The global dietary supplement market has grown into a multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry (especially since the COVID-19 pandemic) and is projected to nearly double in value by 2030 as more consumers embrace health and wellness. In the United States, women make up a disproportionate share of supplement users —with nearly 64 % reporting supplement use in surveys. At the same time, women now own roughly 40 % of all U.S. businesses and are founding enterprises at record rates, with close to half of new startups led by women. In this context, women-founded supplement companies are poised not just to participate but to shape the future of nutritional wellness.
Female founders are reshaping the supplement space
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Here are some examples of how, across categories—from lactation to gut health to hair wellness—many of these founders share a common thread: deeply personal origin stories paired with a commitment to science and consumer trust. They also have some words of advice for future founders who want to transform their struggle into an opportunity to support women’s health.
Legendairy Milk
Luna Aziz, founder and CEO of Legendairy Milk
Legendary Milk
Legendairy Milk was founded by Luna Aziz after her own challenges with milk supply postpartum. The company makes lactation supplements and other products designed to support parents to help them feel confident and nourished.
What was the inspiration for the brand?
Luna Aziz: My journey began quite personally. After the birth of my first child I struggled with low milk supply — I pumped obsessively, I nursed, I searched for help and I simply couldn’t find a clean, effective solution that made me feel supported.
When I tried a standard herb used to promote milk supply (fenugreek) I actually had a serious reaction. That pushed me to dig deeper: to research what women in other cultures had used for centuries, to become my own guinea pig and to experiment with blends.
What it crystallized into was this: I didn’t just want to “get by” or survive motherhood — I wanted to thrive and help other moms who were going through that same exhausted, isolating labyrinth. Because if I was struggling and seeing nothing out there, I knew others were too. That purpose is still at the heart of Legendairy Milk: starting with lactation, then expanding into women’s wellness across life stages.
What advice would you offer aspiring founders?
Aziz: Build your team early and don’t try to do it all yourself. When I started, I believed I could manage everything — from product formulation, packaging, order fulfillment, social media to customer support — while navigating new motherhood. It was utterly exhausting and unsustainable. I wish I had outsourced or brought in help earlier.
Start with the problem, not the product, and stay anchored in community. I wish I had known how powerful it is to lean into storytelling and authenticity, especially because I was addressing a deeply personal struggle. If you’re creating a product or service to meet a need your younger self had, remember: your credibility comes from having lived it. Your brand comes from helping others feel seen and your success comes from listening, iterating and staying humble.
One practical step: talk to your future user early and often. Don’t just assume you know what they need — ask them. What is the experience like? What’s missing? How do they want to be supported? I did that in forums and groups and it informed both product and packaging.
Iris Nutrition
Demi Schweers, Co-Founder of Iris Nutrition
Iris Nutrition
Demi Schweers, Co-Founder of Iris Nutrition
Iris Nutrition is a functional wellness brand for women that was created by Demi Schweers and Allison Escovedo Owen to make hormone health easier and more enjoyable. Iris offers science-based, nutrient-rich daily drink mixes formulated to support hormone balance, hydration, digestion, and cycle health through every phase of womanhood.
Allison Escovedo Owen, Co-Founder of Iris Nutrition
Iris Nutrition
What was the inspiration behind the brand?
Demi Schweers: I was inspired to create Iris out of my own personal experience navigating hormonal imbalances and not feeling like my body was working with me. A year into a physically and emotionally challenging fertility journey, I was diagnosed with PCOS while navigating a miscarriage, an ectopic pregnancy and an IVF cycle. I found myself overwhelmed by how fragmented the women’s health space was – with little guidance, multiple vitamins and supplements, and conflicting healthcare advice. It was time to take matters into my own hands.
I was looking for something supportive that could fit into my daily routine and helped me feel in tune with my own body rather than disconnected from it.
The first step was simply listening—listening to my own body, and to the women in my community who have spent the last four years trusting me with their stories about hormones, energy, and burnout. And from there, my co-founder, Alli, and I spent nearly 6 months researching ingredients, sustainably sourced vendors and consulting with women’s health experts to understand what actually had clinical support behind it.
Once we felt confident in the formulation, we went directly to our community again to work on the creative aspects from packaging design to flavor suggestions because it doesn’t matter how good a product is on paper, we wanted it to resonate with our community and allow them to feel heard and seen within the process. I wanted Iris to feel less like another “supplement” and more like a daily ritual of self-care.
What advice do you have for aspiring founders?
Schweers: It’s easy to feel like you need all the answers before you start, but you don’t. You learn the most by doing, listening and adjusting by staying open to feedback from your community.
My advice would be to trust that your lived experience is valuable. If your younger self needed this, chances are someone else does too. And by building thoughtfully and intentionally, it will allow you to cultivate a brand that is trusted. It’s okay to make changes along the way, that’s where growth happens. You don’t have to have everything figured out, you just have to start.
Bio.me
Bio.me co-founder and CEO Shannon Race
Shannon Race
Bio.me is a female-founded gut health and fiber supplement company that aims to simplify digestive wellness with science-backed formulations. The brand focuses on daily fiber, prebiotic and synbiotic products designed to rebalance the microbiome, support digestion and promote overall well-being.
What was the inspiration behind bio.me?
Shannon Race: I’ve suffered from IBS since I was a teen, and as my quest to fix my gut evolved, it became pretty apparent to me that I needed to not only supplement my diet to fix those dietary gaps I was experiencing, but also to fuel my gut with necessary whole food nutrients that were critical to my overall wellness. One in particular, which took me years to recognize as fundamental to repairing my gut, was fiber. For nearly my entire life, I thought fiber was just something you needed when you couldn’t go to the bathroom. Which, not surprisingly, turned out to be far from the truth – and in realizing that, it helped me recognize that most people thought that way, too. Between my own journey and that of a friend, who found fiber to be foundational to helping her through an Ulcerative Colitis diagnosis, it was obvious: fiber needed a rebrand, and people needed to understand how crucial it is to their gut health, and general wellbeing.
There were many first steps, but the most important one was to determine what the best clinically proven fiber sources were. Our vision was to create a line of powders that could seamlessly integrate into a consumer’s existing routine while providing them an efficacious and therapeutic dose of fiber. There are many types of fiber available on the market and we wanted to ensure we were putting the most credible and effective options in our products. From there, the tireless formulation began!
What advice would you offer aspiring founders?
Race: While I think it’s important to have a clear vision for what you want the brand to become and the products you want to launch, it’s also important to allow that vision to evolve. There were many times that I had to remind myself that I wasn’t the only type of consumer I was wanting to reach with this brand and product, and therefore I needed to flex my thinking to ensure I was also creating something that was attainable and exciting to other types of consumers.
It’s important to remain confident in your ideas and really draw on personal experiences to create and build something magical. Consumers truly feel that in a brand – when a founder is so personally tied to their mission. It can be difficult to want to put yourself out there, but it makes that connection between the brand and customers that much more human. And at the end of the day, human connection is what we all want!
Nutrafol
Cindy Gustafson, CEO of Nutrafol
Nutrafol
Nutrafol is a science-backed hair wellness brand offering dermatologist-recommended, physician-formulated supplements that target the root causes of hair thinning and support stronger, thicker hair growth at various life stages. Its clinically tested formulas also address factors like stress, nutrition, hormones and aging alongside hair health.
The brand was founded by Dr. Sophia Kogan. She started to experience hair thinning during medical school residency due to stress, and she became interested in looking into holistic, whole-body approaches to support hair growth. She then linked up with the two other co-founders, Giorgios Tsetis and Roland Peralta, who each had their own distinct experiences with hair thinning. While the brand has new leadership today, current CEO, Cindy Gustafson, and Chief Medical Advisor, board-certified dermatologist Dr. Heather Woolery-Lloyd, have also had their own journeys with hair health issues.
Dr. Heather Woolery-Lloyd, Chief Medical Officer at Nutrafol
Nutrafol
What led you to work with Nutrafol?
Gustafson: I first started using Nutrafol during the pandemic. I had my second child not long before that, so I assumed what I was experiencing was just some extended postpartum shedding, but it kept getting worse. It finally got to the point where reassurance wasn’t enough. I needed to do something about it, and I needed something that actually worked.
I kept hearing about Nutrafol – from friends, colleagues, my stylist – and how they had seen real results. What stood out to me right away was that Nutrafol wasn’t treating hair health as a surface-level issue. It was looking at the bigger picture and addressing it from the inside out.
The more I learned, the more I appreciated how much rigor and intention goes into the products. Nutrafol holds itself to a higher standard because it genuinely believes customers deserve real answers and real results. That’s something I connected with personally, and it’s a philosophy that continues to guide how we show up today.
Hair thinning is deeply personal and often emotional, and I’ve seen firsthand how impactful the right support can be. That experience continues to shape how I lead – keeping our customers at the center of every decision, from how we invest in research to how we earn trust over time. That commitment is why we hold ourselves to higher standards, including becoming the first and only hair growth supplement to earn NSF Certified for Sport®, a reflection of our focus on safety, quality and doing things the right way.
Dr. Woolery-Lloyd: Taking care of your hair is not just cosmetic; it’s a vital part of overall well-being. I am passionate about a whole-body approach for my patients, and this is one of the reasons I also became board-certified in Lifestyle Medicine, a specialty that focuses on how lifestyle factors influence our health. This perfectly aligns with Nutrafol’s philosophy, which is ultimately what led me to join them. Nutrafol looks at root causes of hair thinning—from aging and hormones to nutrition and stress—to uniquely support women and men across life stages.
It’s been encouraging to see more women comfortably and openly speaking about their experiences with hair thinning. They are advocating for better care while also uplifting one another. I love that women with hair concerns now feel empowered to be proactive about their hair health.
What advice would you offer aspiring founders?
Gustafson: Build with empathy, but ground your decisions in data and science so you’re addressing the right problem in the right way. If you stay anchored in a genuine purpose and let the voice of the customer guide your decisions day to day, it will rarely steer you wrong.
Women’s health is at an important inflection point. There’s a growing recognition that women’s needs aren’t one-size-fits-all, and meaningful progress comes from taking those differences seriously. The brands that will lead the next chapter are the ones that listen closely to their customers, stay rooted in science, and remain committed to evolving alongside women through every stage of life.
The Future of Women’s Health Supplements
Women-founded supplement companies are not just filling gaps—they’re reframing how wellness products are built, communicated and trusted. In categories such as women’s health, many founders are making an impact by starting with lived experience, pairing it with rigorous science and listening closely to the communities they serve.
As the supplement industry continues to grow, the brands poised to lead are those grounded in credibility, transparency and empathy—qualities that many women founders bring not as a marketing angle, but as a necessity born from solving real problems. In doing so, they are shaping a more thoughtful, inclusive future for nutritional wellness—one that meets consumers where they are and evolves alongside them.
