This article was originally shared in Natural Products Insider’s June 2021 Digital Magazine. Download the complete magazine here.
The pre-workout supplement category on Amazon experienced 36% year-over-year (YoY) growth in revenue.
Growth was largely attributed to the enormous quarter-over-quarter growth of approximately 45% from Q2 to Q3 2020. The category’s revenue growth immediately slowed down in Q4 to 8%, which was still quite significant compared with the average fluctuations of 1-2% in previous quarters over the past two years. Overall, the pre-workout category on Amazon is a rather stable market with the potential to grow suddenly and rapidly if stimulated by external and unforeseen factors. Yet the question remains: how to create some real business momentum and sustain such growth in this category?
While pre-workout supplements on Amazon come in 10 different delivery methods, only two are worth analyzing:
In the past year, powder and capsules together made up more than 98% of the category’s total revenue, with powder representing almost 92%. This distribution among delivery methods has stayed essentially the same over the two past years.
In the last 12 months, 191 brands had sales in the pre-workout category, as opposed to 200 brands in the 12 months prior. Among the top 10 brands from the last 12 months, Redcon1 was the only new entrant, climbing from 14th to 8th with 109% YOY growth in revenue. The top 10 brands all saw revenue growth and altogether slightly outperformed the category by 4% YOY. However, considering the top 10 brands individually, the first six brands all outperformed but three of the last four underperformed, with YOY growth as low as 2% (for GAT Sport brand). Each of the top 10 brands either found 100% or close to 100% of their pre-workout revenue from powder products.
The top 20 bestselling pre-workout supplements during the last 12 months collectively achieved 70% YOY growth. The nine new entrants all saw skyrocketing YOY growth—from 120% to 2,196%—while the other 11 products in the top 20 list had varying YOY performance: five of them outperformed with YOY rates up to 128%. Four of them underperformed but still had positive YOY rates, and two of them saw YOY declines of up to 18%. Among the top 20 products, seven came from five brands that did not make the list of top 10 brands. The majority of the top 20 bestselling products had powder as their delivery method.
Based on the titles of pre-workout supplements, 32% of the total revenue came from products with both “men” and “women” mentioned as the target consumers. One-third (33%) of the revenue came from those with men as the only target consumer group, and the rest (35%) came from those with no specific gender claimed in their titles.
Products with both “men” and “women” mentioned were almost on par with the category’s YOY growth, while products with only “men” mentioned underperformed with 28% YOY growth. Products that did not specify gender in their titles outperformed with 45% YOY growth. It is noteworthy that no products in this category only mentioned “women” in their titles.
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Read Sinan’s previous piece in the Natural Products Insider’s April 2021 edition here.