Building a category is harder when the portfolio itself is part of the constraint.
I was working on a new multivitamin brand in Vietnam with just two SKUs. The ambition was significant: 200% growth and moving from 30% to 70% share. But from the beginning, it was clear that two SKUs would not be enough to build both a new brand and a new category.
The two products were differentiated mainly by age group. That left very little room to address different consumer needs or usage occasions. And the challenge went beyond assortment.
Multivitamins are designed for long-term consumption. A 30-count pack can work as a trial, but consumers also need larger pack sizes when they decide to continue using the product.
At the same time, Vietnamese consumers were more familiar with specific supplements such as Vitamin C or Vitamin D than with multivitamins as a category. The business therefore had to do more than sell products. It had to help consumers understand the category.
The market created another constraint: parallel-import products were predominantly available in larger pack sizes, while the official portfolio had only the two smaller, age-based SKUs.
Even the commerce architecture had limitations. With only two SKUs, there was not enough portfolio depth to meaningfully separate the brand across TikTok Shop stores.
The issue was becoming clear: The ambition was bigger than the portfolio.
When the Portfolio Becomes the Constraint
The natural response to a growth ambition is often to ask how to sell more of the products already available. But in this case, that was not the question I thought we should be solving.
If the portfolio could not cover enough consumer needs, support different consumption patterns or give the category enough room to grow, simply driving more traffic to the same two products would not solve the underlying constraint.
The question therefore shifted from:
How do we sell more of these two SKUs?
to:
How do we make the category itself more relevant to consumers?
That changed the role of the portfolio. It was no longer simply an assortment decision. It became part of the growth strategy.
Building a Category Through Portfolio Strategy
Building a category required more than expanding the assortment.
I was the one who raised this question early and started building the case for a broader portfolio, with support from my manager. The portfolio needed to evolve with the ambition.
Additional SKUs could create more room to address consumer needs, provide more appropriate options for continued consumption and give the business greater headroom to build the category. So the decision to introduce new SKUs was not simply about adding products. It was about changing the conditions under which the brand could grow.
That meant connecting several questions that could easily have been treated separately:
What do consumers need?
What does the portfolio need to offer?
What opportunity can the category realistically support?
What does ecommerce need in order to scale that opportunity?
The answer was not to optimise one part harder. It was to change the portfolio so the business had more room to work with.
Making Ecommerce Work Harder Than Conversion
Once the problem was framed this way, ecommerce also had to play a broader role.
In a category where consumers were not necessarily arriving with a strong existing ask for multivitamins, ecommerce could not be treated simply as a place to convert existing demand. It also had to help create understanding.
Product detail pages had to do more than list product benefits. They needed to help consumers understand what the product was for and how it fitted into their needs. Livestreams could help explain the category and answer consumer questions. Other ecommerce touchpoints could support discovery and navigation across the portfolio.
Media could also have different jobs across education, consideration, conversion and portfolio discovery rather than simply putting more spend behind the same products.
The goal was therefore not only:
How do we convert more traffic?
It was also:
How do we make the category easier to understand, easier to explore and easier to buy?
That distinction mattered because the ecommerce problem was connected to the category problem.
The Business Problem Behind the Channel Problem
Looking at the situation as an ecommerce problem alone would have missed the bigger constraint. The portfolio shaped what consumers could choose.
Consumer understanding shaped the demand opportunity. And both influenced what ecommerce could realistically scale. Ecommerce execution then determined how effectively the opportunity could be captured. The pieces were connected.
That meant solving the problem required looking beyond a single functionor channel. The work became a combination of category building, portfolio strategy, consumer education and digital commerce execution. And that was the more useful way to think about the original growth ambition.
Not:
How do we push two products harder?
But:
What needs to change for this business to have the conditions to scale?
What Happened Next
The additional SKUs have now launched. The first signal is encouraging: sales doubled month over month in the second month after launch.
But the launch is still very recent, so I would treat this as an early signal rather than a proven long-term outcome.
The more important decision happened before that number appeared. The business had to recognise that the portfolio itself was part of the growth constraint — and change it accordingly.
The Takeaway
Building a category is not always about selling more of what already exists.
Sometimes, the first growth decision is to change what the business is capable of offering — and give consumers more reasons to enter, understand and stay in the category.
When the ambition is to build a category, the portfolio is not just what you sell. It can be part of what makes growth possible.
