Inno Supps’ Obsessive Focus on Natural Ingredients is Upending the Supplements Industry Founder Kevin Gundersen’s Investment in Product Quality and Extensive Testing is Paying Off
In the highly competitive supplement market, perhaps nothing carries more value than a brand’s reputation and the trust they’ve built with their customers. After all, it can be a world of hyperbole or false claims, unhealthy ingredients, and a diversity of testing methodologies and standards. Kevin Gundersen has spent some 15 years building not only his knowledge base and expertise in the science of supplements, but the trust of his customers at each of his more than ten fitness-focused ventures. So while the meteoric rise of his flagship company, Inno Supps, may seem sudden, it’s actually more than two decades in the making.
“The whole goal is to promote health and wellness,” explains Gundersen. “I focus on getting the best possible products into the hands of my customers. If you have the best product, the rest will take care of itself. We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on additional testing. Purity testing, heavy metal testing—we use it all to ensure we live up to the standards of quality that are so vital in this industry and to Inno Supps’ growing standing and reputation in the supplement world.”
The passion for fitness has been with the 36-year-old California native since a very young age. “It’s both a passion and an obsession and always has been,” he admits. As a kid, he couldn’t wait to start lifting weights at the gym. When he was eight, his parents got him a home gym, and by the time he was twelve, he had joined the YMCA for access to a real gym and equipment. Not many children are adding flaxseed oil to their oatmeal. This dedication and passion haven’t diminished whatsoever, leading the fitness innovator to expand the scope of his expertise to the larger fitness, health, and wellness industries.
“I’ve now become obsessed with optimizing how I feel and how my body performs overall,” explains Gundersen. “I bring those same priorities to my customers and clients at every business I’ve ever owned. How can a person feel good, perform well, be as healthy as possible and hopefully add some longevity while they’re at it? That’s my emphasis and the reason Inno Supps has had the tangible results and public response we’re so proud of.”Considering the dozen or so companies Gundersen, along with his wife, have built over their careers, it might surprise some to learn that the supplement guru’s first entrepreneurial attempt in the health and wellness space was a complete failure. While a student at USC, he risked $10,000 of his own money to create a liver-cleansing multivitamin pack. It was aimed at what he thought was an obvious market and customer base: the heavy-drinking, unhealthy-living college students all around him. He called it the Frat Pack, and it failed…badly. “I thought it was a big market,” admits Gundersen sheepishly. “It wasn’t.”
But the plucky entrepreneur found a profitable lesson in this experience. Instead of choosing a product and market based on his own assumptions, he allowed the market to bring the opportunity to him. His company was using top-of-the-line ingredients in its products, including Micronized Creatine. This specialized form avoids the bloating that is a common side effect of most creatine offerings, and the company’s female customers were ecstatic with this differentiation from alternative brands, helping to carve out a large space for the company in the women’s fitness and supplement markets.
So the entrepreneur pivoted, and working in partnership with his high school sweetheart and now wife of 21 years, he created a number of fitness, supplement, and health brands aimed at the female fitness enthusiasts who weren’t being served well by the other companies in the space. Success and prosperity followed, and the Gundersens haven’t really slowed down in the following years.
While Inno Supps offers products for both men and women, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Gundersen has maintained his loyal following of female customers.
“Right now, Inno Supps caters to a customer base that is 53% men and 47% women. But my passion has always been fitness and supplements for everyone. We just happened to find a niche in the market and it took off. It really expanded my passion beyond fitness to include all aspects of health and wellness. I just wanted to bring these results to everyone at the gym, men and women.”The real game changer for the entrepreneurial couple and their brands was when Kevin began diving into his long-held suspicion regarding certain soft drinks and the way his body and mind would feel after consuming them.
“I believe strongly in gut health and I always knew there was an inflammatory component there,” explains Gundersen. “Every single time I would drink diet soda, which is full of Sucralose, it would give me terrible joint pain, soreness, and even cause my autoimmune symptoms and psoriasis to flare up. When I cut that out of my diet, the results were incredible. My joint pain and soreness went away, I felt better and clearer-headed, and even my skin issues cleared up. I knew then that this stuff can’t be good for you. The real kicker? Almost every supplement on the market contains artificial sweeteners like Sucralose and Aspartame, stuff you really don’t want in your body.”
Kevin’s passion for natural products continued to grow as he became more knowledgeable and saw positive feedback from his customers. His push for natural products made exclusively from natural ingredients has become a cornerstone of Inno Supps’ principles. “It was both a business decision and a test of my personal beliefs,” says Gundersen today. “I started with good intentions. I wanted to provide supplements and products I liked. I wanted to share that with people and hopefully turn that into a business. Don’t get me wrong, we still focus on driving revenue and profits, but I made a conscious effort to put the majority of my attention and mental bandwidth into creating as much value as possible for our customers. Sure, I believe it will help grow the business long-term, but it’s so much more fun to focus on the non-monetary side of the business, safe in the knowledge that product quality will inevitably lead to a strong bottom line for the company.”
As Inno Supps continues to be one of the fastest-growing supplement companies in the entire health and wellness space, it appears as if Gundersen’s stubborn refusal to budge on his standards was the wise choice in hindsight. A wise choice that became the foundation for the thriving health and wellness empire he continues to build, one high-quality product at a time.
