Athlete Vitamin Story. Part 1. A Fresh Approach.

Our Athlete Vitamin took over a year to create, manufacture, and bring to market. Here's the story from beginning to end.

Creating a vitamin product with the goal of providing value for the athlete was something we started thinking about roughly six months after we launched Tier 1. Based upon the consumer response to Tier 1, we felt there was a demand, a need rather, for sports nutrition products that focused on essentials and bringing things back to the basics.

In researching the various multivitamins sold on the market, we saw that the status quo was to include as many vitamins and minerals into a single serving as possible. The problem with this approach was that nearly every product we looked at contained below optimal doses of key vitamins and minerals commonly deficient in athletes.

Our approach when it comes to supplements is to focus on the ingredients that matter - and then provide them in the right amounts. Executing on the basics isn't as glitzy as loading products with bells and whistles - and being great at a few things doesn't look all that flashy from afar. But that's okay with us, because our goal is to provide lasting solutions.

As we continued digging we started to firmly believe that a vitamin product geared towards athletes and those that took training very seriously would be useful. The key would be zeroing in on which vitamins and minerals were important, especially with the physical limitations of each pill, and then providing them in proper doses. 

Here is an excerpt from Examine.com that summarizes nicely what we came across in our research:

*Examine.com is among the best resources we know when it comes to evaluating supplements and the scientific research behind them. You can learn more about them and their team here. 

We saw that the prevailing thought was that multi-vitamins were viewed as "cheap insurance" for those eating a less than ideal diet. We understand that there is a place for this, as a large portion of the population does not eat a perfectly balanced diet. Here's something the venerable Alan Aragon said to this regard. 

However, with our vitamin product we wanted to be much more than "cheap insurance." We take a very hands-on approach when doing research, and in performing our analysis of the multivitamin category it became very clear that the vast majority of products on the market were under dosed on key vitamins and minerals commonly deficient in athletes. Here are some screenshots of our competition analysis so you can see how we evaluated current products.

Simplicity has always been a core principle for us, and when you stand for something decisions become obvious. Instead of cramming a laundry list of vitamins and minerals into a bottle and then marketing it as a cure-all, we wanted to focus on providing the ones that mattered to athletes.

Vitamin and mineral deficiencies can wreck havoc on achieving and maintaining optimal performance, and we knew right off the bat this was something we wanted our product to address. A fresh approach was in order and we were ready to get to work.

The next step was to nail down which vitamins and minerals we wanted this product to include.

Part 2. The Formulation.