Holly Brooke and Joely Walker did not imagine they would quit their director level careers in beauty to self-fund a digestive health supplements start-up, but they are pleased that they followed their passion after a successful first month of sales.
The former commercial director for Skin Rocks and beauty director at Grazia magazine launched We Are Regular four weeks ago with the aim to deliver an all-in-one solution for constipation.
The idea was borne of a personal battle with chronic constipation, leading to a reliance on 30 daily pills to keep symptoms under control.
“I’ve suffered with constipation my whole life,” Brooke told NutraIngredients. “I went to the doctor when I was 17 and told him I was only going around once a week, and he simply said I had IBS and I should have more fiber and water.”
That was the beginning of a 15-year battle for answers and solutions to a ‘debilitating’ issue.
“I didn’t realize at the time, but now I can see how many different aspects of health it impacted,” Brooke said. “For starters, having toxins sat in your gut has a huge impact on your mental state, so I constantly had brain fog.
“It also had a huge impact on my hormones. I had them tested and discovered my estrogen was really high because it wasn’t excreting in the usual way, so was recycling round my system, which was again massively impacting my mental health.
“My cortisol level was also scarily high which meant I was always in fight or flight mode. I would jump out of bed in the morning on high alert, but I’d crash at lunchtime.”
After paying for consultations with a range of health experts and naturopaths, Brooke concocted her own solution which amounted to 30 daily supplements, costing up to £400 every month.
This immediately signalled an innovation opportunity for Walker.
“We went out to lunch one day, and she started popping all these pills,” Walker told NI. “I said that is not okay to need to take all those just to function. It made sense to me that we must be able to combine the ingredients she had found so helpful into one daily solution.”
They developed a powder supplement to be added to water to create a greens drink containing the 10 key ingredients that Brooke had found relieving: L-Glutamine, gluten-free barley grass powder, magnesium citrate, calcium ascorbate, amla fruit extract, acerola, ginger, peppermint, grapeseed and rosehip.
The product is sold in stick packs to allow for convenient use when out and about.
Importance of ‘poo pals’
They decided to direct their packaging and marketing towards females, partly because this audience is more likely to suffer from constipation than men and partly because there is a bigger ‘poo taboo’ in this market, which the businesswomen were keen to dispel.
“We know through speaking to lots of people on the street as part of our social media campaigns that loads of women feel shame around this topic,” Walker said.
“They are more likely to hold it in at work, while men are more likely to say ‘why wouldn’t I choose to be paid to sit on the toilet’. We wanted to build an empowering community for people and a really safe space for women to feel no shame.”
Brooke added: “I know if you find others who suffer constipation—your poo pals—you do talk about it a lot with them because it’s a relief to find someone who has experienced it, and it’s a relief to not feel the shame.”
Their social media campaigns have been hugely successful thanks to the founders’ personable approach to the topic, as well as the wider trend, with the hashtag #pooptok trending on TikTok.
Winning regular customers
To ensure they launched with a bang last month, Walker used her editorial contacts to coordinate features across national newspapers leading to thousands of product orders within their first few weeks.
“We’ve had so many repeat purchases already, and we can already feel the pace at which the brand is growing which is very exciting,” Walker said.
Looking to the future, the eager entrepreneurs want to extend their product portfolio to support key audiences who cannot use the flagship product.
“We get so many parents asking if their children can take the product,” Brooke said. “We’re sorry that they can’t due to the doses, so we’d love to create a product children can take.
“And pregnant women so often suffer constipation, but they can’t take it, then there are people on GLP-1s and other medications, people post-surgery or C-section. There are so many people who are calling out for a product like this, so we will aim to help as many people as we can.”
