Fixing the payback period in Denmark to fund the next phase of international growth

The situation

Embla is a Danish medical weight-loss business combining personalised GLP-1 treatment with clinical support, coaching and a strong focus on long-term behavioural change.

The business had grown successfully in Denmark and launched in the UK while Wegovy supply was still heavily constrained. That created an unusually favourable market for early growth, with high demand and relatively limited competition. The strength of that UK growth helped enable a Series A raise.

By the time the funding landed, though, the market had changed. Wegovy was much more widely available, online pharmacies were proliferating and larger competitors were spending heavily. Growth was slowing and customer acquisition costs were rising quickly.

When I joined, CAC was high in both markets. The service itself was more differentiated than much of the competition, but the proposition and brand did not make that difference particularly clear.

My first priority was to reduce the amount of capital Denmark was consuming and get the established market as close to self-funding as possible. That would free up capital for the UK, which at that point needed to become the much larger growth market and provide the route to the next funding round.

What I did

The first change I made was to treat Denmark and the UK as different markets. I hired a local market lead in Denmark and rebuilt the acquisition and conversion model around the Danish customer. We changed the creative, the funnel and the sales process, with the aim of getting the established business to a point where it could fund itself.

Alongside that, I led a refresh of the proposition and brand across both markets. The research showed that Embla was doing something more distinctive than its brand made clear: highly personalised treatment, backed by clinical expertise and behavioural support, with a focus on helping people lose weight sustainably. I brought in external specialists, worked with the leadership team to make that proposition much clearer and built a more distinctive identity around it.

My remit later expanded to include UK sales and clinical operations, which meant I could take ownership of more of the member journey. That included how we generated and converted demand, how the service was explained before people joined, onboarding, and how members were supported and retained once they were on the programme.

Denmark went from consuming capital to funding itself.

The result

The biggest change was in Denmark, where acquisition cost fell 67% and sales conversion rose from 29% to 55%. Payback period fell by around two thirds and the market became effectively self-funding. That reduced the amount of capital the core business was consuming and bought more time to work out whether the UK model could be made viable.

The clearer proposition and more distinctive brand also started to attract a different kind of interest. That included a microbiome research partnership, a pharmacy trial in Denmark and conversations with the NHS and large pharmacy groups in the UK. People could understand much more quickly what Embla was trying to do and why it was different.

We made progress in the UK too, where sales conversion nearly doubled and churn fell by around 40%, but acquisition costs stayed too high for the scale the business needed. The market was increasingly moving towards cheaper, more transactional access to GLP-1 medication, while Embla was built around personalised dosing, clinical oversight and much more intensive coaching and support. We also didn’t have the same drug-buying economics as the large online pharmacies.

By making Denmark self-funding, we had bought the business time to test that model properly rather than being forced into an early decision. When it became clear that the UK was not the right market for it, the business could pull back from UK direct-to-consumer growth and redirect its international focus towards the US, where there was a better fit for the proposition.

What it took

The two markets needed different answers. Denmark already had a strong underlying business but needed much better economics. The UK needed us to find out whether the same proposition could work in a very different and rapidly changing market.

My role covered enough of the business to work on both. I was close to the marketing and sales funnel, but also to the product, clinical operation and member experience, while working with the CEO on where we should keep investing and where we should change course.

Denmark became a much stronger business, the proposition became clearer and more distinctive, and new routes to growth opened through partnerships and international expansion. We also got to a clear answer on the UK. It wasn’t the answer we had originally hoped for, but it meant the business could stop spending capital trying to make the wrong market fit and put it behind the opportunities that made more sense.