"We're Doing This for a Reason"

Kate Hudson has launched three businesses in very crowded industries but knows what separates her from the competition: It's not just the Products.It's the mission

- ALYSSA GIACOBBE

ENTREPRENEURS LOVE taking “no” as a challenge as if the right combination of savvy and stubbornness can overcome any obstacle. It’s why, against the odds, Kate Hudson went after an elusive herb called amla.

This happened early into Hudson’s latest business, InBloom, a line of plant-based powdered supplements she launched in August 2020. The amla plant is native to India and believed in Ayurvedic medicine to promote overall wellness and longevity, and Hudson’s team had spent months working on the formula for an amla-packed, immunity-boosting blend they hoped to introduce later this year. It had to fit all her criteria—safe, sustainably farmed, good tasting, easily dissolved in liquids, and “bioavailable,” the wellness industry buzzword for “It’ll work.” But try as they might, they couldn’t overcome a fact of nature: Amla is a seasonal crop, and even in the best of times, there is only so much of it to go around. No supplier could help them. That meant no amla, which meant her team had to reformulate everything, which meant a months-long product delay, which meant Hudson had to accept a less glamorous but equally true entrepreneurial ethos: Sometimes you just need to move on…for now, anyway.

“It’s not over,” she says. “In the back of our minds, we’re like, We’re gonna get that plant one day. We’re gonna get it.”