When Monique Bolland was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) at just 22 years old, it took her on a journey to learning more about how nutrition impacts health and longevity. She was able to hone her “entrepreneurial genes” to change the face of the supplements market, co-creating Nuzest alongside her father, Trevor. But, how did she turn her own health concerns into a successful business that now provides nutritional support for everyone? We sat down with Monique to find out more about her story.
Working as a graphic designer, having just come back from her overseas adventure and getting her MS diagnosis, Monique remembers the limited treatment options and how her prognosis looked “pretty bleak.” She says “it was my Dad that first started looking into nutrition and natural health to ensure I would live a long and happy life, despite there being no known ‘cure’ for MS. We spoke to practitioners all over the world. I even spent some time at a natural health clinic in Texas which is where I started to learn about the medicinal effects of vitamins and supplements, as well as treatments that improve health and longevity.” Monique then went on to study nutrition, opening an ahead-of-its-time health spa and clinic, offering treatments she found personally beneficial such as infrared saunas, colon hydrotherapy, and lymphatic massage.
Changing the world of supplements
Whilst Monique was running her successful business, her Dad, Trevor Bolland, had started working with a supplement brand he had discovered while researching nutritional support for her MS, helping them to market and scale whilst learning the ins and outs of the supplement industry. Monique recalls that during this period “things were largely unregulated [in the supplements industry]. Brands would make unsubstantiated and downright deceptive claims on their labels, or would swap ingredients (sometimes leaving them out entirely) during blending from batch to batch.” For Monique’s Dad, who was looking for supplements that would truly make a difference to the health of his daughter, this lack of trust and transparency simply wouldn’t do.
Utilising the experts he’d met, Trevor asked them to design the very best product they could, to provide foundational nutritional support and this is how Good Green Vitality was born. “We used independent formulators (and still do) in part because it means the quality of the formulation is not compromised by being driven by profit margin. They use the latest nutritional science, teamed with their own years of clinical practice and research, to present the very best ingredients and overall formulations,” says Monique.
The aim of Nuzest has always been to make nutrition easy. Monique remembers a time before Nuzest where she’d often be taking upwards of 30 tablets and capsules a day to fill all the nutrient deficiencies common in MS, and to support her brain and nervous system health, which is a common story for many people with chronic illnesses. Good Green Vitality provides a baseline nutritional support for everyone and for those, like Monique, with health conditions “[they can] ‘top up’ some of the nutrients, but with a couple of tablets per day – not 30.”
Lessons learned along the way
Monique’s key learning to date is that nutrition is the foundation for good health and that the foods you eat are not just the fuel you power your body with, but the actual building blocks of the cells themselves. Monique shares that “while our basic nutritional requirements are the same, everyone is individual when it comes to the nuances of what their body needs to thrive. People with high stress levels need more than the usual intake of magnesium, protein requirements increase with age in order to prevent age-related muscle deterioration, and not everyone can properly convert and utilise certain nutrients as efficiently as others.”
Aside from the knowledge around wellness Monique has harnessed since Nuzest’s launch, her experience of being a founder in her 20’s and 30’s meant there were often times where it was hard to be taken seriously. She explains that it wasn’t always easy to tell a man twice her age that she didn’t agree with the way they were doing something, even when she knew she had the qualifications to back up those opinions. However, Monique feels encouraged by the fact that female entrepreneurs are on the rise and that there are a lot of great female-focused leadership groups and communities all helping and supporting each other.
The future of health and wellness
The health and wellness sector has evolved rapidly since Nuzest’s inception in 2012 and Monique believes that as a whole, consumers are a lot more educated when it comes to supplements. “They want to know what’s in the bottle they just bought, where are the ingredients sourced from, and is it the best form of that ingredient. Brands are going to have to rise to consumer demands and be fully transparent about their ingredients.”
When it comes to Nuzest specifically, they’ve gone through a period of change over the last two years where they have moved from a distribution model, to centralised global operations - merging the teams, and improving efficiencies in every area of business. “It’s been a lot of work from every single person in the company but with our new setup and operational platform we are hoping to expand our global reach,” says Monique. “We never set out to be a global brand as large as Nuzest has become, but now that I’ve seen what a genuine impact our products make on so many people’s lives, it’s exciting to see how far we can take it.”
Boost your nutrition and vitality with Nuzest, a brand with personal experience making complex nutrition easy.