How to create your own supplement brand – with Leslie Kenny – Oxford Healthspan

Welcome to the Bring Your Product Idea to Life podcast.

This is the podcast for you if you're getting started selling

products, or if you'd like to create your own product to sell.

I'm Vicki Weinberg, product creation coach and Amazon expert.

Every week I share friendly, practical advice as well as inspirational

stories from small businesses.

Let's get started.

Hi.

Today on the podcast I've been speaking to Leslie Kenny.

Leslie is the founder and CEO of Oxford Healthspan, an anti-aging supplement

brand that contains spermidine, a potent organic compound, inhibits

six of the nine hallmarks of aging.

She's also a co-founder of Oxford Longevity, which brings together

scientific experts to discuss latest breakthroughs in health and aging.

By providing free public health webinars.

I had a really interesting conversation.

That's all my conversations are with Leslie.

Um, we spoke a lot about aging, as you can imagine, and we also

spoke about her product, how she, you know, how she discovered it.

We spoke about the supplements in her wellness industry in general.

Well, as wellness, we spoke about running a business that spans multiple countries.

All in all, it was a really fascinating conversation and I

cannot wait for you to hear it.

So I would love now to introduce you to Leslie.

So, hi Leslie.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you so much for having me.

Oh, you're so welcome.

So can we start with you?

Please give an introduction to yourself, your business, and what you sell.

Sure.

My name is Leslie Kenny.

I'm founder and c e o of Oxford Healthspan.

We're an Oxford England based nutraceutical company selling molecules

that slow aging and help us live our best lives in the second half of life.

These are all molecules studied at the University of Oxford, and my mission

is really to inspire, educate, empower, and equip men and women who are in

their forties, fifties, sixties and beyond, to get these molecules, which

have been scientifically researched at the lab bench into their homes

and their lives and their protocols now, so they can make a difference.

Whereas most of these molecules are going to be used by the pharmaceutical

industry, and they're going to have to be synthetic chemicals researched

for another 17 years or so before they actually reach the mainstream.

I've brought food derived molecules to market, which are safe and which

we can actually use right now.

Wow, that's really interesting.

There's, gosh, there's a lot in that.

So, before, I would love to talk more about your products and, and what's

in them, but what I'd love to touch on quickly, you mentioned that the

pharmaceutical industry will take another 17 years to get these products to market.

How are you able to do it so quickly?

Well, so we're using food derived molecules and

food can't be patented, right?

You can't patent an orange, and yet we know that there is vitamin C in there.

Now, if you are a pharmaceutical company, you want to only use synthetic

patented molecules, and because those have, the safety profile has not

yet been proof for those molecules you need to do clinical trials.

And those can take, say, 10 years.

And then even for those molecules to come to the attention of a pharmaceutical

company, it can take another seven years from the time these molecules

are discovered at the lab bench to the time they come to the attention

of, say, a pharmaceutical company.

And these clinical trials are very ex.

Expensive.

They're very needed because we don't want another thalidomide.

Those viewers who are a bit older may remember the anti-nausea drug that was

given to pregnant moms in the fifties and sixties to to stop nausea, and it

resulted in a lot of birth defects, especially in Great Britain and in the US.

These molecules have got to prove efficacy and safety to the fda.

They're very costly, and that means that those molecules will be expensive

and the profits will go back to the pharmaceutical companies that sponsor

those trials, which is, that makes sense.

They put the money up for the r and d, but it does mean that there's a disconnect

from the time we learn about the value of a molecule to the time it gets

into the hands of the everyday person.

It can be 17 years, that's the average.

And as a patient, I remembered researching for my own diseases, which were rheumatoid

arthritis, lupus, and Hashimotos.

What are the things that I can do to actually make a dent in these illnesses?

And some of them were in foods, so things like curcumin in

turmeric or omega-3 fish oils.

And so these are the types of things that we want to really

make available to people.

And we also want them to know that they are the quality standard because

supplements are an unregulated industry.

It is a bit of the wild west out there.

Thank you so much for explaining all of that,

and I, I'm sorry to ask you to jump into all that detail first.

No, it's just, that's fine.

When you mentioned that, I just thought that is really interesting.

But it's also scary to think about how synthetic, a lot of the

supplements we have might be then.

Well, yes, the vast majority of supplements in the

market come from China and India because those are very low-cost

countries in which to manufacture.

That does not mean that they are not good.

Obviously, synthetic vitamin C, oric acid, it has been shown to be proven useful,

and many of those will be perfectly fine.

But for new molecules that we don't know anything about how they actually interact

with our biology over a longer period of time, that is something that would

concern me as a patient and I would like to then make use of where they occur

naturally in high amounts in nature.

And I remember having a conversation with someone at the University spin out group.

He said, oh, well that's not interesting because there's no patent to protect it.

And I said, I'm a patient and I think it's interesting to me if it's

going to make a meaningful difference in my life and with my condition.

So one of the things that the molecules that we've brought to market so far do

is they're both anti-inflammatories.

I think we can all understand that omega-3 is an anti-inflammatory.

Curcumin in turmeric is an anti-inflammatory, but they also

trigger something called, Autophagy, and that comes from the Greek auto

self and Fiji, which means eating.

And it's literally a process of recycling and renewal that

our cells can do on their own.

It's kind of like your oven can clean itself if you press a little button.

And when we're young, that process of autophagy works really well

because we have a certain molecule that we produce in our tissues and

in our gut biome in high quantities.

And that molecule has a really strange name.

Don't be put off by it.

It's called spermidine.

And as we get older, our production of it goes down just like our production of

estrogen and progesterone and testosterone and melatonin goes down as we get older.

The same thing happens with spermadine and we can, however, get it in our diet

from plants and all plants make it because it's so important to the survival of the

next generation of the plant that they put it in high quantities in the endo sperm,

there's that word again, of the plant.

So in the seed, basically.

And that's why also we find it in semen and sperm.

It's also in very high quantities in breast milk because again, it's for

the survival of the next generation.

And spermidine, it is a really terrible name.

It's a marketer's name.

It is incredibly important.

We all make it.

Our dogs and cats make it.

All the plants you see make it, but some plants make it in

higher quantities than others.

And so beans like soybeans, they manufacture it in high quantities.

And if you ferment it, then that amount increases.

Wheatgerm has it in high quantities, and we have a gluten-free version

that comes from a very unique strain of chlorella that happens to have

it in naturally high quantities.

And we've brought that to.

With another molecule called, nobiletin, that sounds a lot better.

And nobiletin is in the peel of citrus fruit.

Uh, so things like bergamo, you know, which we have in Earl Gray Tea, but

we get ours from Okinawa, where it is in the peel of an Okinawan lime that

has been used for hundreds of years.

And longevity elixir in traditional Japanese campo medicine.

We didn't know why it worked in that formulation, but now we do

because we have identified nobiletin.

So those are the products that we've brought to market so far.

They trigger autophagy and they're anti-inflammatory, so they'll help slow

down nine of the 12 hallmarks of aging.

Well thank you so much and thank you for explaining.

My question was going to be, what are they good for?

So thank you for explaining that . I also didn't realize that these are

molecules, obviously, I read up a little bit about your products before we spoke.

I didn't actually realize that these molecules we have inside us already and

that production just slows down as we age.

I think that's really interesting thing, and I guess is it because

they haven't been launched by a big pharmaceuticals company that many

of us haven't heard about them?

Is that generally how it works?

We don't become as aware of something until it's mass produced.

Does.

Do you see what I mean?

Yeah.

I mean, you do need the marketing muscle of a large company, a large

corporate, to really get word out and educate the public about the

benefits of some of these molecules.

I'm sure that a lot of people weren't thinking about vitamin D until government

and companies started putting out the word about this during, you know, the pandemic.

So it's the same with spermadine.

There are a couple of things.

Spermidine is uh, part of a class of molecules known as polyamide, and

those have been studied for decades.

Prize in medicine or physiology was granted to a Japanese scientist for

explaining the mechanism of action of autophagy, and we suddenly realized,

oh, actually the body has this amazing innate wisdom to heal itself.

The cells can actually make themselves new again.

And then the fact that spermidine triggered autophagy became a big deal.

But before that time, nobody thought very much about it.

And as a result of all of this attention to autophagy, spermidine

there are different pathways down, which we age has become more visible.

So I think we've all heard of stem cells and the importance of them.

And some of them might have heard about telomeres, which are

the in caps of our chromosomes.

So they allow our DNA to, uh, for cells to replicate again and again.

And maybe some of us have heard about mitochondrial dysfunction and each

one of those is a hallmark of aging.

When our telomeres get shorter, when our stem cells stop functioning properly,

when mitochondria don't work so well.

And there are an additional nine hallmarks of things like inflammation,

gut dysbiosis or microbiome imbalance and poor autophagy and spermidine

happens to inhibit nine of the 12.

So that has actually been shown by scientists and we're sort of waiting

to see if they actually help with the other three, but because there's a lot

of crosstalk between these hallmarks, if spermidine can do the heavy lifting

with nine, it gives your body a bit of a rest so it can deal with the other three.

If you see what I mean.

Yeah, I do see what you mean.

The reason for asking the question, I was just reflecting on the fact

that it does feel like a shame that we, we as consumers become aware

that we need to have a certain vitamin or molecule, whatever it is.

Often we are then getting the synthetic version.

That's what I was reflecting on, that.

Oh.

Because by this time we find out that we need it.

Yeah.

Do you know what I mean?

I just, that is a shame, isn't it?

Yeah.

For a consumer that I guess that there is any option once you become aware

of something to look at where it's sourced and look at where it comes from.

Yeah, I think that's right.

And you know this, we saw this happen with coffee previously, people didn't

think very much about sort of how clean their coffee was or pure it was.

They weren't thinking about mycotoxins in it or whether or not it was mouldy.

And over the last few years I've seen more emphasis on cleanliness, purity, adhering

to high standards, testing beforehand.

I see more consumers buying organic or wanting to purchase things locally, and

so they are becoming more discerning.

Right.

And I think women in particular, because many of us have families, for whom

we end up being the, the main grocery purchasers for, or we, many of us do

at least half the household burden.

We want to put what's best for our family on the table, and we do become discerning.

We do educate ourselves because it's not just for us, you know, we

want good stuff for our families.

What's great about spermidine is you don't have to take it as a supplement.

You can just get it in your diet.

The only issue is that in Great Britain and in the United States,

we simply don't get enough.

So if you look at, say, the traditional diet in Okinawa, which is an island

off of the southern coast of Japan and one of the so-called longevity blue

zones, they actually get huge amounts of spermidine in their diet a day.

Around 50 milligrams or more.

Here in Great Britain and in the United States, we get eight milligrams

from our daily diet on average.

It's not very much, and that's why just having a bit of a top up and

having a standardized dose that you know you will get every day in the

form of a supplement is helpful.

And that's essentially what we're doing in the, in one of our products, we include

a prebiotic to help your gut biomes own innate ability to produce this substance.

It helps potentiate that.

So, you know, that's a whole nother thing.

So many of us have been exposed to broad spectrum antibiotics that we've killed

off the bad bugs, but we've also killed off some of the good bugs in the process.

And what that particular product Primeadine original is to do, it

has a prebiotic really to help bring that production back online again.

So work with the body.

Thank you Leslie, and you touched on this briefly before,

but what was it that inspired you to create your own supplements brand?

Because it seems to me like a huge undertaking.

Honestly, I didn't want to.

I had been fundraising for University of Oxford spin outs, only in regenerative

medicine and because I had been told at age 39 that I had five years

So I've outlived my diagnosis by 13 years.

I was very interested in regenerative medicine.

I was looking at companies that were doing stem cells.

Looking at circadian rhythm, things like this, and someone at the university

said, Hey, I know that this isn't ever going to go anywhere, but there's

someone in immunology and rheumatology who's doing some fascinating research

on something called spermidine and how it helps with the immune system.

Now, as a former rheumatoid arthritis patient, I immediately was curious and

went to meet the scientist, and we also happened to have friends in common.

My old Berkeley roommate was someone that she had actually, you

know, been a colleague, Gavin in France and we just got to talking.

I was doing more research and I thought, this is an amazing molecule.

It is ubiquitous in the plant kingdom, in mammals, us humans.

If it is in sperm and it is in breast milk in high quantities, it has

got to be important to human life.

Why is it that babies have such high quantities of it?

So I did some more digging and I just thought, this is really

too good to be true, because it was good for cognition in humans.

They had done those, those trials, the animal studies showed

just really fantastic results.

I won't go through those things because I don't want to be making any claims

here, but it's definitely correlated with longer healthspan and lifespan.

I said to the fellow at the university spin out arm, Hey,

I think this is fantastic.

Would you guys fund me?

And he said, no.

I mean, it's a great, it's a great molecule, but there's no patent behind it.

And we only fund things that have patents behind them.

And I said, I don't know, Coca-Cola doesn't have a patent.

And Elon Musk says he hates patents because you've got to hire an army

of patent attorneys to defend them.

Have you ever heard of a brand, I mean, Oxford kind of.

Some name brand appeal overseas.

People have actually heard of the name Oxford before.

What if we just create a brand that stands for the highest quality standards, the

most pure molecules and very efficacious.

And so I decided when he said, well, we don't do that, I decided, I'd

just go out there and do it myself.

This was also during the pandemic, and I remember speaking to Professor Katcha

Simon, professor of immunology at Oxford, and said, I don't know, is this the right

time to bring this product to market?

And she said, Leslie, we need this.

People need this more than ever, because they've shown that in elderly

mice with elderly immune cells.

It rejuvenates those immune cells.

So she said this has to get out there.

So I decided to bring it to market and you know, first is a proof of

concept, very tentative steps, and it just kind of took off from there.

To be honest, it has a bit of a life of its own.

Thank you.

So how many years did it take to get the product to market?

Well before the pandemic, I had actually gone to visit

manufacturers in the United States.

As you can probably tell from my accent, I am from the US.

I'm originally from Southern California.

We do take a lot of supplements.

Americans, 90% of all Americans take vitamin supplements and minerals,

and so I always wanted the US to be the target and had identified a

manufacturer in the US and I would be shipping in my raw material from Japan.

So I'd sourced the raw material.

Had done all of the testing in the labs for purity.

Found the manufacturer.

I just hadn't pressed play.

And so in April I pressed play.

By the third week of June, we had a product, and then it

was really direct to consumer.

Again, this is just proof of concept.

Let's just get something out there.

I remember that the first day that we launched a girlfriend of mine in San

Francisco bought our first bottle, which was sweet, you know, showing support.

And initially as the orders came in, I remember seeing just people I knew.

And you do watch those orders like a hawk when they come in because you're

thinking this is amazing, right?

But they are all your friends.

And then I do remember that time when the name started coming in and I thought, I

have no idea who any of these people are.

That's exciting, isn't it?

The first order from someone you don't know.

Yeah, exactly.

It really is.

And I remember when Carol Vorderman, the broadcaster started following us

and she's very, very open and public about the fact that she loves our

supplement and takes it herself and has done for, you know, the last sort

of two years, and I didn't recognize the name when she started to follow us.

Our head of marketing said, Hey, do you know who this person is?

And it was, you know, could see Carol Vorderman.

And I said, oh, we should offer her some free product, you know, to try.

And we offered it to her and she said, oh thanks, but you don't need to do that

because I'm already on it and I love it.

And I thought, how did that happen?

But she hadn't used that name to buy the product.

So as a result, I didn't know.

And that was kind of serendipitous and I sort of felt at that point,

okay, now we're onto something.

Right.

Oh, that's amazing.

And did you launch in the UK and the US at the same time?

Well, that's the beauty of Shopify, right?

You know, we are a Shopify platform company and you can, if you happen to have

a third party logistics provider in the countries where, you know, the internet

goes everywhere, if you have a logistics provider there to deliver the product

and store the product in a warehouse, you can go to market there very easily.

So we worked with a third party logistics company that happened

to have a warehouse in the UK.

Several in the US and so it was actually very easy to to do that.

Amazing.

I'm just wondering, is there any difference between how you can talk about

your product in either country or market?

Yes.

There is.

It's a different market, isn't it?

There is.

There is.

So in the UK we manufacture in the UK, specifically for the UK

market because there are rules and regulations that are different.

There are some more tests that you need to do on purity and safety.

We actually run those in the US as well.

So we sort of adhere to traditional European standards in the US as well, but

the labels need to be done differently.

And so you do need to know.

So yes, our manufacturer here does work with us to make sure

that the label is up to spec.

And we also manufacture in the EU for exactly the same reasons.

Because of the different regulations, we have a totally different label,

again, to meet those local regulations.

That's really interesting.

Thank you.

And am I right in thinking that in the UK the requirements are much

stricter than in many other places?

I think actually Canada has the highest

standards, to be really honest.

Yeah, I'd say Canada, toughest possibly in the world.

Then after that, I'd say the EU in Britain, and I believe we are not

part of the EU, but the rules and regulations that we still have, I

believe our EU rules and those are strict, and Japan maybe after that.

So.

Yeah.

I just wondered.

That's really interesting.

Thank you.

Yeah, because I'm, I imagine that you've made it sound so straightforward, um,

it sounds like an absolute minefield, creating lots, essentially the

same product, but to sell globally.

Yeah.

We did smaller batches for the UK and the EU.

Again, we were just trialing it and seeing would this actually fly.

That was very time consuming.

The EU and UK were time consuming, but we're a British company and therefore we

really wanted to be in the home market.

But Brits are not as open to the idea of supplements as the Americans are,

and not all of them have the same idea about healthcare that Americans do.

I think because of the fact that healthcare is free here, there are some

people who believe that it is up to the NHS to take care of their healthcare.

But I think we've seen with the pandemic that we do need to take

some personal responsibility.

So I think that's changing.

Whereas in the United States, you know, if you don't have

insurance, it's all up to you.

The buck stops with you.

And so there are a lot of people who are very incented to stay healthy

and to take preventative measures so that they don't have to pick up the

pieces when things fall apart later.

Whereas here, the NHS is kind of there to pick up the pieces as it were.

That really makes sense.

And I guess, was it, I don't want to say harder, but was it different

selling the product in the UK and making people aware of it and the benefits,

was that a different job too in the US?

Say where people, as you say, take a lot of supplements anyway and um, I don't

want to say more educated, but possibly a bit more informed about some of the

things you can take to stay healthy.

I think there's.

Yeah, I think there's more interest in the US than any of the Western markets.

Like I said, 90% of the population takes supplements.

That's huge.

If you think about it, children taking supplements, right?

So the habit starts early and I remember as a five-year-old taking, you

know, Flintstone supplements, right?

Chewables.

But one thing that I encountered was around the idea of slowing aging.

So if you mentioned this to baby boomers in the United States,

they will say, fantastic.

I like the idea of that, and they're very keen to explore the

possibility of slowing aging.

Really looking at each of those 12 pathways down, which we age, like

inflammation, gut dysbiosis, lack of autophagy, poor stem cell function,

and saying, okay, what do I do to help that or stop that here in the UK?

I remember early on I had people say, and perhaps it's just Oxford.

Why do you want to stop aging?

You know, stiff upper left, you know, that is inevitable.

It's foolish to think that we can stop aging and also

that's unethical to stop aging.

So it was quite a learning experience there for me.

On the issue of the ethics of slowing aging, it has nothing to

do with living 200 or never dying.

It's not at all about that.

I'm an older mother.

I gave birth to my youngest daughter.

43.

She was my first biological birth.

I adopted my first daughter and I had done five IVFs and donor eggs and

you know, had basically thrown in the towel on having a biological child.

When I had her at 43, my first thought was, I have to live a long

time, but I have to live healthily.

So for me, health Healthspan is about being around for my children and their

families and really being able to not be a burden to them or to society.

Being healthy enough to also give back.

And so my argument on extending health span is I just want people to

be healthier, take some pressure off the NHS, have people be vital and

vibrant as they get older so they can contribute and really, so they can do

things like I'm doing, start a business.

I started my business.

I was already 55 when I started . This is not normally a time when you think,

okay, go for a startup and commit to working long hours and on the weekend,

but I have the energy to do it, and I'd love everybody else to have that too.

That's great.

Thank you.

And I agree with you.

I mean, for me, one thing I take really seriously, in fact, I think like you say,

perhaps more since becoming a mother, is I want to be healthy as long as possible.

I don't think it's necessarily about living as long as possible.

Yes.

But for the years I am alive, I want to be healthy and active and be able

to move my body in, in whatever way you can, but you know what I mean?

Exactly.

Feel independent.

Yeah.

And I feel like that's becoming something that more and more people are aware of

and talking about, which I think is good.

Yeah, exactly.

We all want to know who our family members are, have our cognitive abilities so

that we can, you know, use the phone, walk down the street and not get lost.

Right?

Go to the grocery store and not think, now why did I come here?

Or Where are my car keys?

Things like this.

We want that functionality and we want mobility and independence

and not to be a burden.

For me, if I could, ideally everything would stop all at once and I would

live vitally with all my faculties, with my mobility until the very last

minute and then it would just stop.

I agree.

That's exactly what I would like.

And um, also, am I right in thinking, Leslie, that you split

your time between the UK and the US, like physically at the moment?

There are times of the year when I travel a lot, and I am not in the

US probably as much as I ought to be.

My girls are still here in the uk.

My eldest is A level year, so it's a very important year.

Right.

And my youngest will start her G C S E program next year.

So, So I do need to be in Britain, but the US is the market

and I'm very attuned to it.

I have folks in the US and in the US time zone, and I am up unfortunately

later than I should be because you know of that orientation.

But actually at the moment I'm able to do quite a lot being based in Britain.

And I think that's also something for anyone who wants to do business

in Britain and export it to the or have a business in the US.

It's possible, you know, you can get a manufacturer in the US but run it

from Britain and it's a lovely country to live in and work in I think.

That's really good to hear because I did wonder, you

know, it sounds like your business is growing and it's obviously global,

so I wondered if there were, you know, any impacts of that on you.

And it sounds like they are actually quite minimal.

I mean, I don't want to underplay the amount of work you must have done to

get to the point where you can run your business from anywhere in the world.

Yeah.

Don't imagine that was a small task, but it's good to hear that now that you know,

you can be in the UK most of the time.

Yeah.

And you know, your business runs globally.

Yeah, I mean, Brexit was, you know, I won't mince words.

It was not good for small international businesses.

It has meant that we are not able to achieve economies of

scale in Europe because I have to manufacture in the UK and in the EU.

My warehouses, I have to have located, you know, I have to have

two separate operations essentially.

And that is a drain on resources, and it makes us, frankly, less competitive.

But we can cope at least for the time.

We're able to cope and you know, it's working out okay.

That's good to hear.

So I have one final question, Leslie, which I ask everyone who comes on.

What would your number one piece of advice be for other product creators

or aspiring product creators?

Have passion and purpose.

If you don't have passion and purpose about the products that you're

bringing to market, when things get tough, and they inevitably will, and

there will be nights when you don't get sleep and things won't go right.

I remember an FDA inspection in Miami where I had to stay up all night

getting all of our documentation to the inspectors, and we passed

of course, but it was stressful.

You have to really believe in what you're doing so that you can bring it.

You have to bring it every single day.

There will be days when things don't go your way and you still have got

to say, no, I believe in this 110%.

And that, I think when you're also talking to retailers and to partners

and to podcasters like you, or to the press, they can sense it.

Does this person really walk their talk?

Do they live and breathe?

Do they love it?

Would they recommend it to their mother, their father,

their sister, their daughter?

In our case, even our dogs.

Yes.

You know, you have got to have that belief and be mission driven.

So thank you so much for everything that you shared with us today.

You're so welcome and thank you very much for letting me

have a chat with you and sharing my story with other entrepreneurs.

And I hope if they go away with one thing, it's that it's never too late.

And if you're 55 or older, this is what I call the new prime of

life and just get on with it.

You'll be surprised at what you can achieve.

I think that's really inspiring.

Thank you.

You're so welcome.

Thank you so much for listening right

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