Radek Sali, the former Swisse chief executive who sold the vitamins company for $1.67 billion two years ago, has launched an advertising agency he says will help other companies target the burgeoning Asian consumer market.
Mr Sali's Light Warrior investment firm signed off on the deal to form the agency Stratosphere with advertising executive Andrew Shostak on Monday, and has already secured its first major client - one of Swisse's largest sellers, Chemist Warehouse.
Radek Sali, former boss of Swisse Vitamins who now runs his own investment company.Credit: Eddie Jim
The pharmacy chain is also a minority shareholder in Stratosphere, which will operate as an independent media buying and creative agency.
Mr Sali said he founded his own agency Noisy Beast "out of frustration" while at Swisse, and wanted to continue the work he had started with that firm which remains controlled by Swisse's new owners.
Chemist Warehouse is one of Radek Sali's first clients.Credit: Brook Mitchell
"That was unique in the fact that we set it up to do what that brand really wanted to achieve, rather than what an agency sets out to achieve," he said.
Mr Sali led Swisse for eight years, and the company's sale to Hong Kong giant Biostime International Holdings in 2015 netted him $250 million.
He went on to form Light Warrior with former Goldman Sachs banker Adam Gregory, who worked on the Swisse sale. The firm has since made investments in ventures including the fluid replacement product Hydralyte, health and nutrition start up myDNA, and celebrity chef George Calombaris' MAdE Establishment restaurant group.
Mr Sali said he wanted Stratosphere to help brands follow Swisse's success by targeting Chinese and other Asian residents and visitors to Australia to test their products and marketing, which would open the door to bigger markets in those consumers' home countries.
"If you can harness that market... and understand how to market to that group, all of a sudden you're testing and trailing a mechanism in your own backyard, which is far less risk-adverse than having to jump into a new market without testing your ability to sell to that market," he said.
Stratosphere's first client, Chemist Warehouse, already has a large presence in China, and is one of the biggest vendors on Alibaba's Tmall marketplace.
Mr Sali said having investments across various industries put him in a position where he could stay abreast of major trends in a way other advertisers could not.
"We were champions of that at Swisse, where we used traditional media spend to grow our brand in a significant way," he said, adding that he thought some companies were abandoning print media prematurely.
Mr Sali said he expected Stratosphere would eventually take on advertising duties for some of the companies Light Warrior had invested in.