"I can do something about this"

Why a White House veteran-turned-hedge fund investor ditched a booming career to start a wellness brand in one of the most crowded consumer markets.

- Tom Foster

MISSION-DRIVEN Demond Martin wants to use his startup to raise $300 million for health equity programs for Black and Brown people.

MICHAEL ARCHBOLD HAD BEEN through the IPO road show ritual plenty of times. Most meetings follow a script. The executives talk for 20 minutes. They show slides. The investors listen. Except this time was different.

At a hedge fund in Boston called Adage Capital Management, Archbold sat down across from a 35-year-old portfolio manager named Demond Martin. Before Archbold, then the president and COO of the Vitamin Shoppe, could launch into his presentation, Martin stopped him. He had already read the thick prospectus and had marked it up with colorful sticky tabs and dogeared corners. He ticked off what he liked—the discipline, the positioning, the focus on returns. Then Martin made a promise.

“I am going to be your biggest investor,” he said. “I just ask that we have good communication and you don’t screw this up.”

Martin had a reputation for that kind of preparation and conviction. At Adage, he spent years studying consumer businesses up close—walking store aisles, tracking promotions, calling executives with questions most investors never thought to ask. Over time, the results had begun to speak for themselves.

The Vitamin Shoppe meeting took place in 2009, when Martin was still in the first half of his investment career. By 2020, he had built a high-wattage professional network, become a prolific philanthropist, and served on the boards of the Obama Foundation and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. And he’d started from the unlikeliest of circumstances: public housing in Los Angeles County at the height of the crack epidemic.