Today we’d like to introduce you to Alex Brewer, PharmD.
Alex, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I got into supplements at age 18 and I LOVED them. I started buying different pre-workouts because I was convinced they were going to make me huge. I bought whatever was hyped on Bodybuilding.com because that’s what you do when you’re 18 and have convinced yourself you know what you’re doing. I had to cut out supplements for a while because my parents got tired of paying for them and I couldn’t justify them while dropping $25K+ per year in student loan money on pharmacy school tuition.
Fast forward to 2016 – I graduate and start residency. I’m making money again. First thing I want to buy? Preworkout. I missed the boost it gave me in the gym. Except I’m not a dumb 18-year-old kid at this point. I’m armed with knowledge from four years of intense pharmacology. I can see past the marketing. I want a HEALTHY pre-workout – I don’t want any artificial sweeteners or food dyes. I suffered from caffeine overload in pharmacy school, which wrecked my cortisol levels and stress response and caused my testosterone to drop to levels found in 70-year-old men. So, I did NOT want a product with 400 + mg of caffeine. And, I wanted a product with ingredients that had actual evidence behind them, at proven dosages.
Pharmacy school taught me about evidence-based medicine – using evidence from well-designed, properly conducted research to make treatment decisions. I started looking up the ingredients I kept coming across in pre-workouts. I wanted to know: is there solid evidence that these ingredients are going to give me a better workout and help me reach my goals? What dosages were used in the studies?
I realized that the products on the market had a LOT of flaws and I had zero desire to spend money on them. For starters, THEY WERE UNDERDOSING INGREDIENTS. To a pharmacist, this is criminal. Imagine if someone was in the hospital and we gave them half the dose of a life-saving medicine in the ICU. Or if someone walked into CVS and we gave them half the dose that had been proven to work for their blood pressure medicine. I’d get sued for malpractice and thrown in jail ASAP. I’m getting angry just typing this.
Number two – there were ingredients in these products that had dubious studies “proving” their effectiveness – usually funded by the manufacturer. OR, they were using a different formulation of a compound. Companies do this because they can get away with using MUCH lower doses of certain compound variations, even if they haven’t been proven effective. This greatly reduces their costs – at the expense of essentially feeding you placebo.
And, number 3 – the artificial sweeteners. I’m not sure who decided that pre-workout must taste like blue raspberry cotton candy, but that stuff is GROSS. There’s literally zero benefits to using artificial sweeteners and food dyes. We don’t know-how are safe for consumption. They do nothing for your physical performance. I don’t want to put these chemicals in my body every day.
My research left me with only one option: buy each individual ingredient that had science behind it, buy a microgram scale, and measure everything out individually, before every single workout. I went through months of trial and error. Experimenting with different compounds, different dosages, different formulations. Eventually, I settled on a cocktail that had me on fire in the gym. At 6 am! I HATE working out in the morning – but this not only got me through it, it got me the strongest I’d ever been. I had to share this with someone else. I had to know – is this all in my head? Or was I actually on to something?
I told a few friends about my project and invited them to try out my formulation. One by one, they’d come to my apartment. I would bust out my microgram scale, weigh out each ingredient, and throw it in a plastic bag. I 100% felt like a drug dealer. But they each said the same thing: “dude, I had an awesome workout. Can you make me some more… like, in bulk?” I knew I was onto something. I knew I had a product with potential.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
It has not been a smooth road. The biggest struggle along the way has been marketing and reaching new customers. The supplement industry is extremely crowded. There are surprisingly few barriers to entry, so there’s a LOT of competition. It’s a lucrative field – in the U.S. alone, vitamins/supplements have an estimated market size of $33 billion for 2020. Which means the industry is full of people looking to make quick money. Often, they’ve made their money elsewhere, and want an easy business opportunity to keep the cash coming in. They’re armed with huge marketing budgets and little concern for offering innovative or even effective products to their customers.
I started Sanctus Nutrition on my own, with zero outside funding. I started it as a resident making $48,000/year with over $100K in student loan debt. I started this company because I made a product that I believed in, and it worked so well for me, I felt compelled to share it. I don’t have the marketing budget other supplement companies have. I barely even HAVE a marketing budget. Most of our growth has been through word of mouth.
Budget issues have kept me from offering samples, which makes the company an outlier in the supplement space. Nearly every company offers samples. With our manufacturer, it’s a $20K minimum to have samples produced. For me, I can either have samples to offer or an actual product to sell. Right now, I can’t afford to do both. I combat this by offering a 60-day, no questions asked, 100% money-back guarantee on your first order with us. This was recommended by members of a business community I frequented at the time. My initial instinct was, “there’s no way I can do this, people are going to take advantage of it and I’ll be out of business.” To date, only three customers have asked for their money back. It’s been a great success.
Our customers REALLY love our products and tell their friends about it. Last year, over 40% of our sales were to repeat customers. Most ecommerce businesses have returning customer rate around 25 – 30%. Our biggest problem is reaching and converting new customers. Once someone buys a product from us, there’s a high chance they’ll come back for more – because we only sell high-quality supplements.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Sanctus Nutrition story. Tell us more about the business.
Sanctus Nutrition creates high-quality, premium supplements to give you better workouts. I’m a pharmacist, and I create every formulation for every product we offer. Our products feature ingredients and dosages backed by science. We don’t under-dose anything, and we don’t use ingredients which lack quality studies showing their effectiveness.
Our products are made without artificial sweeteners and food colors, which is almost unheard of in the supplement space – especially for pre-workouts. Those two qualities are what I think sets us apart from the rest of the supplement industry: we use science to formulate our products, and we don’t use artificial sweeteners or food colorings.
In reviews, customers frequently mention how appreciative they are to find a pre-workout with quality ingredients, without artificial sweeteners or food colors. So, I think that’s what we’re best known for – creating premium products that only contain what you need to have a great workout. No fillers, no garbage.
Has luck played a meaningful role in your life and business?
I consider myself an extremely lucky person. I was born into a middle-class home with loving parents. They both came from lower-class backgrounds (my dad grew up in a two-bedroom home with his parents and five brothers) and wanted to provide my sister and I with opportunities to be whatever we wanted to be. From a young age, they encouraged my love for reading, my desire to create, and – arguably most important – they supported my independence and autonomy. Nothing was ever forced on me – my parents always encouraged me to make my own choices.
I grew up in Kentucky, which happens to be home to one of the top pharmacy colleges in the world. I had the opportunity to attend and receive one of the best pharmaceutical educations one can receive. Yes, I worked hard to get good grades, study, shadow, intern, all those things. But you can’t discount the role luck plays in this. I didn’t choose to be born in Kentucky. The University of Kentucky College of Pharmacy is a top 10 pharmacy school that has applicants from around the world fighting for admission. They take most of their applicants from the state of Kentucky. None of that is anything I had any control over, yet it all played in my favor. That is luck I didn’t do anything to earn. That is a privilege that I didn’t earn.
I am so fortunate to have the opportunity to run this business. Most people don’t have the opportunities I have. I try and remind myself of that every day.
Pricing:
- Focal Force Caffeine Free Pre-Workout: retails for $47.99 for a bottle of 20 servings.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://sanctusnutrition.com/
- Phone: (502) 309-4837
- Email: hello@sanctusnutrition.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sanctusnutrition/
- Facebook: http://facebook.com/sanctusnutrition
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