain in nutra VSLs, which is usually not big pharma than to a listed company's risk-factor boilerplate.

Scale is the plainest gap of the three. Precedence Research valued the global dietary supplements market at $203.42 billion in 2025, while total US affiliate marketing spend — the channel much of DR nutra actually runs through — reached $13.62 billion in 2024 per the Performance Marketing Association's 2025 study, growing at a 14.42% compound annual rate since 2021. A single-SKU offer's unit economics sit closer to that affiliate figure's marginal dollar than to any of these seven companies' balance sheets, so borrow the ratios above as sanity checks, not as a line-item budget template.

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For deeper evaluation, continue through The Save Desk: Keeping Subscribers Without Building an Obstruction Case, SOPs That Survive Turnover: Documenting a Nutra Operation, The Nutra Org Chart by Stage: Solo, Three People, and Ten, The Operating Cadence: What a Nutra Owner Reads Daily, Weekly, and Monthly, What is a VSL?, and UTM parameter decoding guide. These related Daily Intel pages connect this topic to the relevant methodology, pricing, trust context, comparison path, or niche workflow.