Sharon Leite is a member of a very exclusive club — chief executive officers who left a company for one reason or another and returned for a second tour of duty.
The late Myron Ullman 3rd had two stints as CEO of JCPenney; Howard Schultz had two stints as CEO at Starbucks, and Bob Iger is currently CEO of Disney for his second time.
Leite was The Vitamin Shoppe’s CEO from 2018 to 2023, but left to become CEO of Ideal Image, a chain of med spas, and later CEO of Omni Retail Enterprises, the parent company of e-commerce brands bodybuilding.com, Pier 1 Imports and dressbarn.com.
So what brought her back to The Vitamin Shoppe?
“The simple answer is, I found an ownership group that understood what my aspirations were for this business, the very first time we chatted about it,” Leite told WWD.
In December 2024, she began doing due diligence work and helping to raise money for Performance Investment Partners and Kingswood Capital Management, the private equity firms that bought The Vitamin Shoppe from The Franchise Group in May 2025. That’s when Leite became The Vitamin Shoppe’s CEO again.
“Jeffrey Horowitz started this business in 1977 here in New York City, and now we have a tremendous opportunity at The Vitamin Shoppe to be the true market leader in health and wellness. We are the trusted source for the consumer in a very crowded market where, unfortunately, some misinformation on products and how they help consumers exists.”
Sharon Leite
During a preview of the new The Vitamin Shoppe at 157 East 86th Street in Manhattan — a day before Wednesday’s grand opening — Leite spelled out her vision for the business and what’s in the works.
While acknowledging The Vitamin Shoppe has been a sleepy, cookie-cutter operation, she said it’s a “new era” for the business. In the works, improved “storytelling” in stores and online so customers can readily learn what’s best for them from the store’s vast assortment of vitamins, supplements, sports nutrition, herbs, sleep products, functional foods and snacks, energy drinks, beauty and wellness essentials. It’s a matter of doing a better job spotlighting product introductions, exclusives and bestsellers and better delineating the categories for easier shopping.
The agenda also calls for testing stores of varying sizes, upgrading existing stores with physical improvements, leveraging technology and data for acquiring new customers, and learning more about existing customers and their preferences to personalize the messaging. Leite also spoke of developing marketing and special events to raise the brand profile, providing faster deliveries and establishing “consistency” between how stores and dot-com show up to consumers. She portrays a business with a lot of low-hanging fruit and potential green shoots.
From a merchandising perspective, The Vitamin Shoppe is complex. With about 700 brands, including seven private brands, and thousands of stock keeping units, it can seem overwhelming to the uninitiated. The 86th Street store, with 1,800 square feet of selling and 1,000 square foot for storage, carries roughly 5,000 skus, though that’s actually less than the average Vitamin Shoppe at 3,000 square feet and around 8,000 skus.
“If you think about a business that has all these products, how do you demystify it for the consumer? So one of the things we’re trying to do in this store format is tell better stories,” Leite said during a tour of the 86th Street store, the retailer’s sixth in Manhattan and 19th in the city.
The new store introduces the “Shoppe Advisor,” an AI-powered, interactive digital touchscreen for detailed product information and wellness content, including articles and videos searchable by health goals, trends and brands. Shoppers can quickly look up information, for example, on creatine, among the store’s hottest-selling items for muscle growth as a supplement for strength training recovery. The tool also enables real-time inventory checks in stores and on vitaminshoppe.com, and supports the store’s associates, known as “health enthusiasts,” who provide “personal testimony and have incredible expertise,” Leite said.
The AI-powered Shoppe Advisor at The Vitamin Shoppe.
“What you will see over the next nine months is this merging of our digital channel and our store channel to become seamless for the consumer. It’s not that way today, but that’s where we’re headed.” For example, if creatine gets positioned centrally on a fixture for maximum exposure, it should also be prominently presented online. “Creatine is hot, hot, hot.”
Regarding other bestsellers, Leite cited anything sports nutrition related, magnesium glycinate for improved sleeping, peptides for cell regeneration, collagen and “longevity” products intended to help you live longer.
Specifically, bestsellers include the AG1 Next Gen daily health drink combining a multivitamin, pre- and probiotics, superfoods and antioxidants, sold only at The Vitamin Shoppe, Costco and online, and two exclusive offerings: Momentous for sports nutrition and foundational wellness solids, and Transparent Brands supplements for clean, transparently labeled products for recovery after workouts.
“If you think about the Ultas and Sephoras of the world, a big part of what makes them win is their partnerships and the special launches they get. We have a very similar philosophy on the merchandising side, in terms of being first to market, finding great partners, finding those up-and-coming brands and learning on social what is trending. It’s a very similar playbook to what you see in beauty.”
A “refresh” of stores is occurring in Houston, the brand’s second biggest market with 16 units. It’s a test for what could happen across the country. “We have all generations of stores in the Houston market,” observed Leite. “We will take that market, elevate it, harmonize it, almost like reopening the market in Houston and then elevate it [further] through marketing and a presence in the community. It will be an important proof point for us.” New nesting tables, pantry tables and signage, fresh coats of paint, corner guards and floor plan regrids are part of the modernization effort.
For speedier deliveries — essential to compete against Amazon — The Vitamin Shoppe is partnering with DoorDash. By May, customers nationwide will be able to select same-day delivery and receive deliveries in less than two hours.
The Vitamin Shoppe began franchising in 2023, which ended December 2024 with 19 franchised locations. Licensing overseas continues via freestanding shops and shops-in-shop currently in a few Central and South American and Asian countries. “Those are important partners to us internationally, but domestically, it’s all about wholly-owned stores and linking those to the digital experience,” Leite said. Reviving shops-in-shop is a possibility. They once operated inside L.A. Fitness gyms, which shut down, and Barnes & Noble.
On the tech side, “The decisionmaking with data today is very different than where we were before,” Leite said. “There’s a level of detail we’re into, to really understand our consumer. That information informs everything we do.…They’re intrigued by the constant newness in our ‘On the Go’ business. Look at all the different bars and drinks we have,” Leite said, reaching for the David and Barebell protein bars, which are sold exclusively, contain macros and taste surprisingly good. “We have some customers that come in for this category alone. They shop us more than 200 times a year. We become their daily ritual.
“Literally, we’ve examined 20 years of consumer data in the last six months to have a much finer point on who the consumer is and how we can most satisfy and understand what they’re looking for,” Leite added. Tapping information from vendors and social media partners, the company is discovering potential shoppers that aren’t shopping The Vitamin Shoppe but have profiles that look like those that do.
Leite said the 643-unit retailer has historically been “a one-size-fits-all” store operation. “But today, really knowing the consumer and how they shop, you will see us experiment with different store sizes, locations and assortments. Now we have the technology for that. Even if you think about replenishing product, we didn’t have the tools without it being a manual effort to assortment plan different sizes, different shapes, different locations, at scale.”
A handful of new stores will open this year but it’s more about testing and learning at existing ones, and leveraging consumer data insights to “really inform how fast we hit the pedal on certain areas for growth. That’s very different from where we were before.”
Leite said The Vitamin Shoppe is profitable, though she declined to disclose profit or sales figures since the company is privately-owned. “We are a healthy business,” she said. “The Franchise Group was bankrupt [November 2024 to June 2025], not The Vitamin Shoppe. Unfortunately, we got dragged down into that, but that wasn’t a reflection on our financial performance.
“We’re evolving our business to be truly digital first, and then use the stores as the force multiplier, because we have incredible expertise in our stores. What you’ll see over the next six to nine months is this merging of our digital channel and our store channel, and how it will become seamless for the consumer. It’s not there today, but that’s where we’re headed.”
