Trust Became the Growth Engine for a 50-Year Medical Brand. Jonathan Treiber Explains Why

Welcome to Market Movers: Building Brands & Links with Linkifi! Your go-to podcast for transforming your business into an unforgettable brand, where branding meets SEO and link-building. I’m Chris Panteli, Co-Founder and CEO of Linkifi, and I’m joined by my co-host and Co-Founder, Nick Biggs.

In this episode, we’re joined by Jonathan Treiber, CEO of Skil-Care and former co-founder of RevTrax, where he helped build a category-defining marketing technology platform. We explore how Jonathan moved from finance to entrepreneurship, how RevTrax created a new category around smarter couponing and offer management, and how he is now applying modern brand-building, e-commerce, Amazon strategy, and AI-powered content workflows to a 50-year-old medical device manufacturing company.

 

Key Talking Points

✅ Failure Before RevTrax. Before building RevTrax, Jonathan and his co-founder launched a failed digital marketing venture in affiliate and referral marketing. That first failure became the pivot point that led them toward a much stronger opportunity.

✅ Creating a New Marketing Tech Category. RevTrax was built around a simple but overlooked problem: brands were using online coupons and discounts in the same blunt way they had used newspaper coupons for decades.

✅ Building an Offer Management Platform. RevTrax created what Jonathan describes as an offer management platform, integrating with CRM systems, email platforms, and other parts of the marketing stack to make promotional activation smarter.

✅ Selling a Solution People Didn’t Know They Needed. One of the hardest parts of building RevTrax was that many enterprise brands did not even realize they had a couponing problem. The team had to do a lot of educational and evangelical selling.

✅ A Strategic Exit After 15 Years. After more than a decade of building the category, RevTrax was acquired by a larger marketing services company that needed its technology to support smarter digital incentives and promotions.

✅ The Bigger Lesson From RevTrax. Jonathan says the experience taught him that he was not necessarily in love with digital marketing as an industry. He was in love with solving problems and building companies.

✅ A “Sleepy” Business With Huge Potential. Skil-Care was not a flashy tech startup, but Jonathan saw a major opportunity to bring modern marketing, e-commerce, brand storytelling, and digital strategy into a long-established product business.

✅ Positioning Skil-Care as More Than Products. The goal is not just to sell cushions or safety devices. It is to position Skil-Care around comfort, safety, trust, and care for patients, families, clinicians, nursing homes, hospitals, and home caregivers.

✅ Launching Digital Advertising for the First Time. Skil-Care had done very little digital marketing before Jonathan joined. One of the first major steps was running targeted Facebook advertising with different creative, messages, and audience segments.

✅ E-Commerce as Part of a Multi-Channel Strategy. The company launched direct e-commerce, but not with the expectation that it would become the whole business. Instead, it became part of a broader online and offline strategy.

✅ Amazon as the World’s Showroom. Jonathan sees Amazon not just as a sales channel, but as a discovery platform. Since many product searches begin there, Skil-Care needed to show up properly with stronger listings, better content, and a clearer brand story.

✅ AI for Product Imagery. One of Skil-Care’s biggest AI wins has been creating product imagery, lifestyle images, and use-case visuals much faster than traditional photoshoots or manual rendering workflows.

✅ Why Manufacturing Feels Safer Than Software. Unlike a pure software company, Skil-Care makes physical medical products. Jonathan sees AI more as an operational and marketing advantage than an immediate existential threat.

✅ The Moat Is Trust, Distribution, and Clinical Credibility. Skil-Care’s long-term advantage comes from 50 years of product history, facility relationships, clinical adoption, distributors, brand trust, and real-world usage, not just digital tactics.

✅ Competing With Amazon-Only Brands. Jonathan notes that some competitors are built mainly for Amazon, often with cheap products and aggressive marketplace tactics. Skil-Care’s advantage is that its Amazon presence is only one part of a much deeper clinical and distribution ecosystem.

 

Notable Quotes & Moments

📌 “What I learned is that what I’m in love with is solving problems and building.”

📌 “We were solving a problem that nobody thought was solvable.”

📌 “Many people didn’t even think it was a problem until we highlighted it.”

📌 “We were fighting the war on dumb couponing.”

📌 “Skil-Care is not an Amazon business. Amazon is only a piece of our strategy.”

📌 “I’m really, really happy to be the CEO of a manufacturing company.”

📌 “AI for us is a productivity turbocharging tool.”

 

About Jonathan Treiber

Jonathan Treiber is the CEO of Skil-Care and former co-founder of RevTrax, a marketing technology company focused on smarter, data-driven offer and coupon management for enterprise brands. After helping build and exit RevTrax, Jonathan shifted into medical device manufacturing, bringing modern e-commerce, digital marketing, brand storytelling, and AI-enabled content workflows to Skil-Care, a family-owned company with nearly 50 years of history.

🔗 Website: https://skil-care.com
🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathantreiber/ 

 

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