New Here? Let's Take You Right Back to the Beginning of Elle Sera
With so many new women discovering Elle Sera, we're rewinding the clock. Kelly sits down with Elissa to revisit the unlikely story of how one question, one Golden Pill™ and one hell of a leap of faith started everything.
If you've only recently discovered Elle Sera, hello. There are rather a lot of you.
Our community has grown enormously, new products have joined the family and Elle Sera today looks quite different from the little lockdown business that started it all.
So we thought this was the perfect time to go backwards.
Right back to the beginning.
Before the collagen. Before the magnesium. Before the growing team, the podcast guests and the thousands of women who now talk to us every day.
Back to Elissa, one Facebook message and the original Golden Pill™.
For this podcast revisit, there's also a familiar voice asking the questions. Kelly Bond turns the tables on our founder, Elissa Corrigan, to find out how Elle Sera actually happened — and yes, because these two spend most of their lives together, it gets very candid, very quickly. Kelly originally introduced the episode as a chance to explore Elissa, the brand's origin story and the questions customers most frequently ask them.
Before Elle Sera, there was The Life Lab
Long before Golden Pill™, Elissa had an obsession with health, fitness and nutrition. She'd worked as a journalist, spent years researching supplements and herbs and eventually created her own health retreat, The Life Laboratory.
It was there that something became increasingly obvious.
Women might arrive talking about weight or wanting to change how they looked, but underneath that were often much bigger conversations about their bodies, hormones and how they actually felt.
Then lockdown arrived and the retreat business disappeared almost overnight.
What looked like the end of one business ultimately created the space for another.
Then came one message about libido...
A former retreat client messaged Elissa asking what she could do to improve her libido.
It caught her attention because this wasn't someone she expected to ask the question.
And Elissa thought: if she's thinking it, how many other women are thinking it too?
She started researching what women were searching for online libido, sexless relationships, women's health and the changes happening to their bodies — and realised the numbers were enormous.
That rabbit hole eventually became Golden Pill™.
Elissa worked with specialists, researched herbal ingredients and found a UK manufacturer before taking an enormous gamble on bringing the formulation to life.
There was no grand business empire mapped out.
There was an idea she believed in and a willingness to find out whether other women needed it too.
Turns out they did.
Even our packaging has an origin story
If you're new to Elle Sera, you might also have wondered why we care quite so much about our packaging.
For that, we have to rewind even further.
Before Elle Sera, Elissa appeared on The Island with Bear Grylls. Living on a remote island in Panama, she saw extraordinary amounts of discarded plastic washing onto the beach.
The experience stayed with her.
So when the opportunity came to create a supplement company, she was determined not to simply add thousands more disposable plastic pots to the world. It's why sustainability became part of the business from the beginning, influencing everything from refillable packaging to biodegradable pouches and the materials used throughout the brand.
And then there were two...
There's another part of this episode that's lovely to revisit now: Kelly.
Kelly talks about how lockdown had also completely changed her own working life and how she and Elissa essentially stumbled across one another at exactly the right moment.
Elissa calls it serendipity.
Kelly would go on to become the voice our customers know best, particularly through customer care, education and those wonderfully frank conversations that occasionally begin with a perfectly innocent supplement question and end somewhere nobody expected.
And that human connection has become just as important to Elle Sera as the products themselves.
Some things haven't changed at all
Elle Sera has grown considerably since this conversation was recorded.
The range has grown. The team has grown. And, wonderfully, the number of women finding us has grown too.
But listening back, what's perhaps most interesting is how much of the original philosophy is still there.
Supplements aren't magic bullets.
Elissa talks openly about sometimes telling customers not to buy something. Kelly describes Elle Sera as a deliberately human company where women can actually speak to somebody rather than disappearing into automated customer service.
That's still us.
We want to create brilliant formulations, but we also want women to understand what they're taking, ask questions and have conversations about their health without embarrassment.
So, if you're one of the many women who've only recently found us, welcome.
You've arrived several chapters into the Elle Sera story.
This is where Chapter One began.
And we welcome you subscribe to our channel to listen in real time and learn where we are right now.
_______________________________________________________________________
