How TIES Turned a Stigmatized Issue into a Premium Men’s Health Brand

Background

The whole thing started with a question Luke asked his wife at the kitchen table.

He and Camryn had been married a couple of years, both deep in their careers, and they'd started talking about when they wanted to have kids. Camryn was already doing the work: lab tests, doctor visits, books, podcasts, the long checklist of getting your body ready. Luke watched all of it happen and asked the obvious thing.

"I literally just asked, is there anything I should be doing, looking at whatever? And that's what started us even looking at this category."

So they went to Google. And they found nothing. No products, no real guidance, no one talking to the man at all. What they did find was a silence that didn't match the size of the problem.

"Nobody's raising their hand around this massive issue that's happening, and no one's doing anything about it."

Men are half of every fertility conversation and almost none is addressing them. TIES is a bet that's about to change the men’s healthcare space. The same way men's hair care lost its stigma over the last five years, the founders believe men's health is next.

The Challenge

The category had two common issues with ecom stores. Telehealth brands felt cheap and reactive. Clinical brands felt cold and priced like a procedure. Neither made a man feel like he belonged there.

TIES needed a storefront that did something harder. It had to carry real clinical credibility without making the person reading it feel broken.

"We wanted to create a site that didn't have someone land on it and feel like I have to buy this because I feel gross. We want something that builds community."

That meant the site couldn't read like a pharmacy. It had to read like a brand a guy would actually want to be part of.

Why Platter

The Novaks had a clear standard for the decision. If you're building a company meant to last, the product comes first and the buying experience comes right after it. They didn't want to figure out the storefront as they went.

"If we actually want to build a generational type of company, the product has to be the utmost quality. And then experience for consumers is right there after that. That's why we wanted to partner with you guys off the bat versus making stuff up as we go."

They also weren't building for a single launch. TIES was always going to be a family of products, released fast. They needed a foundation that could carry that.

The Solution

Platter built the TIES storefront on our proprietary framework with a single brief above all others: make a stigmatized health conversation feel premium and approachable without losing an ounce of clinical credibility. Luke has a name for the tone, he calls it Science and Soul.

"We are really leaning into this idea of mixing modern performance with nostalgic family values."

Most of the imagery on the site is the founders' own life. The photos of fathers and children aren't stock, they're family.

"A lot of the imagery that you see on there is both [Camryn] and I as children. The side of our carton is [Camryn] and her father. And then I'm at the bottom of the page. We have a bunch of friends and family. So almost all of the imagery for the most part is either friends, family. It was something personal to us, which was intentional."

A subscription that follows the biology 

The product page defaults to subscription through a custom widget Platter built on top of Skio's billing engine. The 90-day reproductive cycle isn't a marketing detail, it's the reason a three-month minimum makes medical sense, and the page explains the science so the commitment is obvious rather than pushy.

Per-month pricing

Rather than leading with a $300-plus upfront total, the page frames the cost per month. It’s the same plan, but far less sticker shock at the moment of decision.

Science woven through the whole experience

Peer-reviewed citations sit inline next to each ingredient, and the medical advisory credibility, including Cleveland Clinic and the University of Arizona, is built into the page rather than buried. Luke saw that as the dividing line between TIES and the more pharmaceutical players.

"The team did a great job of creating that aspirational state through the website itself and through the entire experience. That's why you have additional things like our journal section, our About Us section, our science section. A lot of these other companies don't lean into that quite as much because they are more pharmaceutical driven. Ours is all intertwined. Our science goes throughout the entire website because that is what we're leaning into."

A future-proofed architecture

TIES was designed as a platform from the first line of code, so the infrastructure and product templates are already in place to launch new products fast without rebuilding the site each time.

"From day one, the TIES name was built to be a platform. What we wanted to do was create a digital storefront that made people feel like they're a part of a world. And that's the world that TIES is trying to create, an approachable, scientifically backed way to improve one's health."