Why I'm Spending a Month Studying a Nutritional Company
In 2019, I walked away from my associate's degree seven credits short from completion.
In 2026, I'm studying how a wellness brand built a company reportedly approaching a billion dollars on videos filmed by regular people in their kitchens.
First, an introduction
I'm Andre Keegan I am a Digital Marketing student at Full Sail University and the founder of Serenity Marketing Agency. I build visibility and trust for the businesses larger agencies overlook: small and family-owned companies, nonprofits, and independent creatives across Central Florida.
My path here wasn't a straight line.
I was homeschooled, which forced me to become a self-taught researcher before I knew that was worth anything. Then I lost my footing for a few years. I came back and enrolled at Full Sail at 28, fully expecting to quit within a month — and instead made honor roll and the National Society of Collegiate Scholars.
I don't tell you that for sympathy. I tell you because it's the reason I believe what I believe about branding, storytelling, and properly exposing your voice to your target audience.
I know what it costs to be unseen and underappreciated.
Bloom Nutrition, A monolith of exposure
Above picture was retrieved from the following link.
This week's assignment was to pick the brand I'll build my final project around. I chose Bloom — the wellness company behind Bloom Sparkling Energy, co-founded by Mari Llewellyn.
Here's why.
1. It's a masterclass in the exact skill I came here for.
Bloom grew from a direct-to-consumer startup into a household name almost entirely through user-generated TikTok content, founder-led storytelling, and a network of roughly 59,000 affiliate creators. That isn't a lucky viral moment. That's a repeatable system, and I want to be able to run it.
2. Its brand story is a comeback story.
Mari Llewellyn built Bloom out of her own health transformation, and the marketing has never really separated from that narrative. My own path back to this classroom was a comeback too — so I'm drawn to a brand that proves a personal story can carry a business further than a product spec sheet ever will.
3. It wins by serving the overlooked.
Bloom found an audience the energy drink category had spent decades ignoring: young women, in a market built almost entirely around hyper-masculine branding. Serving the people bigger players skip past is the entire reason Serenity Marketing Agency exists.
Studying how Bloom made that audience feel seen might be the most directly useful thing I do all year.
What I want to walk away with
I want to get good at turning research into strategy. That means running a real discovery process instead of guessing, matching content types to how an audience actually behaves online, and backing every recommendation with data instead of opinion.
I also want to learn how to hold one story steady across every channel — so a customer recognizes a brand whether they meet it on TikTok, in a podcast, or through a blog post.
And I want a framework I can hand straight to my own clients.
What's next
This is week one — the first of four posts I'll publish for this course. From here I move into discovery research on Bloom: who they actually serve, what their competitors are doing, and which content types the data says will work. That research is what the final project gets built on, and I'll be documenting each step here as I go.
Studying a brand this month too? Tell me which one you picked, and why, by connnecting with me on LinkedIn below.
