yolodex
Case Study · DTC Supplements · Meta
Grüns scales persona-led creative briefs across six brands with one lean strategy team and Yolodex
How the gummy brand we all know and love built a data-backed briefing engine — and freed its creative strategists from the research and synthesis grind of creative briefing.
Yolodex has allowed our Creative Strategy team to continue operating at an agile pace, with hours saved on briefing.
About
The daily greens gummy
Grüns makes the daily greens gummy: 60+ ingredients, 30+ organic fruits and vegetables, 21 vitamins and minerals and 6g of prebiotic fibre, in a snack pack. Founded by Chad Janis in 2023 after one too many powders and pills, it went from zero to past $300M ARR and was acquired by Unilever in 2026.
Today Grüns sits alongside Grüns Kids, Nütrops, Immün, Jüced, and Müves under the Ü Snacks platform. One lean creative strategy team briefs all of them.
01 — Challenge
Persona-led creative testing bottlenecked on research and briefing
Grüns runs creative the way most brands say they want to and few actually do. Anthony Rodriguez, Director of Creative Strategy, leads a creative strategy team that ships hundreds of assets per week on the core brand alone, with a focus on personas, having anticipated the needs of Meta's new targeting algorithm, Andromeda.
Even though the team had automated a lot in-house, briefing still involved a lot of manual work. Each new brief meant analyzing Meta performance data; validating a persona with desk research; analyzing voice of customer data in Claude; asking Reddit what people were saying; then scrolling on TikTok and Instagram for inspiration, before painstakingly screenshotting and assembling all of the different pieces of research together into a brief. General-purpose AI could follow the steps. It couldn't make the judgment calls underneath them — which persona, which angle, which claim is worth testing.
Creative Strategists need time to actually be creative, not drown in research and analysis.
02 — Solution
One system from persona to brief, grounded in Grüns' own data
Grüns was one of Yolodex's early design partners. Early on in the partnership, Anthony ran a proof of concept — one creative strategist, one brand.
Within a week the team reported that Yolodex was saving huge amounts of time analyzing performance data, looking for inspo and building briefs from scratch. Within weeks, Yolodex was supporting creative briefing across the Ü Snacks portfolio.
Today, a creative strategist opens a chat, names a persona, an angle or a sprint number — or asks Yolodex to find the gap — and gets back a brief with the audience insight from social listening data and voice of customer data, the validated angle, competitor and organic inspiration, and format options, in the structure Grüns' designers already work from.
Grüns' outputs are fully customized to their needs, with Yolodex providing white-glove tailoring of the platform to their specific requirements, briefing templates and creative research needs.
03 — Results
Six brands, four creative strategists, one briefing system
Within weeks of the team's first brief, the whole creative strategy team was briefing multiple brands in Yolodex on a weekly basis.
- 6 brands briefed by a lean team of 4 creative strategists
- 90%+ of concepts design-ready
- 1 day saved in weekly concepting and researching per CS
The capacity has changed what the team is willing to try. Personas that got eight or ten ads and were written off are back on the table, because Yolodex enables systematically testing more value props, angles and formats within each persona.
Our lean team can handle multiple brands with less time spent briefing. I'm eager to see what else we can test.