Shaping the future of wellness
A chance meeting between a former journalist and an academic in a Geneva clinic led to the formation of a multi-million-pound, global company that counts Hollywood stars Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Hudson and Kim Kardashian among its customers.
LYMA Life, the brainchild of Lucy Goff, exploded from a one-woman outfit in 2018, rejected by dozens of potential investors, into a worldwide phenomenon in only three years and has now scooped the King’s Award for International Trade.
The business began after the “absolutely horrific” birth of her daughter, who thankfully survived and thrived, but which left Lucy extremely ill for a lengthy period with septicemia and its after-effects.
She realised the pharmaceutical model wasn’t making her feel better, while supplements didn’t work either.
Lucy says she stumbled upon her eureka moment after a chance meeting with Professor Paul Clayton, who introduced her to evidence-based nutrition, ingredients that have gone through the same rigorous process that a pharmaceutical drug has gone through.
“All the ingredients have been tested for toxicity, for efficacy, for stability, correct dosages, everything that a pharmaceutical drug has gone through before being published in medical journals.”
The problem, she says, is it didn’t fit in with the commercial structure of the existing market. LYMA Life was created and her inspirational move was to bring “the genius” Dr Clayton in with her to create a “game changer for the supplement market.”
At first, though, Lucy says, “Nobody would touch us, so in the end I funded it myself.”
Her problems were just beginning though: “Even to find a factory that would deal with this set of ingredients took over a year.
“But having Paul involved brought on an incredible team of world-class scientists, that was the priceless element because he knew exactly what we needed to do in order to bring a world-class product to market.”
Her PR campaign paid off and within the first month of their launch Lucy, who had experience in PR, says they were flooded with positive feedback from women (about seventy percent of which were perimenopausal) whose lives had been changed by using LYMA Life supplements.
After we initially sold out, we became international, and we started shipping to over 70 countries.
“The biggest challenge that we had was recruiting people.” . Despite those challenges, revenues have doubled every year since they launched.
The company also found success with the launch of their Lyma Laser, a world first in that it was the first tested and cleared clinic-grade laser that was available for home use.
Again, Prof Clayton was the genius behind the idea as he realised laser treatment resulted in the skin on his patient’s knee looking 20 years younger than the skin on the knee that hadn’t been treated.
When they did launch the LYMA Laser in September 2020 the plan was to sell a thousand lasers in a year: instead, they sold out a thousand lasers in the first forty-eight hours.
