How fresh customer discovery helped this healthcare scale-up to major wins
TL;DR
In early 2025, we worked with a fresh, sustainable healthcare brand who had a problem: they’d built a very loyal customer base but needed to better understand how customers perceived the brand and what opportunities there were in the wider, mainstream market for growth.
Six months after our research highlighted six critical growth opportunities, they achieved some amazing results:
- Won major retail listings with high street retailer
- Successfully secured £1m in funding
- Won a £50,000 TV advertising campaign
- Reached an annualised revenue run rate of £4.5 million – a huge 15x increase since launch
About the client
The client is a UK-based personal healthcare innovator operating in a fresh new category.
The challenge we accepted
By early 2025, the client had built strong loyalty from an avid group of early adopters. They’d found product market fit but needed to bring the brand onto its next phase of growth, specifically:
- Grow brand awareness and consideration
- Increase market share and penetration
- Identify opportunities for continued growth eg. distribution channels, NPD
The client needed comprehensive customer understanding and fresh insight to guide their next phase of growth. The research needed to answer fundamental questions about where new growth might come from as well as maintaining the authentic voice that had won over their early adopters.
With a founding team and newly appointed Head of Brand eager for fresh insight on customers and potential customers, Customer IQ set to work. Time was an important factor here – competitor activity was increasing. The client needed actionable insights fast.
The client needed comprehensive customer understanding and fresh insight to guide their next phase of growth … time was an important factor here – competitor activity was increasing. The client needed actionable insights fast
How Customer iQ partnered with the client
Clearly, this wasn’t going to be a typical market research project. The client team didn’t want numbers in a PowerPoint, they needed insights that would fundamentally reshape their business strategy.
The research design reflected this partnership mindset. We structured three complementary studies to build a complete picture: i) a comprehensive customer survey, ii) a robust market / competitor survey and iii) a category boost survey.
The client also had other sources of customer data that we analysed to help a) better understand what they already knew and b) triangulate findings with fresh data collection. We involved key stakeholders in questionnaire development, ensuring we captured attitudinal and behavioural insights that could drive real action.
What made this engagement different was the speed and depth of collaboration. Rather than disappearing for weeks and returning with a dense report, we maintained regular communication, sharing preliminary insights and testing hypotheses together as data came in. This iterative approach meant the final deliverable wasn’t a surprise – it was a roadmap we’d built together.
The client team didn’t want numbers in a PowerPoint, they needed insights that would fundamentally reshape their business strategy … this iterative approach meant the final deliverable wasn’t a surprise – it was a roadmap we’d built together
What we discovered
The research revealed a number of game-changing insights that challenged the client’s assumptions and helped redefine their growth strategy. Whilst we can’t share these here (for obvious reasons) we can say that the findings were surprising and provided the client team with some really counter-intuitive points of view that led to exciting conversations about the potential for the business and brand.
What happened next?
Research findings like these couldn’t just sit on a shelf. Instead they helped inform the roadmap for the next phase of growth, with measurable results that exceeded even optimistic projections. The six months following the research saw some extraordinary outcomes:
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15x revenue growth since launch, reaching £4.5 million annualized revenue run rate (August 2025)
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c.300 high street retailer stores secured for physical retail presence, their first major bricks-and-mortar listing (September 2025)
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£1 million funding round secured (August 2025)
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£50,000 TV advertising campaign won (aired September 2025)
Why this partnership worked
Three core principles made this engagement successful and turned insights into impact:
1] Speed matched to business urgency
We structured the research to deliver actionable insights within the tight timeline the client’s retail conversations demanded, proving that rigour and speed aren’t mutually exclusive when needs require them both
2] Audience depth over surface breadth
Rather than surveying broadly and shallowly, we invested in substantial sample sizes across strategic segments – customers, market, and category-specific boosts – ensuring statistical confidence for the bold recommendations the business needed
3] Insight creation, not just data delivery
Every finding was explicitly connected to a business decision or action the client could take, transforming research from an interesting academic exercise into a practical playbook for growth
Ready to unlock YOUR potential?
Are you facing a similar challenge with understanding your market opportunity or customer potential?
Whether you’re preparing for expansion, seeking funding, or planning your next growth phase, customer intelligence can transform uncertainty into confident action.
Let’s talk about what’s possible for your brand.
