Bret Kovacs commutes several hours a day into New York. Most mornings he stands on the same train platform looking at the same set of ads. Hims, Ro and the rotating cast of consumer health brands competing for the same eye-line. The visual grammar is consistent: vials, syringes and pills. Sometimes a model. Sometimes a clinical-looking line drawing. The product, photographed.
“That’s not what people care about,” Kovacs says.
He joined Enhanced as marketing lead two months ago, after spells at Quirky, BuzzFeed and Barstool Sports. The company launched its direct-to-consumer arm a few weeks ago, which makes him the person responsible for translating the Enhanced Games, the still-controversial competition that lets athletes use performance-enhancing drugs under medical supervision, into a peptide and supplement business that ordinary consumers will buy from.
What Kovacs wants to put on his train platform is different.
“I want a billboard that says throw your kid higher than all the other dads in the pool,” he says. “When I’m at the train station, which I’m always running for, I want a billboard that says never miss the train again. Increased VO2 max.”
It is, on one level, a marketing-school argument: sell the destination, not the journey. The category has heard it before. What’s striking is how few of the brands Kovacs commutes past every morning are doing it.
What the wellness category sells, and what Enhanced sells instead
Kovacs’s diagnosis of the wellness market is structural rather than aesthetic. The visuals are downstream of a deeper positioning problem.
“The wellness industry is built on averages,” he says. “The AG1s of the world, their goal is to get you to your baseline. You go in to see the doctor and get a clean bill of health. So much of wellness as an industry is built to get you to the baseline. Enhanced’s goal is to get you to your ceiling.”
The framing is the company’s but Kovacs is using it to make a point about marketing rather than about science: if your product is calibrated to the average customer’s average deficiency, your advertising will speak in averages too. Pictures of vials. Promises of being a better version of yourself. Nothing emotional enough to make anyone stop scrolling.
Enhanced, in Kovacs’s telling, gets to be specific because its customers are. Each one talks to a telehealth specialist before getting a protocol. Each one comes back when their goals or their biology shift.
“Everybody who comes to us has different goals, different biology,” he says. “They can’t take the supplement that’s for everyone. They want something that’s personalised to them so they can break through their biology to their ceiling.”
That makes the marketing job easier, in theory. A specific customer with a specific goal can be addressed in specific language. The dad in the suburbs running for his train. The menopausal mother training for a first marathon. The 49-year-old who, like Kovacs himself, has started watching his biomarkers and decided eight hours of sleep is non-negotiable.
The peptide market’s marketing problem
The peptide category is also, by Kovacs’s reading, in a particular kind of mess. Confusion is rising faster than category education. New compounds are being added to the consumer market faster than any one brand can credibly explain them.
“Even in the world of peptides, it’s such a great market, but there’s so much confusion,” he says. “Our goal is to be the North Star. Whether people buy products from us or don’t, they come to us because they know we’re the source of truth.”
Enhanced’s stated discipline on this is that it will only sell category-one regulated peptides, and that its medical advisors, Kovacs cites the head of genetics at Harvard and a member of FIFA’s cardiology team, are the ones doing the public-facing explanation of what each compound does and why someone should take it.
Whether that holds as the assortment scales is the open question. The rest of the market is not being patient. The combination of GLP-1 demand spillover, FDA enforcement gaps and aggressive D2C compounding has produced a category where the most-trafficked product pages do not necessarily belong to the most rigorous operators. Enhanced is launching into that landscape with a six-week-old store, a small team and the asset Kovacs cares most about: a brand people are willing to wear.
“I’m not walking down the street wearing a Hims shirt,” he says. “But I will wear an Enhanced t-shirt.”
Why personalisation breaks the all-in-one playbook
Kovacs spent his BuzzFeed years inside a particular kind of consumer-product machine. The team would read the data, find the content that performed, and reverse-engineer products from it. Tasty content about cheese went viral, so they built the Pondoodler, a hot glue gun for cheese. Posts containing swearwords outperformed everything else, so they registered thefuckshitshop.com and sold merchandise stamped with the phrase.
The thing he’s selling at Enhanced cannot be built that way.
“Where we play in the world of optimisation, we also play around personalisation,” Kovacs says. “It’s the all-in-one versus the specific-to-one.”
That distinction has marketing consequences the category has not fully absorbed. An all-in-one product can be sold with one creative campaign, one set of claims, one billboard. A specific-to-one protocol — even if the SKU range is small — has to be sold with marketing that reaches different people on different terms. The dad. The menopausal mother. The marathon runner. The commuter. None of them is the average customer, because the average customer is, by definition, not the person Enhanced is built to reach.
This is the part of the playbook Kovacs thinks the category has skipped. Personalisation has been treated as an operational problem (telehealth, intake forms, dosing) rather than a marketing problem (what do you put on the billboard when no two customers want the same outcome). His answer is that you stop trying to write one billboard and start writing the dad’s billboard, the mother’s billboard, the runner’s billboard, the commuter’s billboard. The cost is creative complexity. The reward, if it works, is the thing the category has been failing to manufacture: emotional attachment to a peptide product.
Where the brand goes next
Kovacs is six weeks in. The most concrete thing he has built so far is the store itself, getting the initial assortment live and ready for the May launch of the games to drive traffic. The harder work, the storytelling, the case studies, the customer-facing narrative that makes Enhanced something other than a more credible Hims, is ahead of him.
When asked what he wants to build, he reaches further than the supplement business.
“I want to build the resource for anyone who is thinking about living longer and living stronger,” he says. “Eventually, why can’t we have Enhanced retreats? Or Enhanced travel? People will know Enhanced because it is a different company’s point of view, that we are your complete one-stop shop for living better.”
It is a brand-extension ambition the category has not earned the right to think about yet. Most peptide D2Cs are still trying to convince regulators and customers that they are something other than a workaround for a prescription system. Enhanced is starting from a different position; the Games, with their genuine athletic stakes and their ex-Olympians chasing world records and million-dollar prizes, give the brand a story the supplement business does not have to manufacture.
What Kovacs has not yet shown is whether the marketing thesis travels beyond the train-platform pitch. The dad-throwing-his-kid-higher line is good copy. The question is whether it survives contact with media buyers, performance marketing, and the regulatory lawyers who will read every claim Enhanced makes about what its peptides do.
In the meantime, a swimmer Kovacs mentions, the one who has to win thirteen world championships to match the prize money for a single Enhanced Games race on May 24th, is in the UAE finishing his protocol. The marketing campaign that turns him into a story the suburban dad on the train can connect to is ready for the next chapter.
