We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jeanne Reilly. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jeanne below.

Jeanne, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s jump right into the heart of things. Outsiders often think businesses or industries have much larger profit margins than they actually do – the reason is that outsiders are often unaware of the biggest challenges to profitability in various industries – what’s the biggest challenge to profitability in your industry?

The biggest challenge we’ve found as we work towards profitability is what the consumer is willing to pay for a supplement vs. what a high quality supplement costs to produce. We knew entering into the unregulated supplement industry was going to be a challenge – in a world where any manufacturer can produce anything unchecked we had our work cut out for us to stand out. Particularly in the prenatal supplement world, 99% of the products you can find on the shelves or online are sub-par. They are certainly below our standards as Registered Dietitians. We wanted to create a product we’d be excited to take, and one we were proud to recommend to other parents and health practitioners. To do that, we demanded the use of high quality ingredients in the forms that work best for our bodies. That meant we needed to include a lot more ingredients than others (our prenatal & postnatal have over 25 ingredients!), and in much higher amounts. Most people are ok spending $15-$20 on a month of prenatal vitamins, but that barely covers our costs. On top of producing the best prenatal nutrition support available, we’re trying to educate consumers on why the supplement industry is very much a “you get what you pay for” environment and show them how high quality translates to better health for moms & their babies.

Jeanne, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m a Registered Dietitian who became a mom and realized how underserved the parent community is when it comes to high quality nutrition support and reliable nutrition information. With so much information at our fingertips, the biggest challenge can sometimes be knowing what to believe and how you can turn that information into action steps that fit your needs. That’s were Registered Dietitians come in. We look at the research and translate it into a clear direction for consumers. My Co-Founder, also a Registered Dietitian, and a Dad, had a similar struggle to me as he & his wife became parents. Even as trained nutrition professionals, we struggled to figure out what we needed to support our bodies – which nutrients, which forms of those nutrients, how much did we need to take each day to ensure a healthy pregnancy & postpartum? It was our own struggles that helped us realize we had the ability to help other parents struggling through this nutritionally demanding phase of life.
We looked at the supplements available and saw a huge gap between what parents need, and what was available. Even more surprising is the lack of up-to-date research available on the amounts of nutrients mothers need at different phases of conception & pregnancy. We knew we could do better and take away the confusion and frustration so many parents face.
A postnatal supplement was our first product as that’s where we saw the biggest gap in current supplement offerings. New Mama, our comprehensive postnatal multivitamin, mineral & botanical supplement, is meant to replace your prenatal vitamin once you give birth. It has levels of nutrients & botanicals curated specifically to help a mother’s body recover from pregnancy & support breastfeeding if she chooses. We are very close to releasing our prenatal vitamin as well and will offer a supportive botanical blend to help ease some of the most common unpleasant symptoms and deficiencies pregnant women experience.
Our long-term vision is to have high-quality supplements to support both mothers and fathers from pre-conception throughout postpartum and beyond, far into parenthood. We’ll also offer a children’s line of products as well!

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

We started this business right before COVID hit. While we are fully e-commerce, it certainly took some wind out of our sails related to networking and in-person expos and conferences we had planned to launch our business and get in front of our customers. The first couple years were slow growth, but we stuck with it.

The biggest challenges we ran into were related to marketing. Because we are only sold online, the only way people could discover us was through marketing. We went through 3 different marketing agencies before we had run out of options and out of cash. iOS14 crushed our marketing efforts and we finally had to hit the pause button on all marketing efforts and reassess our approach.

We had to dig deep into our own savings as founders who have a vision and were not willing to let it be stopped by challenges that we knew could be overcome with some additional cash and a team invested to our success. Through pure luck we were introduced to a marketing professional who has become an integral part of our growth. Marketing is more expensive than we ever imagined, but we’re making strides forward! We haven’t paid ourselves yet – every dollar we earn goes right back into the business. We are currently looking for investors to get us over the next hump of inventory and marketing expenses and power us that looming goal of profitability!

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

We are fortunate to have families who believe in our vision and were able to help us get started financially. We took small investments from our parents and siblings in the initial round – this got us through our branding, website setup, legal fees, and first inventory orders. Taking money from family is a very flattering and humbling thing. While we were excited to have the funds to do what we needed to get started, we were also very hesitant in spending, and potentially losing the money! We had to work to overcome the fear of spending others’ money and instead seeing it as the fuel our rocket ship needed to take off!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.iamnurtured.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamnurtured/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/iamnurtured/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanne-reilly-ms-rdn-966baa4a/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChMptqiXx66BvyvZ-cEBujg/featured
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@iamnurtured?lang=en

Image Credits
Photo credit for photo of me (Jeanne Reilly), and my son (my inspiration for creating this business): Angela Doran Photography