Words by Rosie Speight of Equi London
HOW DID EQUI THE BRAND COME ABOUT?
So I come from a banking background of 8 or so years. It was very full-on, working long hours, and entertaining into the evening. It was a full force job and lifestyle. I tried to be healthy, but it was so hard to maintain because I had to be up early in the morning and out into the evening, I found myself always eating on the go and not really putting my wellbeing as a priority.
I’d generally been healthy, but was just burning the candle at both ends, as so many people do regardless of where they work. Around this time, I came off the pill because my husband and I were thinking of starting a family. My intention was to be pill free and any sort of medication free for a year to kind of cleanse my body so to speak. And within weeks I had the most awful cystic acne. It really affected my instantly, and because I was trying to detox my body I didn’t want to take any medication for it. I tried some topical treatments, but nothing worked.
This is where my best friend Alice comes in. We’d been best friends since university and we just clicked right away and have stayed really close. Now, Alice set up her clinic on Harley St, and she was seeing people who were experiencing issues just like me. Luckily she put me on a range of supplements that were only available through a practitioner. And everything just head and shoulders above what I had tried on the mainstream market with regards to quality. The results were fantastic. Not only a noticeable physical difference, but it was only then that I noticed how rubbish I’d been feeling inside in terms or energy and self esteem. Although I felt great, I was spending between £250-£300 a month to keep up with the supplement plan.
So we thought, this is brilliant. There’s a business here. We need to create a blend of all these products in a convenient to use supplement and a reasonable price and get it to the market to help people dealing with similar issues. Unless you see a practitioner, it can be really difficult to know what to take, so we’ve took out the guess work. Equi gives you only the best ingredients to deliver really impactful results to help people feel and look good.
HOW DO THE EQUI FORMULAS VARY?
Our idea came about to help people feel good physically and internally. We developed out philosophy at that starting point, and realised there were more products to be made. So we began with the Beauty Formula to helps boost skin and hair health, and then developed a general wellbeing formula which is our Original Formula.
Alice was at one point getting an influx of questions at her clinic about healthy weight loss. This was around the time we’d see so many celebrities on Instagram endorse appetite suppressant lollipops and things like that. And we thought we needed to offer a healthy weight loss support product to counter the harmful things being advertised on social media. This became our Lean Formula.
Also, at the time we were setting up our business, I was actually pregnant with my first child. We couldn’t find any good pregnancy products - in fact, we were shipping things in from the states. But these still had lots of added ingredients. Eventually we just created our own Pregnancy Formula.
WHAT MAKES EQUI DIFFERENT TO ALTERNATIVES ON THE MARKET?
The market as we see it is split between mass market which often has filler ingredients and often the results aren’t great. They can sort of be a bit placebo in the sense that they don’t really deliver the effects they could or what people are necessarily hoping for. The other side or the market is of course, extremely luxe, prohibitively expensive products. Often these can be style over substance; we do see these also carry a lot of filler products for flavour, or unnecessary ingredients of which you’d probably get your requisite nutrients from throughout a normal daily diet anyway. Then you have you practitioner level formulations which are the most sophisticated, very specialised ingredients and formulations. Unless you’re a practitioner yourself or have a nutritional degree these would be incredibly difficult to navigate.
Equi is different in that our formulation is a monthly subscription that brings that practitioner level of quality and sophistication with beautiful branding to the mass market. The products work as a functional medicine, which is the idea and proven science that whole body is split into different sections that are interconnected. When one aspect is in imbalance, it has a knock-on effect on all the other systems. And these manifest in what people often write off as niggling side effects of modern living: such as occasion skin irritation, foggy heads in the morning, poor concentration, low energy, bloating, bad PMS, etc. All these things aren’t life-threatening, and people so often just put up with because they think they’re symptoms of normal life. But they’re not. They’re the body’s way of telling us something is imbalance and needs attention.
Our formulations address these internal systems so they all work in a balanced way together. Our formulas are all over 50 ingredients each. It’s a full range of 10 products in one supplement. They all work to help the body function better, and of course they have their own targeted effects as well, such as skin improvement from the Beauty Formula, for example, and all the rest of it. But everything we do is to bring the body in balance, hence “Equi”, it’s that equilibrium in which our bodies thrive.
And Alice is an absolute genius. The formulas she’s created are just second to none, and they have only the best ingredients with nothing extra. And that’s really want makes our products so effective and different. I also think the fact that we’re best friends running this business has also played a huge part in us being able to delivery the very best of our brand, everything we do is a passion project.
HOW SHOULD PEOPLE WORK SUPPLEMENTS INTO THEIR EVERYDAY?
The powders are super absorbable. We’ve flavoured them naturally so they taste great even just in water. We didn’t want people to have to necessarily make a full smoothie every time they went to take a supplement. They’re designed for busy people on the go, and they still deliver everything the body needs.
You should always take supplements with food so they can deliver optimal effectiveness. They mix well with water or nut milk, whatever you like really. And you don’t need to take any other supplements when you’re taking Equi because it really covers all the bases.
We’ve found that the formulas work really well in a shaker. And at the moment we’re having some beautiful black matte shakers made, so keep an eye on the market for those!
WHAT ADVICE DO YOU HAVE FOR PEOPLE STARTING OUT ON THEIR WELLNESS JOURNEY?
From my point of view people so often try to change their lives completely when they’re trying out this wellness thing. And I just think that stops people from maintaining positive changes because that dramatically change can be really off-putting. Whereas, if you just start taking a daily supplement, it almost becomes a ritual. You give yourself a supplement which you know is a really nutrient dense formula that nourishes your body, and that’s really a demonstration of self-care. It’s gonna start you off on the right trajectory to take on the day, and make healthier choices every day.
Start small, and ease into a healthier way of living. Results come from small, consistent changes.
