How Bare Biology Founder Melanie Lawson Is Transforming Our Health, One Supplement At A Time

When Bare Biology founder Melanie Lawson first started telling friends and family that she was thinking about starting a business that sold fish oil in the early-2010s, she was met with a whole lot of questions and even more confusion.

“Health supplements weren’t a thing. It was still quite niche,” she says. In those days, someone might take vitamin C or a Berocca tablet if they felt a cold coming on. But no one was stacking and supplementing and thinking about their health the way they are today. 

While Lawson has always been interested and invested in all things health and wellbeing, she didn't discover the power of omega-3 until she was struggling with postpartum depression, OCD (which she has had since childhood), and joint pain after the birth of her second child. It was a chiropractor who first suggested she try fish oil, which is rich in omega-3 fatty acid and helps with things like inflammation and, importantly, brain function and mental health. Game to try anything that might make her feel better, Lawson acquiesced. "I'll give that a go," she thought, and bought her first fish oil supplement. Little did she know, it would change everything.

The effect wasn't loud or abrupt, but became apparent after a few months of supplementation. “I just noticed my ability to cope was way better, my mental resilience. I didn’t burst into tears all the time. I had a two-year-old and a newborn, [which was] quite challenging, and not a lot of help,” she says. 

But perhaps just as importantly, it opened Lawson's eyes to the leaps and bounds that could be made to improve women's pregnancy and postpartum experience—and the benefit that would have for their health in general. Why not create her own product that filled that gap she had been caught in? 

So, for the past 14 years, she has done just that, building a major supplement company, Bare Biology, that is now worth £9 million and serves customers with an aesthetic array of high-quality supplements, from omega-3 and vitamin D, to collagen, magnesium bisglycinate, and creatine.

At the heart of it all is a founder on a mission to change what health looks like, especially for women, and to provide people with the tools and proper nutrients to take their wellbeing into their own hands. 

Bare Biology's foundations are changing supplements as we know it

The scepticism Lawson faced at the outset of launching her business only motivated her. “I was like, I've got to make this a success, it has to work,” she says. Over a decade and multi-million pounds in revenue later, it's clear her vision was the right one.

Bare Biology isn't like most other start-ups. They've never had investors, yet have been profitable since year one, says Lawson. What that suggests is that the brand doesn't just fill a need, but meets people exactly where they are, and really speaks to them.

The fact that women don't often receive the information, diagnoses, or care they need when it comes to their health is no secret. Research still routinely leaves them out of studies, with findings in men generalised for the entire population. A survey from 2025 found that more than a quarter of women in the UK were living with serious reproductive health issues, yet faced all kinds of issues that prevented them from getting the care they needed.

Small steps forward, like the ones Lawson and Bare Biology team are taking, can make all the difference in a world that is still only just beginning to pay attention to the many, often invisible struggles women face.

Lawson knows that a supplement isn't the be-all, end-all in someone's health journey. But it can help. As the company's website states, "Supplements won’t sort your life out, but the right ones can be the rising tide that lifts all the boats in the harbour of your life. That’s what omega-3 did for our founder and why we do what we do."

A female founder's keys to success

At Bare Biology, Lawson is focused on instilling a culture of excitement, trust, and innovation. That sense of positive energy around what they're doing — in helping people live healthier, fuller lives — is especially important to the founder, and she wants her team to feel that each and every day. “It’s very hard to feel unhappy when you're excited,” she says. 

Of course, fostering authenticity and trust is also paramount, especially when you're dealing with people's health. "Trust" is a word that comes up again and again in reviews, Lawson says. “I don’t ever want to erode that or ruin it."

To that end, while Lawson is serious about her supplements, she's even more serious about what goes into them. The supplement market has grown exponentially since she began her business roughly 13 years ago. And right now, there are endless products out there that contain fillers and bulking agents, or have misleading labels. “There’s no due diligence. No one’s going to meet the people who make them. They don’t ask difficult questions,” she says. 

So, for her products, she does the leg work that others often don't. At each step in the process, she asks endless questions of potential suppliers, heads out for manufacturing site visits, and reviews packers before selecting the best ones. That's not always the norm — and suppliers are often surprised she takes the time to investigate so thoroughly. She has researched and sources the very best fish oil on the market. She has been adamant that Bare Biology's products, which are made in Norway and the UK, go through third-party testing, contain no additives, and are "free from nasties," as the site puts it.

By building that foundation of trust, authenticity, and truly stellar ingredients, Lawson can tackle her larger goal of filling essential gaps in women’s health. “It’s getting better, but it's still got so far to go," she says. "I'd really like to be one of the kind of leading people in that space." And by all accounts, she is doing just that.

Founder’s supplement stack

If there's someone who knows her way around a solid supplement stack, it's Lawson. The list of daily supplements she takes is long but intentional. She's eager to learn about new breakthroughs in the space, and approaches new formulations with curiosity and excitement.

Lawson starts each day with a spritz of the Beam & Balance Vitamins D3 + K2 Spray. She makes sure her kids — the eldest now 20 — take it too, especially after this past winter when the UK was plagued with 60 straight days of rain and cloudy weather.

As she sets up for family dinner each night, she makes sure to put the Bare Biology Omega-3 Fish Oil Daily Capsules bottle on the table so that everyone, including her kids, remembers to take them. “I literally divvy it around, and they know they have to take it,” she says. (While Lawson used to take omega-3 in liquid form, she now just takes between two-to-four capsules per day, depending on her needs.)

Also on the list are Bare Biology's newer Ready and Rested Magnesium Glycinate capsules, which support energy, balance, and calm in a gentle, easy-to-absorb form.

These days, she’s started adding in some creatine to her stack with High Flyer Creatine Monohydrate Powder. “I’ve been playing around with the dose, but I’ve landed back on 5 grams,” she says, explaining that she experimented with a higher 20 g dose. “My body was like ‘5 is enough, thank you.’”

Sometimes, Lawson likes to add some collagen and Momentous whey protein to her coffee, à la Stacy Sims’ famed 'proffee,' “which actually keeps you going for quite a long time,” she says. And if she starts feeling a little under the weather, she will pop some Pure Encapsulations NAC. 

Lawson’s advice for female founders

When Lawson first started Bare Biology back in 2012, she would squeeze in work wherever she could in her hectic schedule — usually between nursery school drop-offs and her two-year-old’s naps. As a busy mum of three small children, she found that the key was creating a strict timetable for her day, and working as hard as she could in those spare moments, even if it was just an hour and a half. “I was very driven to make it work,” she says. “I couldn't procrastinate because I just had no time.”

As a longtime Tim Ferriss fan and podcast-listener ("I was a really early adopter!" she says), Lawson really abided by one of his big productivity rules: do the things you least want to do first. That maxim helped her crank out Bare Biology's earliest projects and most stressful tasks. Of course, Lawson also stays extremely organised, working systematically through all manner of spreadsheets and projects to stay on track.

Her number one piece of advice for young female founders is to trust your gut. “I run my business very much based on intuition,” she says. “Women have very good intuition, and we can really tune into it.”

That goes for the advice you get from other people, potential hires, and other big business decisions. “If it doesn't really sit with what your intuition is, trust yourself more.”

It’s also essential to stay focused — on yourself, your business, and your own lane. Ultimately, that’s where you’ll find the most success. “Don’t be looking at all the competitors,” she says, “because you just end up being like everyone else, or you get distracted.”

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