Daniel Lubetzky didn’t build KIND Snacks into a household name by chasing crowded categories. He found a product people were already buying — snack bars — and repositioned it as something they should feel good about eating every day. Twenty years later, he’s running the same play again. This time, the product is a magnetic strip that goes on your nose.
Camino Partners, the investment platform Lubetzky founded and which is led by President Elle Lanning, announced a $62 million investment in Intake Breathing — a direct-to-consumer nasal dilator brand built on a reusable magnetic system. It’s the largest single investment in Camino’s history, and Lubetzky is not being subtle about why.
“This is the company that most reminds me of KIND,” Lubetzky said. “That’s how excited I am.”
The Real Story Here
The surface story is a $62 million funding round for a niche wellness product. The actual story is a masterclass in how the best consumer investors think about category expansion.
Intake Breathing makes a patented magnetic nasal dilator: a reusable band with adhesive tabs that mechanically opens the nasal valve — the narrowest part of your airway. Unlike the paper Breathe Right strips you’d grab at CVS when congested, Intake is designed for daily use. Packs of 30 run $40. Monthly subscriptions go for $25.
The company was founded by Jim Castillo, a serial inventor who developed knee braces for motocross riders in the 1980s, then turned a breathing problem specific to goggles into a standalone product. It went through a Kickstarter campaign in 2019, grew organically through DTC channels, and attracted a following among professional athletes including Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Justin Wrobleski and Belgian soccer player Amadou Onana. Until now, it had taken zero significant outside capital.
Lanning put it directly: “When an entrepreneur can find a narrowly used product, and then introduce new occasions to use it, they’re able to expand and define a category themselves.”
That’s not just an Intake observation. That’s a repeatable framework for any entrepreneur building in consumer goods.
By the Numbers
The $62 million figure matters not just for its size, but for what it tells us about the consumer health and wellness market right now:
- The sleep and recovery market reached $585 billion globally in 2025, per the Global Wellness Institute’s annual report — growing at 8.3% annually.
- The sports performance nutrition and supplementation market is projected to hit $32 billion by 2028, per SPINS data cited in industry filings.
- Intake’s model — DTC-first, subscription-driven, repeat purchase — aligns with what the Federal Reserve’s 2025 Small Business Credit Survey identified as a top driver of creditworthiness for growing consumer brands: recurring, predictable revenue from existing customers.
Lubetzky flagged this dynamic explicitly: “Many supplements and wellness products fail to create repeat customers, because people can’t tell if they’re actually working. But with Intake, you immediately feel it.”
That instant feedback loop — the thing that makes customers come back — is also what makes a consumer brand fundable.
The Hustler’s Library Take
Here’s what Entrepreneur’s coverage of this deal missed: Lubetzky isn’t just investing in a nasal strip. He’s investing in a habit shift. And the playbook for pulling off a habit shift is specific, learnable, and completely applicable to businesses with no VC on the horizon.
KIND didn’t win because it made a better snack bar. It won because it convinced people that snacking could be an identity-consistent behavior — something you did because you care about your body, not despite it. Intake is running the exact same script: nasal strips aren’t a sick-day remedy, they’re a daily wellness ritual.
For small business owners, the more important signal is this: Lubetzky said publicly that he will not invest in a business — no matter how good the market or branding — if the product isn’t already perfected. “In consumer product goods, the product is king. If you do not have a killer product perfected, you can invest all you want, market all you want, at the end it’s not gonna take off.”
That’s the exact opposite of how most founders think about fundraising. Most founders try to raise capital to finish the product. The founders who get Lubetzky-level checks have already built the thing that generates word-of-mouth before they ever walked into a pitch room. Gymshark did it. Intake did it. The pattern is not an accident.
There’s also a contrarian read on the timing: consumer wellness is getting crowded with AI-driven marketing at scale, which means undifferentiated products are going to struggle more, not less. The businesses that survive the next wave of competition in DTC aren’t going to win on ads — they’re going to win because their product creates an immediate, undeniable experience. That’s the real filter Lubetzky is applying, and it’s one every product business owner should apply to their own line right now.
What You Should Do
1. Run the “occasion audit” on your product line. Intake’s breakthrough wasn’t a new product — it was new occasions for an existing one. Make a list of every context in which your product or service is currently used. Now ask: what’s the adjacent occasion that nobody has claimed yet? This is the same thinking behind how KIND moved from health food stores to airport kiosks to hotel minibars.
2. Build the repeat-purchase signal before you pitch anything. If you’re thinking about raising capital, seeking a partnership, or pitching a retailer, the single most important data point you can show is customer return rate. Lubetzky’s team looked at Intake’s retention data and called it “insane.” What does your retention data look like right now? If you don’t know, find out before you do anything else. This applies whether you’re pitching a bank, a shelf buyer at Target, or a Shark Tank producer. You can explore CAC vs. LTV math to understand what your numbers actually say.
3. Study the Camino portfolio for trend signals. Camino Partners holds Barry’s (boutique fitness), Athletic Brewing (nonalcoholic beer), and now Intake Breathing. That’s not a random collection — it’s a thesis about where consumer spending is heading: performance, recovery, and daily wellness habits that are both affordable and identity-affirming. If you sell anything in the health, food, fitness, or lifestyle space, you should read that portfolio as a market map. For more on applying portfolio thinking to your own revenue streams, the framework translates directly.
Also worth reading: The Two-Speed Business — specifically the section on separating the work that keeps the lights on from the work that builds something worth investing in. That distinction is exactly what Intake was navigating for seven years before Lubetzky walked in the door.
Source: Entrepreneur | Additional context: Global Wellness Institute Economy Monitor
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