My journey into natural health began at fifteen, as a Saturday boy at my local health food store. That early taste of food as medicine never left me — it sent me to the University of Westminster to study Nutritional Therapy, and it shaped everything that came after.

I trained to become a clinical practitioner, but I soon realised my passion wasn't in the consultation room. It was on the shop floor — the daily conversations, the energy of it, the chance to put things that will genuinely help people in to their hands. So when the very shop where it all began came up for sale, it felt like destiny. I took it on, and rebranded it into what is now Apothecary 27.

Twenty years taught me to read a label.

For over a decade I've stood behind that counter as a qualified nutritionist, helping real people with real problems — their sleep, their joints, the change of life, the years of feeling tired. And in that time I watched the supplement world change, not always for the better.

Beautifully packaged brands began filling the shelves and the Instagram feeds — gorgeous to look at, and, far too often, hollow inside. I could read a label and tell, in seconds, that a product wouldn't work. Token doses. A pinch of an active so it can be named on the front, never enough to do anything. Forms the body can barely absorb. Style standing in for substance — and people paying for the difference.

We've always loved style. It just has to have substance.

It bothered me precisely because I love beautiful things. It's why every item on our shelves is chosen with care — we stock what we believe in, and we never sell for the sake of selling. If it wants a place on our shelves — it has to earn it.

But beauty was never meant to be the whole story. It's the invitation. The substance is the promise.