The Organic Content Playbook Behind Tonic Health's 1.7M Followers: Sunna on Disrupting Supplements

0:00I think we did for half a billion views in 2025. They're on social to either be entertained or educated. That's it. So how do you fit into that? Like, what's your narrative around that?

0:14Welcome back to another episode of DC Diaries. Delighted to be joined by Sunna. I guess viral celebrity on Instagram. author and founder of one of the UK's fastest growing supplement brands both for adults and then more recently with a heavy focus on kids so yeah delighted to have you on thank you for joining us thanks for having me yeah thank you yeah I guess you I definitely think you are the guest we've had on with the largest social following organic social following um pushing like over a million followers now on well nearly nearly a million on Instagram nearly a million on instagram if you tot it all up it's like 1.7 across all channels i saw one of your linkedin posts you said you did 47 million impressions in a month yeah the other month which is absolutely bonkers you're known obviously for being in the deep in the supermarket aisles do you get spotted much in the eyes a very vain question to kick it off but honestly it's got quite weird because i was just a founder right and i just wanted to like build this vitamin company that i had a passion for and a mission behind and I was never into celebrity in the beginning I didn't even want to be on camera like I was scared to put myself out there and post on LinkedIn and like make a statement and whatever like I was like anyone else but then through COVID I was basically forced into it for the business and then it just started working and then yeah fast forward like three four years and people are stopping you in the street going oh my god you're that tonic guy you know I love what you do and it's like kind of crazy it's really weird because I'd never really wanted to be a celebrity I don't consider myself a celebrity at all I just make some videos in the supermarket it's like not glamorous whatsoever but people you know I think we did for half a billion views in 2025 so people see you and they know it and they love it yeah it's kind of crazy quick one from our sponsors if you've been in the game for any amount of time you know that your gross margin lives and dies by two things.

2:20What you're paying for your product and how you reliably get it to your customers. And for most founders, that back end, the sourcing, the manufacturing, the fulfillment is where margin quietly bleeds out. Bad suppliers, relationships, ballooning landed costs, shipments that miss the windows, it all adds up fast. That's exactly what Commersive is built to fix. They work with over a thousand e-commerce brands handling absolutely everything from sourcing, manufacturing and fulfillment. So you don't have to do any of it. And they're not just shipping domestically. They can get your products to customers in 65 plus countries worldwide.

2:54So whether you're scaling in the US, pushing into Europe or going global, they've got the infrastructure to handle it. The whole point is that you stop spending your time managing the backend and start spending it on the things that actually move the needle, whether that's the product, the marketing or the growth. So if you want to see what it actually costs no commitment no pitch head to commercive.co and get a completely free quote that's c-o-m-m-e-r-c-i-v-e.co let the experts handle the back end so you can focus on actually building your brand. Commercive go check it out. Really unique you know angle that we usually with a lot of founders they they they haven't quite been able to crack it to that degree and And I think it's because, you know, I was actually weirdly, like obviously we work with you guys at Tonic and I actually, I was following the channel on TikTok for a period of time before even you guys onboarding with us or knowing that Tonic was a brand.

3:57I just thought you were like someone on social media that kind of went into supermarkets and looked at, you know, nutritional value of different products, things like that. And I think actually that is the trick. and I think where a lot of brands probably get it wrong is they go too heavy on the promotional side and not enough on actually just leading with education and value that then will translate into customers at a later point and I think that's what you've done really well. Yeah, well, I mean, I get it, right? Like I've had questions from investors and my board at times being like, come on, can't you talk about tonic a bit more?

4:31Like, come on, sell some more vitamins. And for me, it's always just been about how do I add value to my community my audience like how can I help them on their journey so if helping them means I talk about tonic maybe two or three times a month then that's what it means right because I put the customer first and go what are their biggest pain points what are their biggest problems so like inevitably I'm going to talk more about bread because it's a bigger problem for more people than I am you know vitamins yeah I think I've heard a lot a couple of other like um marketing leaders it's jab jab jab right hook right as a concept but like the more it's getting the like ratio those things right i feel like if you're if if you lead with enough value when you do the ask or when you do the push the the impact of that push is so much greater the revenue it generates is so much larger versus if you oversaturate and the the direct sale driven content too frequently well it's just everyone's trying to make a quick buck and everyone's selling everything on social and it's like so boring seeing someone just sell the next thing and it's got to come place from a place of authenticity and i think yeah most people are just like sell sell sell go go go and not playing the long game of like how can i just add value how can i help people let's start there yeah so i'm not going to name the tabloid but you got quoted by uh not not the nicest of tabloids in the uk as the world's most followed nutrition brand so it's clearly working i know you've got you're a very mission driven business i'd love to as with most of these guest episodes like really hear a bit about the backstory and like what led to to the brand and and the mission behind that as well yeah because i mean it with every founder i think it comes from a personal problem and i used to work in banking and i was getting pretty run down five six times a winter i would catch everything going and i you know i played sport i thought i like like relatively clean, healthy diet.

6:30And I just, through talking to the doctor, then nutritionist, then doing some blood tests, realized I was nutrient deficient and I wasn't getting enough nutrients through my diet because, you know, I was a sports guy and I was playing football and I was eating chicken breast and rocket to keep my six pack and whatever else. But it was fairly low in nutrition comparatively compared to certain foods and having a balanced play and everything else. So I basically discovered this world of micronutrition, which, you know, this was sort of 2012, 2013, around that time. Like no one thought about that, right?

7:08Like protein bars were a relatively new thing and eating more protein. So that's what it was all about at the kind of macro level. And I was just like shocked because people were asking me, weren't you sick just like a couple of months ago? I was like, you know what, this is quite bad. like I need to figure it out and then went to the supermarket was like right I'll buy some vitamins great easy solve and realized like the first ingredient on half the packs was sugar or artificial sweeteners or fillers or like crap that I didn't want in my body and I was like well why like I'm trying to do something positive yet there's all these negatives that come with it and then started to kind of look into the science and the research and realized that the entire vitamin industry is based off of your NRV percentage, which is your nutrient reference value of how much you should have in a day, but defined as to prevent a deficiency disease, not defined as what's your 100 % that you need for optimal health to feel amazing, feel great, have the best immunity.

8:09And I was totally depleted, but I was like, wait, that doesn't make sense. Like if I'm going to fix this, why wouldn't I go to the optimal level? Why would I just do the bare minimum and so I couldn't understand that whole concept and so through like just experimenting buying like bulk powders of ascorbic acid vitamin c and like making my own drinks at home I really I went from having like five six colds a year to none and I was like oh that's so powerful like that's how powerful nutrition is and in the UK we have this misconception of like do vitamins actually work and it's mostly because the vitamins on the shelves don't right they're so low dose that you take it and you don't feel a difference whereas actually if you get those optimal doses in there according to science and give people what their bodies need it can make a huge impact on their life and i just saw it as a real ethical like lie from the entire industry basically selling you all this low dose stuff making insane margins and for what you know just for profit and putting it over people and so i was like that's wrong that needs to be corrected in the vitamin industry and so that was my kind of driving force to go and then start a vitamin company albeit probably like 10 years later yeah i love that and yeah it's so true i see it all the time and it's it's it's something that you it's it's hard to believe is is allowed um you know with these blends and whether just it's you're not getting enough of whatever the nutrient is to actually make any kind of impact, yet the person thinks they are doing the right thing.

9:46So yeah, I love the mission attached to it. I mean, what did the early days look like? What was that kind of first inflection point when you realised, okay, we're actually doing something of value here that people like and this is a viable business? I mean, it probably took about three, four years to feel comfortable that this is a viable business because you're always battling cashflow and startup challenges. But no, I mean, we, you know, we developed the product and started talking to people straight away. So from banking, I then went to Virgin, then went through into food and drink with baby food, and then set up an agency before then going into tonics.

10:26So I'd got some experience along the way of working with retailers. So I basically took the deck and the proposition of this is what I think the vitamin industry needs. needs and I took it to boots and said what do you think and they were like yeah we agree like we think it needs this and so basically from a standing start I had a boots listing agreed for April 2020 and that was like okay cool like this can happen like there's real weight behind it and off the back of that boots listing I was able to raise my first like a small angel round to get the whole thing going. So that was the first kind of moment like, okay, we've got something.

11:06Let's go and build this thing. And so I went full-time on the business in February 2020. Then COVID happened in March. Boots delayed the range review because they couldn't physically put people in stores to go and make the changes to the shelves because it would have been a health and safety risk because of what was going on. So they basically pushed the range review back from April all the way to September. so all of a sudden I'd kind of raised this money the retailer that I thought I was going to have didn't materialize they were like oh it's fine we'll put it online and then they put it online and then within a few weeks they were like oh we're only going to sell the top 10 brands in every category because we can't handle the demand online because the demand went from you know 90 % of their sales were in store 10 % online to all of a sudden you know everyone's on boots.com and so they couldn't deal with it so then all of a sudden we were online but we weren't able to be bought and so we had a bumpy like first sort of six months and then managed to get another listing with Holland and Barrett and that was great and was like right we're going into Holland and Barrett so that should be all right because they stay open we'll get the listing away and that was in for September that same year and then they went ahead with it but then that first winter of covid nobody went out everyone was so scared so basically what i had was a holandabarrett and a boots listing and no customers and nobody would go to the shelf and you know spend five minutes figuring out what vitamin they should buy because it was very much mission driven i've got to go in and get this and then i'm out because i don't want to get covid yeah right so i think it was And essentially that was like, okay, wow, we had something.

12:52Now I believe and I know what I've made is great, but no one else knows it exists. And so then that was what was like, okay, how do we talk to people online? And I didn't have a DTC background. I wasn't a Facebook ads guy. I had no idea how to run that. So my challenge to myself was how do I talk to my customers? And so I started writing newsletters, started doing podcasts over Zoom, started you know trying a bit of everything and then stumbled upon let's make some videos in a supermarket when we could go in because it'd be a bit more engaging than me standing in my front room let's do that and see what happens and then within a couple of videos one did 250 000 views and we were like oh okay there's something here yeah that's yeah that's super interesting and i think there's a there's a real lesson there about getting scrappy um and you know going outside of your comfort zone and especially i hear founders say a lot about you know they don't feel like they're right to be in front of the camera within their own business or they're not you know they're uncomfortable going in front of camera but like i've always tried to push back but it's just a muscle that you need to to flex and and you know us on this podcast i think we were pretty awkward i was very stiff very stiff when i first started doing i feel like you are at such a massive disadvantage if you can't get yourself out there to some degree what advice do you have for founders that are maybe you know going through that process i mean you just have to start right like my first ever video is still on tiktok you can scroll all the way back if you've got time you've got a private you have i found your private page on tiktok with like five videos i think do I still have a private I need to get rid of it I was going to find them at the tonic page but the point is they're still there and you can see the first one it's so slow stumble my words it's awful I hated doing it it was so uncomfortable and everyone's like oh you're so good on camera now you're so good at just rattling out lines it's only practice like you say it's muscle like you have to really in a way be forced into kind of just getting over that fear and then the more you do it you know the better you get at it and you watch your videos and you get live feedback and you learn yeah it's like anything but in a way i was lucky that covid kind of forced me into it because if i hadn't have had that like desperate business need i don't know if i would have done it yeah what so it started off as something that i guess didn't really have a process or a strategy around it i would love to dig into because what what i think you have done incredibly well that the one percent do is actually be remain really consistent um really kind of be become known for a clear format but then consistently drive that what does the process look like now end to end from an organic standpoint because i think you know i was i've watched your tiktok for for a while now and i think and as an example i think there was the um what's the fish finger brand bird's eye the about you know the percentage of batter is much higher than the percentage of fish you know where i want to know what that end-to-end process looks like how you're extracting these insights um around kind of nutritional factors within different products but then what what what is there a team behind it you know what's that looking like it's just me just walking in and grabbing some fish fingers and be like i love that it's me and our content manager yeah right and we kept it lean and to be honest we've gone you know full circle on it like we started super lean and just making videos with me and one other and then we were like okay this is working we need to put a whole process and a script and a research strategy behind it and all of a sudden we scaled out this whole process that just very quickly we realized just wasted a ton of time because we can all sit there debating which video is going to go viral which one we should put the most time and research and energy behind and 90 % of the time you're wrong right the algorithm knows what the algorithm is going to do no one else really so the game is how can you produce as much there's good quality but at volume for as little time as possible because I think where a lot of founders get caught up is to be like right we've got to make this one video and then they're going to script it and then they're going to think about 17 different scenes and then all of a sudden one video is like half your day and the cost is too high for you to do it whereas i can get probably about 60 videos in one day so two days my month is done and then i don't touch social anymore so i make it hyper efficient and you know uh daisy our content manager she'll go and do the research and like you know product selection things like that product selection what's new what should we talk about she'll and but she'll come up with a list which is more like not a script but it's a beat point of like we should try and talk about this this is the thing to mention and that's it no script no nothing because actually the having no script means it's totally free she can point the camera and as long as i know the main thing to talk about i'll build an architecture around it just live and then if it's crap, we'll just say, no, do that again.

18:04Or it's done and it's great and it was really efficient and we can just knock loads out. I think we've all suffered from complexity bias at times and it is that thing of simplicity scales. I also think we've been talking about this, literally again in the taxi on the way here, we were talking about also when you're really close to a problem, there's this novelty bias, this bias to always doing new things and new topics and new formats because you think that your audience is like consuming your content the same way as you do yeah when it's like just not true it's like 90 of the audience is new so it's like you can just repeat same like topics same style same format once you found something that works i think people get caught up in that treadmill i've always tried we've we've done it before like trying to make newness that's then harder than just repeating a framework that just works if it works it works speaking of uh frameworks the uh one of your videos i think it was you were comparing some collagen products on the on the um supermarket in the supermarket and we do a lot of organic research as part of our of our process and we usually take organic and and look at if there's an opportunity to translate that into a paid framework and i think that video we we translated that into a paid framework and then for multiple brands it became a best performer did it really so it's that that idea of like an us versus them in the supermarket and it was like modeled off your format it had its moment and it's not working anymore sadly people watching said oh you don't go ripping 10 more but yeah i think it's it is an interesting um the the style of the content like you in a setting that feels very native to someone's like routine is definitely a trend in like user generated content right now we're finding a lot of like hooks where people are in like the gym yeah like carrying the one what i was looking at yesterday was like a guy carrying his daughter down the road it feels like something someone would experience in their life on a day-to-day basis and you just see like hook rates just explode on paid which is really interesting that's it my kids are getting roped into my next shoot running around the kids eye um yeah i think it's just you it's just very it's a great example of being like customer-centric value-led and i think that's what a lot of brands watching should should be focusing on for like 80 percent of that content right well it's amazing how many brands because like i think initially brands really struggled with the transition from picture to video like that whereas we were early in video and went on it hard so we were kind of right there at the right moment whereas a lot of brands were like oh my god how do we start making video this is complicated we need an editor and so they struggle with that transition and then even today like three four years later where video is the only thing on the platform really apart from the old carousel you know people still are just trying to be like they don't get it they're just trying to be like hey look at me this is my brand how great it is yeah just like products in the hook look how funny we are because we show you behind the scenes in our office i'm like no one cares man like really like what they're on social to either be entertained or educated that's it like there's nothing else to it they don't want to see your brand like so how do you fit into that like what's your narrative around that heard a heard alex homozy quote that was like all the audience audiences on social have an insatiable appetite for value but have zero appetite for fluff and it's like just thinking through that lens of what is value for your customer and then creating off that basis i think a lot of brands are just a bit like self-centered in the way they create content in that sense yeah yeah because they still think they have to have a brand channel and it's all about them as the brand sharing what they're about with the world but it's like no no the consumer is there to watch something for a purpose yeah not sell your product like so how do you integrate it in real life and create stories and things that are useful to them 100 yeah so we switching gears a little bit i'd love to talk about the kids uh range because that obviously we're working with you on on the gummies yeah which is super interesting um talk a little bit about the journey um to yeah move into kids and maybe some of the complexities around that sure i mean it came from like you know we were adults first as a product but then by that point we were already making viral videos and I had my first kid Jax and basically just did what any dad does and goes right I need to now buy a baby vitamin went to the aisle was like why has this got sugar in first like I thought the baby ones would be at least half decent then they had preservatives in gums like it made no sense and I just was like okay well cool we need to make a video about this because it's more content, made a video about it, went insanely viral where mums and dads were going like, what the actual, like how is this even possible in today's world that we can't get a vitamin without sugar or sweetener as like the main ingredient?

23:15And so that's kind of the unintended consequence of the social that people don't realize is like the insight we get from that community is so powerful. Because when you have a video do half a million views say and you get, I don't know, a thousand comments. That's a thousand real engagements hearing what people are thinking. And so when you see so many of your community go, wow, like this needs to be fixed. As soon as we saw that, we were like, okay, we need to fix this. Like we're a vitamin company, but we need to fix this. Like how can there not be a vitamin like that? And so we spent a couple of years developing, working with a couple of different manufacturers to figure out how we could make it.

23:54And then we made the world's first gummy with no sugar, no sweetener to give kids nutrition they need without the junk basically and that product has actually become our hero product that's our number one product in the entire business even though it was like two years in because it just landed with that insight and a category problem that parents are shocked about that needed to be fixed and then it's just scaled ever since really what were some of like the biggest findings going deeper into like children's and baby nutrition as a space because i've heard that it's like a bit like the wild west with some of the products that are actually on the shelves and how the quality of those products from other people but anything that really shocked you i mean you've like the regulations and stuff are just scary like if you start in pregnancy vitamins right up until 2023 vitabiotics had titanium dioxide in their pregnancy pregnant care that was outlawed by the eu as genotoxic in 2023 so such a bad ingredient like shouldn't be in our food at all and it was in their pregnancy vitamin right up until the moment that legally they had to take it out right and so that's where the vitamin industry was like they'd put because they they basically in a way had a free pass because everyone thinks oh i'm buying a vitamin so it must be good for me they don't interrogate the ingredients list in the same way and so they were just getting away with all these crazy ingredients engineering cost effectiveness into their products fillers and binders and all the crap and so that's how bad it starts in pregnancy and then you go into baby and the leading baby vitamin in the uk has preservatives sugar and gums in it and it's like well wait a minute like the baby can't even eat broccoli yet why are we giving them all this like other crap it makes no sense that that is where it starts and then the rest of the category buys more sugar than it does vitamin like the kids vitamin industry buys more sugar than it does vitamin like that in itself tells you everything right it is it's shocking and they clearly put their margin and their profit first because there are plenty of options for them to go and fix it but they're just not not the incentive i love the quote i found whilst i was doing the research of you can't fix 21st century problems with 20th century vitamins which i think is i I guess it sums that up really.

26:23It's like the companies that have supplied these haven't had the level of scrutiny and accountability to drive the quality that you guys are now coming through and supplying to the market and those people. Yeah, and look, if you look at the kind of macro data of the nation, right, about three quarters of the UK don't get enough nutrition from their diet. Nine in 10 aren't consuming enough of certain nutrients. Like it's bad. Like on a macro level, people are like, oh, you can get everything from your balanced diet. and you can technically but the reality is no one is in the data and the industry yeah just was built primarily 30, 40, 50 years ago as pharma logical solutions when our understanding wasn't as good we just needed basic levels of you know nutrients because arguably back in 1970 we ate meat and two veg as a nation right and we sat down and had proper lunches and lots of time outside we spent lots of time outside and so we probably had less of a need for nutrients fast forward to today 57 of our diets ultra processed and we're not getting enough nutrition through ultra processed food therefore we all need way more and then we don't need any of the sugars because we're consuming too much sugar it's way more available than it used to be 50 years ago like all these factors just play into how we need a totally different nutrient industry today to help people You mentioned at the start blood tests, and I feel like that's been a really positive, that's like a positive trend right now, is like the barrier to doing that and the awareness that that generates for individuals.

27:57Because I think individual profiles is very, like what someone needs is very different by person. I've certainly, I've done a couple, I do one like every six months. It's just interesting to see how that trends. It is. I mean, it's blown up in some regards, like lots of companies have come into it, but then it's kind of stalled in others. So it hasn't like become something that everybody does. and there's just a price barrier. Yeah. Like it's expensive, like a hundred quid for a full panel test and then you've got to prick your finger, it's painful, it's complicated. It's a bit of a faff. Like some people who are really into their health do it, but most people, when you're talking about the people that really need nutrition, they're the guys in Tesco and Sainsbury's and they want just a simple solution, which is why we built all our propositions around kind of, I wouldn't call hybrid, I'll call it hybrid personalized.

28:47So it's not true personalization for the N of one, but we're not just a generic like, okay, here's your vitamin C. We sit in that middle of like, what's your need? What's your problem? Which I think is the Zona and marketing as well. Exactly. It's like, what's your problem? Tell us what's going on with you. And then here's the solution that will fix it. Because arguably, if you've got a deficiency that means your immune system is struggling and you're catching loads of colds, if I give you our immunity which has 11 vitamins, minerals and plants in it for your immunity 99 % of the time that'll sort your problem out because we're not that different that what works for your immune system is different than what works for your immune system makes a lot of sense quick one from our sponsors if you've been in the game for any amount of time you know that your gross margin lives and dies by two things what you're paying for your product and how you reliably get it to your customers And for most founders, that back end, the sourcing, the manufacturing, the fulfillment is where margin quietly bleeds out.

29:51Bad suppliers, relationships, ballooning landed costs, shipments that miss the windows. It all adds up fast. That's exactly what Commersive is built to fix. They work with over a thousand e-commerce brands handling absolutely everything from sourcing, manufacturing and fulfillment. So you don't have to do any of it. And they're not just shipping domestically. They can get your products to customers in 65 plus countries worldwide. So whether you're scaling in the US, pushing into Europe or going global, they've got the infrastructure to handle it. The whole point is that you stop spending your time managing the backend and start spending it on the things that actually move the needle, whether that's the product, the marketing or the growth.

30:29So if you want to see what it actually costs, no commitment, no pitch, head to immersive.co and get a completely free quote. that's c-o-m-m-e-r-c-i-v-e dot co let the experts handle the back end so you can focus on actually building your brand. Commersive go check it out. How do you think since you started the brand and I guess you know the inflection of your mission I guess what how do you think the awareness has changed in the market and how far off do you think we need to be from from where it should be it's a great question i think the the exciting thing is it's massively changed in the last like few years i mean you only have to look at how hard m &s are going after like just ingredients that to see this is like started as a little social tiktok trend and now it's like mainstream all the press pick it up and talk about what's on food now like i'm quoting the daily mail all the time and they never even speak to me they just take our video and write an article about it you know the the book became a sunday times bestseller like it i think it's really transitioned from like a health trend to like a macro shift in culture which is hey wait a minute like i want to eat real food i don't want all this shit um so that for me is like incredibly exciting i still think there's a massive massive way to go like if you look in certain areas of the market it's still all junk and filled with crap and a lot of manufacturers are very slow to change and quite resistant to that change because their whole business is built around volume and just doing what they've always done and running the machines as efficiently as possible right so when they when it comes to changing their business they don't really want to do it um so yeah i think it's just an incredibly exciting time where you know i think we've got another five years to like really fix everything because there's so many areas that need fixing you mentioned mns did you see the mns product development product uh head of product development has started a tiktok where she she like she does a very similar style to you she just walks she's walking into mns and explaining like these new products that are in those like those ranges i've i have met her and um yeah we've we've spoken a few times because obviously we're just aligned in what we're doing and yeah um yeah i mean i think it's great she's getting out there and doing the video really cool um yeah i agree on that i think it's always interesting to see like this where we work with a number of supplement brands just like how the market evolves over time like we had green powders like holistic solutions i feel like we're now in this like need state focused persona driven mech like solutions to a specific problem we've then got like glp1 and the wave that's bringing through the industry of like fiber protein now coming in almost like full circle into a high quality protein been a massive product category again yeah just such a collagen and fast moving space i mean it's quite exceptional and i don't like even though i'm massively in it and at the kind of epicenter of it i don't know where it's going to go right like if you look at hydration and creatine as categories they've gone from i mean creatine was big before but in the like bodybuilding space no you never thought it'd have another level to go to almost when you thought about creating you would have never thought but then hydration as well it's like how many brands can the uk really sustain right because basically everyone's jumped into it and there's probably 15 to 20 companies going after it and there's not much differentiation between them so it's like how's that going to play out how big's the market going to get versus will some brands have to die away because there's just not enough to go around like i just don't know it's just crazy to see how fast it's going but you don't i don't know the tam i don't know the stats necessarily but you look at like the tam of creatine even like 12 months ago the being i mean you've probably been closer than myself but i've been fairly close to it from a research standpoint and seeing how it's gone from this you know very male gym supplement brand uh stereotypes to actually you know it's a massive cohort being like menopausal women as an example and and you know seeing all of these studies coming out but it fits it really supports huge amounts of different types of people is super super interesting i mean it's yeah it's fascinating it's but where does it go like how big does it get i mean creatine is the most researched supplement in the world ever because it had such a bodybuilding grounding for so long yeah which means it's it's backed it's legitimate the science is there like is there an argument everyone should be taking it well quite possibly because it works on a cellular level for your atp and energy production so it's like how far could it go right like i mean to some extent if you flip it on its head everyone drinks coca-cola which is just sugar and a bit of caffeine and they love the little feeling it gets and it tastes nice but why wouldn't everyone just drink creatine instead without the sugar i mean maybe like that i guess that's the argument of like to one of one side of how far could it actually go i don't know i guess what's exciting for you must be exciting for yourself is it feels like kids is a category is so underserved within that broader broader niche i feel like supplements is obviously booming but like the the amount of niche brands that are serving kids babies incredibly well like yourselves is is far less presumably because the barrier to entry regulatory like the process to do it it just takes more time and more thought that you've taken that step up yeah you have to be a bit more you know measured with what you're creating because you can't just make something and sell it and be like it's fine because it's not it's for kids you have to be responsible and the technology is harder to like make stuff that kids will like is palatable and is healthy and good right in adults you can kind of just put a powder in a sachet and off you go and maybe an adult will drink it because they think it's good for them whereas it doesn't work like that with kids so you've got to be much more focused on taste and i mean for me it's like the next generation need the most help out of anyone right like we're all old enough to choose health if we want to and we have an element of free will that if we're still drinking coca-cola well that's on you it's you know whatever but the kids like come on they're kind of they don't know what they don't know and if you feed them sugar and crap they're going to eat sugar and crap or if we just sort out what we give them then they'll develop a taste palette that wants healthier things isn't so sweet on on just that topic how are you approaching MPD?

37:22Because I think there's so many different verticals and areas you probably really want to tackle. How are you prioritizing that? And what does that process look like? It's the hardest question in my business because essentially with our social following, I could make bread and probably sell it as well as yogurt, as well as coffee, as well as vitamins, as well as everything else because more people know me for the social content than they do the thing. and I see so many brands now starting to really break category norms and bounds so you've got the likes of pure sport fizz and these supplement guys now going into rtd and drinks and that was a move that businesses would have never have touched like 10 years ago because it's quite a different dynamic a whole different business model like different margins different operating processes like it's difficult to do that kind of thing but barriers to entry getting lower and lower and lower with ai and social and how quick we can do stuff now so there's an element of my belief is if you fast forward long term like there's going to be so much just me too dross out there that my answer to that question is a i don't know i'm still trying to work it out um but b i think when something goes so crazy that everyone's just launching everything and you've got mayonnaise brands launching supplements like you the only thing you can do is be incredibly authentic and consistent and true to who you are as a brand like the brand values in essence of who you are and what you stand for get just more and more important because otherwise everyone's got a bit of everything and it's like which one do you choose i think it's also trying to i think you have to think about how your asset as a business is packaged if you're trying to sell to someone if you've got an exit plan of like long term it's like how does it fit into a strategic portfolio if you if you're just doing loads of things that don't sort of connect together in a tightly packaged proposition yeah because people are just chasing growth right they just want to see sales numbers so they're like right we'll launch this product we'll launch that product but does it fit your brand like there's so many examples of brands that have just you're looking at it going why why would you launch that i don't really want to call any of them out but you know like from you know mushroom stuff to like pure stuff or from like liposomol to non-liposomol powder and they're just all of a sudden doing everything and you're like what does your brand mean now yeah because if you've just diluted your core essence of what you stood for and what you're about like does the customer get it yeah and does a buyer get it as well if you're trying to sell it somewhere interesting that you i want to just touch on like the growth journey obviously you did the seed round um you got into retail relative really early especially for i feel like especially at that point like premium supplements in that sort in those sort of retailers hodden barrett being maybe an exception like boots tesco these more mainstream was it was like premium space it's It was hard to get into, right?

40:33And I feel like it still is quite difficult to penetrate. Yeah, the irony is I think retail is even easier than D2C. Because you've got the distribution. Yeah, but for me it's like a model that is quite easy to predict. Yeah. Like, you know, I get my listing and then I can pretty much within a plus or minus 10 % tell you what my sales are going to be for the next 12 months. Whereas with D2C it's like, okay, it's great today, let's scale. oh shit tomorrow it cracks through the roof what do I do um so I think it's easier than DTC and we had success early because I had a bit of a I had a retail background so I knew how to like solve the retailer's problem I wasn't coming in going hey I'm this cool brand you need to buy my product because I'm this cool brand I was going looking at your shelf this is how you're losing money this is how I can address a gap and this is how you can make more money and they go oh yeah okay let's do that um motivations yeah well yeah yeah i never sell to them i talk to them about how they can make more money and what did that look like i mean you know you have to understand retail a bit like terms like you know incremental trade up cash margin these sorts of retail terms of like okay i'll give you baby as an example if you're so no other supplement brand I've seen despite the explosion in wellness has gone after baby vitamins I think we're the only ones if you look at the data declining birth rates dead market like in decline everyone's losing nothing exciting going on there you know difficult customer to get you get them in at birth and then they maybe exit out after a year then there's like no lifetime value right so you look at all those things you're like no let's not go to baby but i looked at it from the lens of wait what they're doing is fundamentally wrong they're giving babies sugar and preservatives this is terrible i need to help my customer and fix that problem for them that's how i looked at it so we made it and so we made the uk's only baby vitamin with no sugar no sweetener no preservative like clean label and then we launched it as a test online only bought like 5 000 little bottles sold out within six weeks and we're like lead times are 12 so we were out of stock and then within a year it was in every retailer in the country and that was just like a testament to me understanding the dynamics of the retailer because yeah, that category's in decline, it's worth no money.

43:19So how do you Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, Morrison, how do you make more money out of that little piece of fixture? Because that's their job as the buyer. How do I make more money out of that bit of shape space? Well, look, you've got five brands all selling it at five, six pounds, all doing the same job. So the customer comes, they buy one, they walk away. Five pounds through your till. Put tonic there at 10 quid. and some of those people are going to switch into a 10 pound product instead of a five pound product and then you've doubled your cash margin going through your till and we've driven incremental value into your category because they're now spending 10 instead of five so that's the role we play in that category and you might go oh but it's a bit more expensive and it is but people will pay for quality for their kids as they should and that product's just now sitting alongside these institutional brands that have always been there like abidec well baby halibor orange that you know no one's innovated or done anything in that space for decades and we've come in and just got every retail listing because we know super interesting that's going to provide value to the retailer because they need something to happen in that space to make more money super interesting very intentional and very like thought out way of like handling those conversations i think a lot a lot of brands that we speak to or like maybe earlier in the journey see retail as a bit of a magic bullet as well i think at times and it's it's like you still have to do the the awareness the generation off channel to to drive through which i think you're really good at you have to work hard to make it work you don't just get it on the shelf and it works i mean we've seen a lot of you know brands come into retail and not perform and to the extent of you know like a wild nutrition big online great vitamin business can't say a bad word about them but they're very premium and then they come into Sainsbury's with a whole shelf of nutrition at 40 quid and everyone's used to spending five to ten and so that trade-up is too big for customers to stomach they're like i'm used to spending like five to ten pounds on a pack do i really want to spend four times that right now yeah so even though they've got a beautiful brand a great product whole shelf in sainsbury it's like the sales velocity is incredibly low compared to us yeah makes sense makes sense especially in that sort of customer demographic that are like you say used to just lower lower ticket items yeah so you did organic retail paid and then you've obviously started to do events as well i came down to the one in shoreditch which was super well orchestrated I think is the word the set up was yeah very impressive like the immersive experience do you believe that's the playbook in today's ecosystem do you think brands need to be omnipresent less reliant on paid really I know we've touched on organic enough but do you think events is like a big part of your strategy moving forward I think so because I think the kind of the thing for me is if you're just a DTC scale up and you're just pumping ads, pump ads, pump ads, are you really building a community?

46:34Are you really engaging with your audience in the way they would like to be engaged in if you're just sell, sell, sell all the time, all the time? And sure, it might work. And you do need paid ads and they're a huge driver of scale and awareness. But actually, don't you want to be part of your consumer's ecosystem and life? And so, yeah, we'd pump all the organic and then you're in retail. and basically the book that's always in my mind is How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp, which just simply basically was a mega study on how brands grow. And they clearly identified that the best thing to grow a brand isn't how much you spend, it's just physical distribution.

47:13Like the more people can see you in different places, the more they're going to become aware of you. So if you've got an opportunity to do organic social at scale and pump loads of videos, pump loads of videos, because that's a form of distribution, same thing as if I've got an opportunity to get a thousand new stores in a retailer that's a form of distribution that's going to grow my brand then events and in-person speaker events podcasts you know whatever it is it's another form of distribution of your content your brand and what you're doing so I think it all works really well together like you need to feel like you're a real brand you can be trusted you're authentic they can see you in a podcast and you can have an hour two hour conversation they can see you at an event that they can buy tickets to or they might see you in their feed or they might see you in a store or wherever and you just kind of like are omnipresent in their life whatever they're doing wherever they're going you're there i really resonate with this i resonate with the simplicity that that brings i guess to a strategy as well just like how do you get in front of people in more more more touch points and i think it's like you can either do more of something you can do it better or you can do a new channel it's like just applying that playbook over and over again in the business when it's hard because you can't do everything right it's prioritization you know we tested tiktok shop and you know it can do some sales but it didn't feel right for us because it's just sell sell sell discount discount discount and we're like wait but we're like an education first brand we want to help our community like this isn't really helping them so in some ways i'm 100 bullish on live shopping but the way it's being done on tiktok i'm totally anti and against so we haven't figured out how we do it and we basically just gone you know what we haven't got time to do that right now we'll focus on other things but i think it's like another really important channel to be in that mix you just have to do it in the right authentic way that fits who you are yeah i think that's why really knowing your mission and your values is super, super important because it will help direct some of those decisions.

49:19But what I love that, because it sounds like you're doing lots of different things and some people could say you're not focused, which is something we talk about a lot. However, I think what you've done really well is optimize channels. I mean, just from looking at the outside, like Organic as an example, you've really optimized that as a channel. You have a simple playbook that you've continued to execute on and then you've diversified at the right time versus i think what a lot of people listening don't we want them to do is like go away and suddenly just tomorrow do everything at once with and spread themselves to then and not do anything well yeah i mean you're absolutely right i'd say there's one small caveat to it which is like in the beginning it was a bit of do everything spray and pray see where you would get nuggets of like positive feedback and intent and then once we had that nugget it was like okay we're growing on tiktok and we're growing on instagram and so then we didn't do youtube and we just grew tiktok and instagram and we've ignored youtube until now and then now we're going okay we should probably think about building youtube because we've got these other two channels locked in we can keep that going let's expand out into youtube and now we've started youtube just this year and you know we're still finding our feet on it we're not exactly crushing it but we can see some green shoots of how we will because it's it's a whole another job and you yeah it's only now that we can go okay well we can hire another video editor who just does our videos for youtube because it's like a whole different job all of a sudden it's not a 40 50 second video it's like a 16 minute video and it's a lot more work that comes with it would you would you say and it's almost like the red bull model where you know you're not selling a product you're you're a media company that that is evoking some form of emotion whether that's education or entertainment and selling a product and and the product is secondary to that would you would you call yourself or do you see yourself moving more towards being an educational media company with the products as a i guess as a byproduct to that it's hard because we've had this conversation on our side and quite easily we could right i could probably charge 10 grand for a reel if i wanted to but then you lose your authenticity and for me the mission has always has been about fixing people's health and nutrition.

51:40And so if I'm true to that mission, what does getting 10 grand from Alpro do to me? It just conflicts my truth of what really is healthy, right? So if I become a media company, all of a sudden I need to sell out to all these big food brands that are selling shit, because that's what will make me the most revenue, right? Special K pay good money. The startup that's actually healthy doesn't. So we've basically taken the decision to not be a media company be totally unsponsored we don't take money and what we do then is we maintain that authenticity and we build a media platform for the sole purpose of hopefully we can commercialize that through product or someone buys my book or whatever and that's where we get our downstream like revenue because yeah obviously everyone needs to earn a living and I've got kids and mouths to feed as everyone else but we just want to do it in a different way so we can maintain that authenticity and trust basically nice yeah it makes total sense um we're approaching the end but we love to ask what does the end goal look like for you great question the the the funny one i always talk about is my ideal would be the day i can phone up the asa and tell them to take down Vitabiotics's kid and baby ad that says we're the number one trusted baby vitamin in the UK because it's on the back of all those buses and they say they're the number one and they're number one by volume of sales right because they're the biggest but they're not number one trusted they're not really the best at all they're the ones with all the crap in it and I'd love them to take down that ad when we're the number one and we're genuinely helping kids like that would be my personal mission because then I know we've fundamentally disrupted the industry to a point where we're number one so people have to start following us and if they start following us I know everyone's going to get a lot healthier because they're going to have to put max strength doses in without the junk and make people actually get the nutrition they need so for me that's my you know personal mission I know a lot of founders will always talk about the the exit and the that day but the more I you know don't get me wrong when I was 25 I was all about like I want to make money and that but now like the more I realized I was like that isn't really what the goal is like sure it would be nice you one day exit and you can take it a bit more easy and whatever but really the goal is what you're doing like you're on a mission like I love this job it's the journey that's exciting I've heard lots of stories from other founders who have had that exit and then go into like major depression because all of a sudden everything you've stood for for five to ten years just doesn't exist you're out you're not on that mission anymore and that's you know in a way it's a scary day as much as we've got investors and to pay the investors back at some point there should be an exit or a liquidity event really the mission for me is the mission and i want to smash this journey as best as i can and give it my all yeah it's like It's like that thing where if you stripped everything out and no one needed to earn money, what really are we left with?

55:01It's like connection and purpose. So yeah, what you described there is purpose, right? Yeah, and having the connection to the great team we've built. I enjoy working with our whole team. We've got a great culture. There's no bullshit, no politics. And yeah, as long as you're still enjoying it, why would you want it to change? But inevitably with the way, you know, the industry is set up and the way things will go, it will at some point. But yeah, the end point for me is like, I can phone up and say, sorry, that Vitabiotics ad can't exist anymore. I think that's a really good place to end. Yeah, poignant and powerful, powerful mission.

55:40But yeah, thank you so much for coming on, son. I really appreciate it. Pleasure. Really interesting. Where can people find you? All over social, just at Tonic Health or our website's tonichealth.co, really easy. simple yeah very simple just shoot us a message or you know we're happy to always answer our dms and help people with health questions or whatever um and help other startups doing the right things you know if people send me product it's not that i want free product but if i learn about new brands that are good like i'm more than happy to go and do videos for them to help them because i believe like good food and good health needs to be promoted more um yeah so yeah and then you got Ollie that turned up with a Diet Coke I know you found some shots of it though I could have it's your podcast so I wanted to be nice that's the only thing we had in the office I saw you giving it a side I'm usually a Dashwater man I'm still sponsored Dashwater is much better though but I mean that's the thing right like it's funny how a lot of podcasts and a lot of like celebrities are like I know we can't we're not sponsored by them or we can't talk about this and I just find it crazy like we're allowed to talk about anything we're just people right yeah it's a brand it's in our life like okay I'm not getting paid to promote Dash but they make great drinks but then so do some of the kombucha brands and so do like Trips a good product like great like who cares saw someone explain this is fridge cigarettes the other day and I was like just stop with me but I'll still carry on drinking it but yeah no the video I saw about the fridge cigarette was where you mix coke with coffee and fizzy water that was what he said that was wild I saw it but it was so crazy that was like I'm intrigued to try it but yeah don't like coke obviously cool thank you well yeah thank you so much for coming on if you enjoyed this please subscribe comment down below give us a like and we will see you on the next episode