We recently met up at the Science Museum in London with Joe Welstead one of the founders of Motion Nutrition, to have a quick chat about his burgeoning Nootropics company, here’s what he had to say.
How did Motion Nutrition start?
I was a professional swimmer and competed in Scotland in the commonwealth games in 2014. Before that, I trained in Scotland full time for 25 hours a week for a good while. As an Athlete, I began looking for supplements that were healthy and would help me compete at looking for supplements that would get me to maximum performance but also maximum health. However, in the process of this search, I found that the majority of supplements were of low quality.
I bought a bunch of stuff from the US and other places, and it was always the same, most of the time, packaging was only slightly better, and the products were all the same.
The even weirder thing I discovered is most people didn’t care as long as they received the performance boost, whereas I was interested in supplements that were healthy but would also give me a performance boost. So, after competing in the commonwealth games, I decided to look into creating supplements that would be beneficial to health and also give a performance boost both mentally and physically.
Then in 2015, I founded Motion Nutrition with my business partner (Charlie Matthews), since very early on, we’ve been working with some of the very best nutrition scientists in the world (many based in London). We found these amazing people with all this knowledge and began to formulate products and went into a period of market testing. Since then the company has grown insanely fast, and my business partner and I keep looking at each other to see if we’re missing something or this is really happening.
How many investment rounds have you done to date?
Initially, we did a few small Angel rounds (up to SEIS) to amp up production. Then a year later we raised £600K, which allowed us to launch our Nootropics and upgrade the packaging, the change in packaging has which has supported growth. Now we’re looking at a bridging round or going straight to series A to support growth activities.
What’s your distribution?
We’re available through motionnutrition.com and in the process of launching our amazon store. With our products, we want to make it as easy as possible for people to purchase, so our Nootropics are also stocked in Holland & Barrett and other supplements stores.
We also have a three-day trial pack which allows people to test our product before purchasing a monthly supply, this trial pack although doesn’t make any margin has really helped us get people to trial and move onto the main product.
What differentiates Motion Nutrition products from other supplements?
Many supplement /nutrition companies in their products only follow the minimum guidelines set by the government to avoid illness. We take the opposite approach and focus on optimising performance and health. For instance, if you look at our Power Up Day Time Nootropic, we have 16,000% RDA on Vitamin B12, that’s because that’s the level where you see improvements.
Long term with our company and our products our aim is reach as many people as possible and make a health/performance difference to people’s lives. In my eyes, if your product is making a difference for people, making them feel better – then you’re going in the right direction.
