The parent company, called Organic 3, has rebranded its consumer facing aspect as Smidge supplements. The tagline is: ‘Small batch supplements.’
The company launched more than 10 years ago around a probiotic offering. Founder Daniel Corrigan said that original product, which was one of the first multi strain probiotic supplements on the market at the time, was labeled as GutPro.
The original idea, Corrigan said, was to offer the probiotics to consumers in a formula of nothing but the probiotics themselves. The purpose was to appeal to discerning (and in some cases desperate) consumers with sensitivities to many substances that might be common excipients in the supplements trade.
“It was unique in the sense that it didn’t have any fillers or other excipients. It was a pure probiotics powder,” Corrigan said.
The issue with formulating a probiotics finished good in that way, Corrigan said, is the probiotics themselves take up almost no space. So a month’s supply, more or less the industry standard for a SKU on the shelf, didn’t go well into standard delivery formats.
“We weren’t adding in a prebiotic or any other fillers. So we started out with these tiny bottles that wouldn’t go through any sort of machine. So does that qualify as a ‘small batch’?” Corrigan said.
Biohacking conference got rebranding ball rolling
Corrigan said as the online brand started to expand its product line and consumer base, the products came to the attention of the nascent biohacking community. For several years running, the brand was invited to exhibit at the Bulletproof Biohacking Conference (the annual event has since dropped ‘Bulletproof’ from the name).
Corrigan said that community’s tight focus on ingredient lists and product attributes led him to conclude that there was more value within the company’s formulation strategy and brand presence than was conveyed using the fairly innocuous name of Organic3. In addition, the biohackers were well aware of the implications of the gut/brain connection.
“That really opened our eyes,” Corrigan said. “They were really focused on clean, premium, high quality products.”
So ‘Smidge’ was born, with the idea that the products contained just what was needed and nothing that wasn’t.
Corrigan said another differentiator is that the company only uses who food ingredients for its vitamin content. For example, the company’s vitamin A offering is supplied by beef liver, and a vitamin C product comes in teh forms of Kakadu Plum. The natural variability of these whole food sources as fits into the small batch model, Corrigan maintained.
“Each batch would have a slightly different amount,” Corrigan said. “We don’t offer these as standardized or fortified in any way.”