Kristin Myers: Good afternoon from the floor of the NYSE. This is Startup to Stock Exchange. I’m Kristin Myers. Now, most of the companies that we put in the chair sell software that you can’t see. But today we have a piece of plastic and adhesive that goes on your nose. Now, nasal strips have existed for 30 years, and they live in the cold and flu aisle. But my guest thinks they belong somewhere else entirely, in the same routine as your sleep tracker and your supplements. And to get here, he sold his truck and packed orders himself. But first, let’s take a look at the company. The road from an idea to the opening bell starts right now.
We do it more than 20,000 times a day: breathe. But what if something that basic could also become a big consumer business? Well, for years, nasal strips have mostly lived in one place, the drugstore aisle. Alex Hauck thinks they belong somewhere much bigger: in your daily wellness routine. Hauck is the CEO of Intake Breathing, a company that built a different kind of nasal breathing system. Instead of a traditional strip across the bridge of your nose, Intake uses adhesive tabs, magnets, and a reusable band designed to open the nasal passages and improve airflow. And consumers are paying attention. Intake says more than 1 million customers have used its products, with professional athletes helping put the brand on the map.
But getting here wasn’t easy. The company struggled to manufacture the product at scale. Hauck sold his truck, put his own money on the line, and at one point was packing orders himself. And now Intake is trying to make an even bigger leap. Most of its business has been built direct-to-consumer, but the next opportunity is taking Intake off the internet and onto more physical shelves, while expanding beyond athletes and sleep into the broader wellness market. And there’s a business model behind it: sell the starter kit once, then keep customers coming back for replacement tabs.
But here’s the challenge: can Intake convince millions of people that better breathing isn’t just something to think about when they’re congested, but something worth paying for every single day? And can a product that started online become the brand that defines an entire wellness category? From Startup to Stock Exchange, Intake Breathing CEO Alex Hauck is next.
And joining us now, here at the desk, is Alex Hauck, CEO of Intake Breathing. Alex, thank you so much for joining us today. And you’re wearing the product, so everyone can see exactly what it looks like. So I want you to tell us a little bit about it, because nasal strips are not new. So talk to us a little bit about your specific product, how it works, and how it’s different from some of the other nasal strips that folks are familiar with.
Alex Hauck: Sure. So, kind of stepping back, nasal breathing is a far more efficient form of breathing than mouth breathing, or just poor breathing in general. But most people, whether they realize it or not, are struggling to breathe through their nose. And so Intake basically just opens your nose so you can breathe through it clearly. Intake is a patented two-part magnetic breathing system. We use adhesive tabs. Those go on the outside of your nose, and they have a little steel disc in them. And then we use a reusable magnetic band that attaches to the tabs, which opens your nose to the size of the band. And we have different-size bands, so you can find your perfect fit.
Kristin Myers: So just so I know, this part, the plastic bit, is reusable, but are the tabs disposable, every single day or every time you use them?
Alex Hauck: Those are disposable. You have to change them out, not only for hygiene, but also because you need them to really be sticky in order to stay on all night, like we promise.
Kristin Myers: Right. Okay. So why magnets? You know, what is wrong with the nasal strips that are in the aisle? I’ve seen some with almost, like, flexible rods inside of them. I’ve seen all sorts of types.
Alex Hauck: Yeah. So the traditional nasal strip is basically just a thin piece of, like, polyethylene plastic, and it’s kind of a one-size-fits-all approach. And the problem is that when it attaches to your nose, it’s using your nose to open up your nose. And what’s nice about the system being broken out... And the magnets are really more of just a means, a mechanism, right? There’s nothing going in your nose. It’s not like an energy source or anything like that. It’s really just the mechanism we felt was strongest to have the right attachment to your nose.
And so you’re able to place the tabs independently and use the different-size bands, and because they’re rigid, they’re not going to collapse upon inhale. And so they hold your nose open to a fixed width, whereas with the others, it’s basically whatever strength the bridge of your nose can provide you. That’s what you’re going to be getting out of the traditional strips. They also fall off very fast.
Kristin Myers: So talk to me quite specifically about what it’s doing, because this seems so simple, right? It’s opening up your nasal passageways. But when it comes to breathing, there are a lot of reasons that folks might struggle to breathe in through their nose as adequately as possible. So it’s just opening up your nasal passages, right? But this isn’t necessarily a cure or a fix for someone who has, like, maybe a deviated septum. Or would this work if I have a cold, right, and the inside of my nose is swollen? Talk to me, you know, very specifically about what it’s doing and what it’s not doing.
Alex Hauck: Absolutely. I think it is that simple. It really just takes that part of your nose that we struggle to breathe through most, whether it’s from congestion, snoring, or, I mean, enlarged turbinates. There are all kinds of different reasons why you might struggle to breathe through your nose, a deviated septum being one of them. And no, it’s not going to solve your deviated septum. But what it will do is allow you to breathe beyond that. Because it allows you to open your nose to the degree that your nose would basically close, you can now breathe past most of those things. And also, sometimes just getting a little bit more air in through your sinus cavity can be enough to cool your sinuses a little bit and also reduce inflammation in certain ways. But yeah, congestion, allergies, you know, deviated septum, a ton of different reasons why you might need to be able to breathe better through your nose.
Kristin Myers: I can genuinely name right now at least five people that I’m thinking I should give this to in their stockings at Christmas, because I can’t tell you how many friends I have that have had major surgeries to essentially try to help them breathe better, and it actually didn’t really work too well. They’re not breathing that much better at all. Okay. So let’s go back a little bit in your history. I mentioned in the introduction that you sold your truck in order to really get this off the ground. Talk to me about that part of starting this company, because I think that we look at the success, and we don’t look at the struggles, or everything that it takes to get somewhere.
Alex Hauck: Yeah, it was a lot more than just selling my truck.
Kristin Myers: Tell us all about that, too.
Alex Hauck: So when we first started, we actually had a nice little kickstart from friends and family. They helped us kind of get everything together. And then we did a Kickstarter campaign that was wildly successful, right? And as we got going, we realized we couldn’t scale our supply chain. And as we just kept going through time without being able to scale supply, I couldn’t market the product. And so cash was just dwindling, and we basically got all the way down to the point where I had nothing left. And I went back out to any of the friends and family that would go in, and they all kind of put their hands up, like, hey, man, good luck.
Kristin Myers: Yeah.
Alex Hauck: And so, yeah, I was faced with the decision: what are we going to do here? My wife and I were actually working together. We discussed who was going to stay on and who wasn’t, and we ended up deciding to let her go. So she had to go get another job. We had just gotten married, and then we had a lot of stress. And then we brought in a roommate. At the same time, I actually started gardening for the apartment in order to offset the rent a little bit. And so we did everything to basically pull back all expenses. We say we went full Spartan, and we held nothing back.
And then, because it was during COVID times, we had access to an EIDL loan, which was our last lifeline, but I had to personally guarantee it. And I still hadn’t seen a finished good from our new supplier. That happened to come through. But in 2023, we fixed the supply chain problem, and we’ve been growing like a weed ever since. It’s been incredible to watch the growth since then.
Kristin Myers: That’s absolutely incredible. And to do all that at the start of a marriage is already difficult enough.
Alex Hauck: And then to throw in a roommate and everything else, all while working with my father-in-law, who is my business partner for this whole thing, who wasn’t even my father-in-law at the time. He was still my girlfriend’s dad. So yeah, we threw it all at it.
Kristin Myers: So talk to me a little bit about the supply chain issues, the manufacturing problem. I think this is something that a lot of investors and viewers don’t necessarily think about all the time when manufacturing an actual good. So say a little bit more about that. You said manufacturing at scale was the problem. Could you give us a little bit more detail on that?
Alex Hauck: Well, I think, I mean, I’m guilty of this myself. When you look at the product, it seems very simple, and some of the best products are, right? The problem was that we all looked at the tabs and thought, oh, these should be super easy to make. And it turned out they were very, very difficult to make at scale. And so my father-in-law, the inventor that he was, had created this kind of janky machine that looked like a monkey was trying to keep it all together. And we were spitting out enough tabs to basically keep a very small cohort of people happy.
Kristin Myers: So you started manufacturing at home at first?
Alex Hauck: Yeah, no.
Kristin Myers: And then obviously had to move on to having it done at some sort of factory?
Alex Hauck: Yes. And for most of the people that we went to, the machines that were needed in order to run the product were super expensive, and we didn’t have the funds. I mean, they wanted a million dollars upfront. We didn’t have that kind of funding, so we couldn’t work with anybody here in the US, even at the beginning. We’ve brought it back to the US since scaling. But at the time, we had to take a chance and go to China with this. They were the only ones that were willing to take on a small, up-and-coming startup for this. And it took a year and a half of R&D working with them to get to the point where we had a solid finished good and a scalable supply chain.
Kristin Myers: So just so I’m super clear on this: Was there already a machine that was readily available and able to make this product, or was there a machine that actually had to be built to create this product? At least, I’m assuming, for the magnets inside of the adhesives.
Alex Hauck: So a bit of both. There are established machines, tape-combining machines, that are these huge, awesome machines, but they work to do a bunch of different functions, right? And so they had to make a bunch of adaptations in order to be able to make the product. And those adaptations took time on the machine, which is very valuable to manufacturers. That was what took so long to figure out.
Kristin Myers: Now, why should anybody pay attention to how they breathe? Well, let’s start with this number. A healthy adult breathes roughly 20,000 times a day. It is the most repeated physical activity in a human life, and a lot of people don’t do it well through their nose. They have a deviated septum, chronic congestion, allergies. The estimates vary, but nasal obstruction is common enough that surgeons perform hundreds of thousands of procedures for it every year, just in this country alone. And most people don’t even get the surgery. They just breathe through their mouth and don’t even think about it. And the wellness industry has noticed: sleep trackers, mouth tape, breathing apps. A category that used to be about being sick is becoming a category about being optimized.
We’re back now with Alex Hauck, CEO of Intake Breathing. So Alex, speaking about being optimized, I think about one category of people that always wants to be optimized, other than founders and investors, of course, and that’s going to be athletes, right? They seem to be, if I’m not mistaken, one of the first categories of people that really gravitated toward your product. Was that a strategy? Did you purposely target athletes, or did they just sort of come on their own?
Alex Hauck: You know, really, we were built out of sport. So the founder, my father-in-law, had invented this basically to solve the acute problem that he couldn’t breathe through his nose while wearing goggles for motocross. And so the band was really an evolution from the goggle system, to be able to be used across any use case. And so that is actually where we came from. We came out of sports, and that’s how most people in the early days found us.
Kristin Myers: So talk to me about the competition. As I mentioned, and as we’ve said, nasal strips are nothing new. Breathe Right has been in that aisle since the ’90s. I’ve seen it since I was a little girl, and it only costs a few dollars. Well, one, tell us the price of your product, and why someone should pay more for yours instead of those products that you see in the aisle.
Alex Hauck: I think you’re paying for control. So, unlike the one-size-fits-all solution, which, don’t get me wrong, they are the pioneers of the category, and the thought and the idea was there. But I think they just fell short of really solving the need. And I think our customers look at the product way differently than just being something that you’d maybe buy if you’re having a cold, and you use it until you’re done with the cold, and then you kind of throw away the box. Our users are using this very regularly. This is a part of their routine. This is part of a better life, well lived, by being able to breathe better through your nose. And so what I’d say is... Well, I’ll finish there.
Kristin Myers: No, no, no. So actually, I want you to say a little bit more about that. How are your customers using this product differently than perhaps other folks are using it? As I mentioned, I think a lot of people think about breathing when there’s someone snoring next to them who just won’t shut up, and they’re, you know, droning on next to you. That’s when you notice there’s a problem. Or you’re sick, you’re congested, and you’re wishing you could breathe better. How are your customers thinking about breathing? You just said that they’re using it all the time, so this doesn’t sound like it’s just for sleep, then. So how are they really thinking about breathing, and how are they using the product in their daily lives?
Alex Hauck: So sleep is far and away our bread and butter. That is the intro to the product, to the technology. And I think that’s, you know, falling out of basically the category that’s already been there, right? But more and more, we are seeing that people are just adopting it into their everyday lives. They’re finding they wake up with better focus. They’re finding that by using it throughout the day, they have better focus. Or, you know, specifically, going back to the DNA of the company, sports as a use case. I just can’t see how this wouldn’t be used all the time for that.
I mean, personally, that was how I became an avid believer. I couldn’t let it go after I had used it for a workout, and then I didn’t have it the next day, and I realized, whoa, the difference that it had made the day prior. That was when it really clicked for me that this could be adopted way more universally than just for snoring or sleep, right? But I mean, hey, if it’s used for snoring, and that’s what’s bringing people back to bed together, I mean, that alone is an awesome use case, right?
Kristin Myers: I wish I had this when I was hiking Machu Picchu. I really struggled with breathing there. Okay, talk to me a little bit about your model. So you have a starter kit, and then you have the replacement tabs. How often is a customer coming back?
Alex Hauck: Well, we do monthly subscriptions, which is probably the most frequent way that people are purchasing through us. But we also offer, you know, 30, 60, and 90 packs. We really didn’t want to lock anybody into one set way of purchasing the product, right? But yeah, we have a starter kit, which comes with four different sizes so you can find your right fit, and then, yes, you come back for the disposable tabs, right, just over and over again.
Kristin Myers: Right. Now, you started this out as a direct-to-consumer business, but now you want to actually take shelf space, right? That’s a different model than what you currently have. Why do you want to go that route in your expansion plans?
Alex Hauck: I mean, fundamentally, we feel everyone should be able to experience breathing through their nose this way, right? And in order to accomplish that, we have to make the leap from DTC into retail, because we basically need to meet customers where they’re at. By being found online only, we were limiting our reach and our ability to find new customers, and to expand this with the vision that we have for this category, and really create it.
Kristin Myers: I want to ask about what aisle, because it sounds like, again, as you were mentioning a moment ago, your customers are using this not just for sleeping. So what aisle would that go in? Is this something that should be in the pharmacy, or is this something that goes in, you know, a GNC or an REI? Where do you see this product fitting into the spaces that currently exist? Is this a wellness product? Is this a sleep aid? Do you know what I mean? Is this a medical device? How are you guys thinking about it?
Alex Hauck: I think the challenge is that it’s all of the above, right? And so, I mean, breathing is the foundation. It’s step one. And so everything is kind of downstream of breathing. So it’s, where do you want to take it? And so how we’re thinking about it, and this is a big part of why we brought Camino Partners in, is how do we speak to retailers, and how do we work with them in order to shape that new model of where this will go from there? Is it in a wellness aisle, versus just sinus and allergy? Is it in a sleep category? You know, is it in athletics? I mean, we really could expand into a lot of different areas, just depending on which retailer is going to work best for us and sees that strategic vision.
Kristin Myers: So, speaking more about the expansion plans, you just mentioned taking, essentially, outside money and working with someone outside of the family for the first time, because this was a family business. How does that change the dynamic for you guys, and how you think about things going forward in terms of expansion?
Alex Hauck: I mean, we’re really excited about this partnership, because for the longest time, we’ve been operating under certain constraints in the business, outside of maybe operating in the best interest of the long-term vision for the company. And by taking on the Camino partnership, we’ve been able to basically see a new vision moving forward, and we really have a team that understands the landscape we’re about to travel. Like, if you can have somebody out clearing mines in front of you, you should definitely take advantage of that.
And that’s what I’m so excited about, having, you know, their team in particular. They’re uniquely suited because of their experience with KIND bars. You know, Daniel and his team created the category of healthy snack bars. They looked at something that was historically sitting in the pharmacy aisle, with, like, PowerBars or some strange protein bar, and they saw a different vision of the future, and they were able to pull it into that. And so having them as firepower behind us, I think, is just such an awesome advantage going into the next stage of growth.
Kristin Myers: Five years from now, thinking about that next stage, what does success look like or feel like for you guys? Is it about the amount of revenue you’re getting, or is it about even perhaps changing a category that has been fairly static for decades now?
Alex Hauck: I think it’s really just about elevating this entire category through awareness. And to me, I’m so deep in it now. The revenue is great. The success is great, as it pairs to, you know, how we traditionally measure success. But to me, I believe the product deserves to win. Ultimately, it deserves to be the thing that drives the category forward, because it is so effective. And I think that, by expanding into omnichannel and building a big business, if five years from now Intake is the legacy brand that people think of when they think of breathing, that to me is what success looks like.
Kristin Myers: I have to ask, in the last ten seconds, since we’re on the floor of the stock exchange: do you ever think about going public?
Alex Hauck: I have not. I do not think that far ahead. I really just take it one step at a time. I have to stay focused. So I haven’t really thought about that or considered that yet. But it is pretty exciting to look around here and to see the reaction of people here, even on the floor, to me wearing the product.
Kristin Myers: All right. Thank you so much. Alex Hauck, CEO of Intake Breathing. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Alex Hauck: Thanks.
