In 2015, Katerina Markov Schneider was newly pregnant and on the hunt for the right prenatal vitamin. There were plenty of options available on the market, but none that met her standards. She found most of them to have high levels of heavy metals and too many artificial ingredients.

Schneider decided to take things into her own hands.

"I knew we all deserved better, including myself," she tells CNBC Make It. "And this passion to set a new standard in this supplement industry took over."

Schneider quit her job as a venture partner at Atom Factory, an entertainment company, to start Ritual.

Less than 10 years later, the supplement brand has expanded far beyond prenatal vitamins and sold over 25 million bottles of supplements for daily health, better sleep, stress relief and more.

In 2024, Ritual brought in more than $250 million in gross revenue.

But the 39-year-old founder and CEO says building a business centered around women's health wasn't easy: "[It] was so underfunded and understudied."

Here's how Schneider weathered the many "no's" she got from investors early on, stayed dedicated to changing the supplement industry and built a successful business.

'Why can't I make this available for other women?'

Schneider's parents immigrated to the United States from Ukraine when she was around four years old. She says they've always had a holistic approach to health and wellness.

"My parents were the ultimate skeptics," she says. "So, anything they were reading or anything that was in front of us, there was ultimate skepticism."

In 2004, when Schneider was studying at Brown University, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. "It was such a dark moment in my life," she says.

At the time, Schneider's mother opted out of conventional treatment like chemotherapy and radiation, and sought out care from a naturopath who gave her holistic supplements and suggested following a diet based on her blood type. Now, more than 20 years since her diagnosis, Schneider's mother is well, but does monitor her condition with a physician.

Schneider says she was always influenced by her parents' approach to wellness, but it was a new chapter in her life that helped determine her own.

"I would say that the thing that had the most profound impact on how I thought about health and wellness was being pregnant," she says. "I never took a multivitamin before. And here I was pregnant, and I had to take prenatal vitamins. And there was nothing out there that met my standards."

Doctors typically advise that pregnant women take prenatal vitamins to increase their intake of folic acid, iron and calcium, which are important for fetal growth and development. Schneider thought the supplements she found on the market didn't have enough of the essential nutrients she needed as an expecting mother.

Instead of a standard prenatal, Schneider added magnesium, vitamin D, omega-3 and methylated folate to her daily regimen. But, she couldn't shake the idea that there must be a way for her and other expectant mothers to get the nutrients they need without all of the other junk.

"I felt something so deeply inside of me. Why do I have to cobble this together? Why do I have to do the research? Why can't I make this available for other women? And it became kind of a rallying cry inside me," she says. "I was determined to start the company."

At the same time she was cooking up the idea for Ritual, Schneider's husband Michael was launching his own business.

"We were paying off debt. We were renting out part of our house and about to have a kid in like five months," she says.

These challenges almost caused her to give up on starting her business, but Schneider's husband encouraged her to stick with it.

Once she was set on creating Ritual, the first step was "really investing in science," she says.

To show consumers that her vitamins were different than all of the rest, Schneider wanted to have scientists in-house to lead clinical studies on the efficacy and safety of her product. But funding her vision would be costly, so Schneider began pitching investors in Los Angeles.

"A lot of the feedback I got was that women's health is niche, pregnancy is niche, postpartum is niche, fertility is niche, menopause is niche," she says.

She was eventually able to get investors on board, including her old boss at Atom Factory, Troy Carter, who invested $1.3 million. Schneider quit her job to focus on the business full-time.

'The future of health is clear'

At eight months pregnant, Schneider went to a nutraceutical convention where a manufacturer displayed a vitamin in a clear capsule.

The ability to see exactly what was inside the pill inspired her to take the same approach at Ritual. "I was like, 'Wow, this is what it's meant to be,'" she says. "The future of health is clear."

By July 2016, just months after giving birth to her daughter, Schneider was able to raise an additional $3.5 million in funding. And this gave her a chance to build her team of scientists.

She hired a chief scientific officer and created a team of 20 scientists and experts in fields like physiology and nutrition, who decided it would be more beneficial for the brand to start with a multivitamin.

"When we looked at the multi industry, we saw that it contained a lot of ingredients that people were already getting from their diets," Schneider says. "But they were lacking in certain ones that people needed."

Vitamins and supplements are not closely regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

"Basically anybody can go out there and start selling a vitamin supplement and putting a claim on their label," says Jen Scheinman, a registered dietician with over 30 years of experience in the field of nutrition and wellness. "It isn't really until somebody complains or asks the FDA to go look at it that the FDA is going to investigate. So, unfortunately the onus really lies on the consumer to do their research."

Schneider made the traceability of Ritual's product integral to the company's mission.

The Ritual team decided to not only list every single ingredient in the multivitamin on their website, but also where each was sourced. Also, anyone can access the clinical study that tested Ritual's multivitamin on their website.

"At Ritual, traceability is really the proof. It's taking transparency to the next level," Schneider says. "We have a commitment to have clinical studies on every single one of our products by 2030, really showing people the proof behind our science."

Experts like Scheinman welcome Ritual's approach.

"The sourcing for the supplements to me as a dietitian becomes concerning because I want to make sure that my supplements are going to be pure, clean of heavy metals and are going to actually have the effective ingredient in there," Scheinman adds.

"Ritual's doing two things. Number one is they are declaring where they source their ingredients so we can trust they are clean and have the right efficacy. And the other thing is they do third-party testing, which is them confirming [they] sourced this ingredient from a high quality supplier. [It's] putting their seal of approval on that and this is something that's pretty unique to see in the supplement industry."

Ritual launched the multivitamin for women ages 18+ in 2016, and for the first six years, the product was only available direct-to-consumer as a subscription service at $30 a month. "I wanted to make it easy because I felt like the industry was just so overwhelming in the amount of choice," she says.

Transparency and that DTC model helped Schneider gain the trust of consumers.

"For two years, we only had a multivitamin for women 18-plus," she says. "And what's amazing is that during that time, we were doing something so different in the industry that people started saying, 'Hey, when are you coming out with a prenatal vitamin?'"

In 2018, Ritual launched the prenatal vitamin that started it all for Schneider. And soon, the brand added postnatal and postpartum supplements.

'She's still at the center of her brand'

Since Ritual's launch, the company has expanded beyond its original target demographic.

Ritual now sells multivitamins for women over the age of 50, teen girls, teen boys and men. They also sell supplements for sleep, stress and gut health.

"We added other products, but she's still at the center of her brand," Schneider says. She often refers to her primary customer base using "she" and "her" pronouns.

"Internally we call her the chief health officer because she's making all of the health decisions for her household, not just for her."

In 2022, Ritual launched their product in Whole Foods stores, and two years later, expanded to Amazon, Wegmans, and Target. In stores, the vitamins typically retail for $37 to $43.

To encourage other brands in the industry to embrace the same transparency they've built their own brand on, in 2023, Ritual wrote a letter to Congress asking for better regulation of heavy metals in supplements, and to require vitamin and supplement companies to conduct and share clinical trials that support their claims about the products they offer.

"I have three little girls that are growing up in the world where women's health is underfunded, understudied and just has a really deep lack of investment and care," Schneider says.

"It feels really exciting to be building a brand that is on the forefront of that."

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