Doing things right shouldn’t put you at a disadvantage
We’re supplement compliance consultants, a former dietitian and a pharmacologist, working with human and pet supplement brands across the UK, EU and US.
How we got here
Victoria didn’t come to compliance from regulatory work. She came to it from copywriting.
She trained as a dietitian and spent eight years in the NHS, then left to bring up two children under two. A few ecommerce businesses later, she started writing copy for supplement brands and noticed the same thing on almost every project. Founders took compliance seriously and rated it highly. Almost none of them could tell her what they were allowed to say.
So, she learned. Food law, supplement regulations, the claims registers, the advertising codes. Not out of interest, but because she didn’t want to hand over work that would get a brand into trouble or have to be redone six months later. Before long, founders were asking her for the compliance rather than the copy, and the question became a more interesting one: how do you write supplement marketing that stays inside the rules without watering it down to nothing?
That’s still the question we work on.
The science side
Richard (Rick to most) spent twelve years in pharmaceutical and biotech research, including at AstraZeneca and GSK. When he first started reading the evidence behind supplement ingredients, he couldn’t quite believe what brands were claiming from it.
In pharma, an ingredient earns the right to make a claim. Preclinical work alone takes five or six years: pharmacology, safety, efficacy, bioavailability, all before it goes anywhere near a person. The obvious objection is that drugs are different, because supplements are food. But plenty of supplements contain concentrated actives in forms you’d never find in a normal diet, and the evidence behind them is often a handful of trials at different doses, in different formats, in different populations. Sometimes it’s mice, and there’s no human data at all.
Almost none of that is brands trying to mislead anyone. Many founders don’t have a scientific background, and reading a study for what it can substantiate is a skill in itself. That’s why the science sits at the centre of what we do. Science claims are everywhere in supplement marketing, and they very often don’t support what the founder believes they support.
How we work
Victoria leads the client work: scoping, the compliance audits, the label work. Rick goes into the literature and comes back with what the evidence will carry. We both have strong opinions and we tend to argue them out over coffee in the morning, which is usually where the recommendation gets decided.
We’re married, in case you were wondering about the surnames. We also work from wherever we happen to be, which so far has been a lot of places, and has made no difference at all to how quickly work comes back.
What we won’t do
We’re not enforcers.
Our job is to make sure you understand where the risk sits, and yours is to decide how much of it you’re willing to carry. We’re entrepreneurs too, and we know the pull of bending a rule slightly when the copy would be so much better for it.
There are a few things we won’t do. We won’t work with brands who mislead their customers or put their safety at risk, and we won’t help sell an ingredient that isn’t legal to sell. It happens innocently and we’ll always flag it. But when a brand knows and carries on because the rules feel like they’re for other people, that isn’t a brand we want our name on. Plenty of things are already on the market. That doesn’t make them right.
Underneath all of it is a fairly simple hope: a supplement industry that’s safer and more trustworthy than the one we’ve got. One that doesn’t make promises it can’t keep and puts people’s health ahead of the marketing. We work with brands who want the same thing and care about building with integrity.
Victoria Metzger
CO-FOUNDER & Compliance Lead
On any project she’s the one who reads the formulation, works out which claims it supports at the dose you’re using, and turns that into messaging that’s defensible and still worth reading.
Richard Metzger
Co-Founder & Science Lead
He reads the studies behind an ingredient and works out whether the research holds up at the dose and in the population a claim depends on.
Getting started
Working with us
We take on a focused number of brands at a time, so the two people reading your formulation are the two people you deal with throughout, and the guidance you get is specific to your product.
Most brands start with the compliance and messaging strategy. If you already know what you need, or you just want a label checked before it goes to print, we can start there.
Or email info@vjmwritingservices.com if it’s urgent. We reply the same or next working day.