How does ND price their products so competitively?

Thorne is owned by multiple billion dollar multinational corporations: Kirin, the makers of Kirin Ichiban beer, and Mitsui, the markers of Sapporo beer. They bought out the ownership stake that two other venture capital companies had in Thorne a few years back, so they certainly want to make back their investment and profit. To do that, you have to have high margins. Also, Thorne sponsors the US Olympic team, the UFC, Crossfit, and a bunch of other athletic teams. They spend a LOT of money on advertising and sponsorships. They have decided that their business model is focusing on a high priced/high margin sector, and using the money from those margins to focus on sponsorships and brand awareness. I am just a dude that decided to start a company one day after multiple people went to the hospital from fake and impure supplements. I knew that the lab testing and quality control standards of this industry needed to change, and I knew nobody else was going to do it, so I decided to make that my mission. I am also passionate about the science of self enhancement, and have been a big part of building the nootropics community to what it is today. I don't just sell these products. I take them all myself, and am constantly experimenting and pushing things forward. Because of that, I am much more involved in the community. This is why I have always tried to keep things as reasonably priced as possible, while still advancing our larger mission of lab testing, quality control, and consumer protection.

How do we do it? To be honest, by working our asses off. One of the main themes you will see if you look back at my history is a gradual increasing distrust of everyone in this industry as time has gone on. The things I have learned over the years would not just scare people... they would make you as angry as I am! I have been lied to, misled, and given faulty or fake data by the entrenched players in this industry for almost ten years. The state of this industry is horrible. Many people that I once trusted have turned out to be charlatans and liars, just like the rest of them. What this has forced me to do over time is take over control of every aspect of what we do. The analytical labs we were using were giving us faulty, fake, or inaccurate data, so I had to build our own in-house analytical testing lab from scratch. The contract manufacturers we were using were not properly making the finished goods, then lying to us about it, so I had to build our own production facility from the ground up. Contract fulfillment companies suck, and I personally hate waiting for packages I order online, so I had to build a fulfillment center that could get orders out as fast as humanly possible. Customer service, quality control, marketing, R&D, graphic design, SEO, supply chain management, engineering, and now even limited grow operations and synthesis... I all had to bring in-house and build our own operations, so that I could oversee them and ensure they were being done right. This means we have built an extremely vertically integrated company from the ground up. I trust nobody anymore, which is why I will only put my name and reputation behind something I can personally oversee the operations of. We even tried to get in stores years ago. That's when I learned how broken that system was, too. You have to effectively bribe the large distributors to even get in front of stores. Then the distributors want at least 50% margins, and the stores want 30% or more. The stores don't care what the best product is. They care what sells and makes them the most money. By the time it reaches an actual customer, you either have to raise the prices to stuff the pockets of those middle men, or you have to skimp on ingredients or the process to bring your costs down. I refuse to do either, so we stick to what we know now: developing, producing, testing, packaging, selling, and fulfilling products directly to customers that appreciate what it takes to do things right. I can't even imagine the amount of middle men in between Thorne and its customers holding their hands out for a piece of the pie... That's not my world. I am good at making novel quality products that I personally want to see in the market, then interacting directly with the customers that will take those products.

Also, some people have described us as an analytical testing lab that also sells products. That's probably a very apt description. Our ISO certified analytical lab is a world class facility doing chemistry that no other lab in the world is doing. It's a cornerstone of who we are as a company. Everything we do is in furtherance of expanding and improving our lab and pushing my mission forward. The amount of money it takes to run our lab is pretty nuts. Most people have no idea what it takes to do proper analytical chemistry on a handful of products, much less the hundreds that we have, and the novel R&D we do. We have to fund all that simply from the operations of our retail sales, which can be difficult. Our overhead every month would make some people spit out their drinks. Frankly, what disgusts me is how all the other brands in this industry can charge what they do for being glorified middle men. Most brands are literally just shells meant to extract money from consumers. They are basically marketing companies. They place orders from contract manufacturers, who source ingredients from the cheapest places, do zero lab testing, then send pallets of their bottles to contract fulfillment companies. Some brands never even see or touch their products before they reach customers. Many are using Amazon as their exclusive fulfillment operations now, and even when you order from their main site, the order is fulfilled through Amazon. These brands use review programs to put up tons of fake 5 star reviews, then give away free product to other people who will agree to give 5 star reviews. Literally everyone does it on Amazon. They juice their rankings with these fake reviews, then pay influencers to hype up their stuff and get enough sales velocity so they can just sit back and extract money being middle men forever. Some of them even go one step farther, and do negative SEO on competitor's sites to try and screw with their rankings, and use black hat tactics on Amazon to get competitor's product's pulled from listings or lower their rankings in search results. Some of our competitors have gotten our products pulled from Amazon by hijacking the listings and putting references to illegal drugs on them. Our NMN listing was down for 6 months because of a competitor attack like that. They sometimes DDOS attack our site. They try to hack us. They send death threats to me and my family. This industry is shady as fuck! I guess when you are a middle man literally doing nothing all day, you have all the time in the world to set up these sorts of shady things. I am a common target because I constantly call out the bad actors in this industry, which doesn't make me a lot of friends with the people profiting off consumer's lack of knowledge on how this industry works.

That brings me to the final pillar of who we are: consumer protection and awareness. It's something I have constantly done since before I even started this company. Brands selling fake and impure product is rampant. Nobody is doing proper lab testing or quality control. Consumers are buying things that are completely fake, contain impurities, are spiked with other things, or just don't contain what is claimed on the label. They use fake or compensated reviews to obfuscate things, and consumers are taken advantage of, or sent to the hospital in some cases. It's a fight I have been fighting for a decade now. I have tried to be as open and honest with everyone as I can, and to help educate and inform consumers what is going on in the background, and how they need to hold brands accountable. There are many bad actors in this industry, but there are even more that are just apathetic and don't understand what it takes to do things properly. Fighting both that willful misconduct and apathetic negligence has been my mission for many years. Consumers shouldn't have to fear whether supplements they are buying are fake or impure. They should be able to trust that what is claimed is in the product actually is, and that the company making it has done what it needs to ensure that every time. That is, unfortunately, an exception to the rule in this industry. I am trying to change that.

So that's a long answer to some questions you didn't even ask. However, I felt it was relevant to understanding exactly who we are as a company. Cheers!