• by Les Luchter , July 14, 2025

If you ever chewed up Fred, Wilma, Barney or Dino, you know the appeal of character-based kids’ vitamins.

Bayer’s Flintstones Vitamins, launched in 1968, marked only the beginning of what has become an established fact of the children’s vitamin market: such products sell, from L’il Critters Paw Patrol to CVS Kids’ Peppa Pig to Nature’s Bounty’s The Incredibles -- the latter via a partnership with Disney and Pixar.

Today, D2C kids’ vitamin brand Hiya launches a Disney Princess multivitamin bottle, coming just a couple of months after debuting another Disney-themed product with The Lion King supplements.  The company entered the field of what CMO Corinne Crockett prefers to call brand partnerships rather than character partnerships a year ago with Mattel, first via Barbie and then Hot Wheels.

Five-year-old Hiya differs from other kids’ vitamins companies by being a subscription-only service focused on clean nutrition (no sugar added) and sustainability, which every month delivers a supply of vitamins to pour into a refillable bottle. The brand partnerships have become a large part of the latter, as initial bottles with labels for The Lion King, Barbie, Hot Wheels and now Disney Princess have been offered to new subscribers, along with a free sticker pack allowing kids to attach additional art to create a personalized bottle, Crockett tells Marketing Daily.

The shape of the daily multivitamins themselves remain unchanged from brand partnership to brand partnership -- only the images change.

“Keeping and decorating your bottle, and having refills, is really important in establishing daily health practices for kids,” Crockett says. “It helps establish a direct bond for kids between the vitamin they’re taking and the happiness and enjoyment they have from getting the bottle and the stickers.”

Other brands, she relates, “have gotten kids to take their vitamins by throwing sugar at the problem, and making them bright and visually appealing by putting all these weird red, blue and yellow dyes on the vitamins. What kid is going to say no to a sugary gummy?”

Hiya’s new product includes Disney princesses from every era: Moana, Jasmine, Tiana, Rapunzel, Ariel, Belle and Cinderella, with the latter characters also serving as a nudge to nostalgic moms, since “they’re the ones making all the purchasing decisions,” Crockett says. “We tap into nostalgic brands that are really exciting and relevant for kids today, but also invoke that same excitement and some nostalgia in moms.”

Hence also the appeal of The Lion King’s Simba -- along with Barbie, which Crockett says has been the best-selling branded partnership so far.

While ostensibly limited-edition products, all the previous partnership products are still available to new subscribers “because the demand is so high,” Crockett says. However, over time, you will see these phased out as new partnerships come to fruition.

Hiya will promote the new Disney Princess product through influencer marketing, impact affiliate partnerships, organic and paid social campaigns, email marketing and PR outreach.  The target audience is mostly millennial women, with some Gen X and Gen Z, Crockett says -- “any mom of a kid aged two to 12.”

Crockett attributes Hiya’s rapid growth to a growing demand for “better-for-you” products across categories, where shoppers “aren’t interested anymore in a traditional offering. They’re looking for something that is better for the consumer, in this case for kids. Also, she says, Hiya’s “brand experience is designed in a much more elegant way that is kind of made for this online generation.”