Pair's model cuts the cost of vitamins

[attach]6794[/attach]Køge Vitamins founders Andrew Lenjosek and Alex Hyssen left their respective Wall and Bay Street jobs behind to start their own company.

“It was not an easy decision, I mean I had a nice salary down in New York. I loved New York,” says Ottawa native Lenjosek. “My friends and my social life are there but I think I speak for Alex as well as myself when I say that when you have a once in a lifetime type opportunity you really need to jump on it and I think that’s really what drove both of us to start this.”

After a year of planning, the 23-year old entrepreneurs launched their online vitamin venture in February. Instead of having retail locations, they offer subscription-based vitamin packs for energy, weight management, antioxidants and daily essentials directly to customers.

“They can get the most premium vitamins and avoid the five times markup involved with retail distribution,” Hyssen says. “When you look at your typical retailers out there, vitamin shops, consumers are paying for five times markup because of the lease hold, because of the sales employees, because of these additional costs inflated upon the cost of the actual products.”

The pair behind Køge Vitamins, who met at the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario, says Hyssen’s family’s 30 plus years in the industry, as well as their experience and guidance helped tremendously in the early stages of starting the company.

“Specifically the connections that have been available to us to develop incredible formulations and products have been instrumental in us putting out our own great product,” Hyssen says.

Although their business model challenges a multi-billion dollar industry, its inception stems from more humble beginnings near Bayview and York Mills.

“I was living with Alex, I was living in his basement and we were working in the basement the entire time,” Lenjosek says, adding their approach is also different because they offer a simplified buying experience with pre-selected vitamin packs for each major vitamin category. “So the entire inception, creation, strategy, etc. came from Alex’s basement in North York.”

Køge Vitamins, which has an [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwAocZMn6tk]amusing commercial[/url] with 5,770 hits on YouTube as of press time telling consumers not to buy from the company, have also partnered with Vitamin Angels, whose mission is to advance availability, access and use of micronutrients, especially vitamin A, among at-risk populations.

“For every purchase our customers make we donate vitamins to children in Africa under the age of five who are suffering from malnutrition,” Lenjosek says.

While the business is now running fairly smoothly, they recall the snow day in January that nearly jeopardized their launch when their shipment was held up at the border needing approval to cross from a Health Canada official.

“They had a clerical error on their end which halted our products at the border and so I literally called the same Health Canada person because I knew for a fact that he was in the office but he wasn’t picking up,” Lenjosek says. “I probably called him 30 times in a row until he picked up.”

“By the end of the day he knew our number, he knew who we were and I’m not even joking 4:59 he gives us the green light and we were like thank you,” Hyssen adds.