It takes a lot to build a wellness brand that sells a product every minute. It takes even more to completely disrupt the traditional celebrity endorsement model. In this Q&A, founder Rose Rayner and NRL great Braith Anasta reveal the science and strategy behind Australia’s fastest-growing supplement brand, and why Anasta bypassed a standard brand deal to get his hands dirty in the Gold Coast lab.
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Q: Rose, tell us more about your background… where you grew up, interests, unusual jobs in the past. And, what experience have you had that led to you launching your business?
Rose Rayner:
I’ve always been incredibly driven. I grew up in Wales with five brothers, so from a young age I learnt how to compete, stand my ground and hustle for what I wanted. I was also an avid show jumper, spending years competing at a high level. Horse riding taught me lessons that have stayed with me for life: discipline, resilience, consistency and the understanding that results don’t come from shortcuts, they come from relentless execution – anything is possible if your locked in.
Entrepreneurship has always been part of who I am. Long before Calmerceuticals, I built and helped scale businesses, including the Customer Service Institute of Australia, which ultimately became part of an ASX-listed company valued at more than $460 million at listing and over $800 million by the time I exited. That experience taught me what it takes to build something that genuinely disrupts an industry rather than simply competing within it.
But Calmerceuticals wasn’t born from a market opportunity. It came from a very personal frustration. The unique position that we are in is that I did’nt build Calmerceutical’s to make money – I have already made my money – I built it because I personally want better options.
I’ve always been a functional health girl, I’m incredibly passionate about health, nutrition and looking after my body, yet when I went searching for a collagen supplement that was clean and actually worked, I couldn’t find one. The market was saturated with under dosed formulas, synthetic fillers, clever marketing and products that looked beautiful on the shelf but delivered very little where it mattered.
I remember thinking, surely we can do better than this… Why doesn’t Australia have premium and proven options?
So I decided to build it, I spent more than seven years working with my team of Scientists, biochemists and formulators to create the product I wished existed. We challenged every assumption. Every industry norm and most importantly every ingredient. We refuse to compromise on clinical dosing, ingredient quality, absorption or transparency, even when it meant taking the slower, harder and more expensive path.
It would have been far easier to launch another powder or capsule. Instead, we have genuinely pioneered Australia’s premium liquid collagen category because I believed consumers deserved something far, far better.
My ambition has never been to build another supplement company. We’re building a company that restores trust to an industry that has lost it. Every formulation starts with one question: Would I confidently take it every day myself? If the answer isn’t an unequivocal yes, we don’t launch it. And I am incredibly selective on what I out in my body.
Calmerceuticals is just the beginning. Our vision is to build one of the world’s most trusted science-led wellness brands; setting a new global benchmark for efficacy, transparency and uncompromising quality.
Q: Rose, Calmerceuticals sits in the top 1% of Shopify stores globally and holds a staggering 92% customer retention rate after launching just last year. What is the secret to building that level of brand trust so quickly?
Rose Rayner: Sitting in the top one percent of Shopify stores globally is one thing, but that 92% retention rate is what I’m so incredibly proud of every single day, and I track it like a hawk. In plain terms what does it mean? It means our products work. Ninety-two percent of our customers come back month after month, and people don’t keep buying something that doesn’t work.
The industry average is 32%, that tells me we’ve built exactly what I set out to build: premium, proven, incredibly effective products with no fillers and no synthetics that above all else work. That the results speak for themselves every single time to the point our retention rate sits at 92%.
Before I launched Calmerceuticals, almost everyone I spoke to pushed back. They told me there wasn’t a market for premium supplementation in Australia, that it had to be cheap, mass-market ingredients to make the margins work.
I disagreed.
Europe and the US already had a plethora of genuinely effective premium supplements, and I couldn’t understand why Australia didn’t.
Being in the top one percent globally this early has been the proof. I believe there’s a real shift happening. People are sick of being sold supplements that don’t work, sick of wasting their money, and sick of putting things in their body that when you actually look into the ingredients are pretty scary.
We’re here to flip that script completely and change the status quo. The fact that we have managed to be in the top 1% globally within our first year cements to me that the tide is changing on brands selling products that simply do nothing and expecting customers to accept it.
Q: Braith, we’re used to seeing sports stars simply slap their name on a label. You actually went into the Gold Coast lab to reformulate the Ultra Performance range. What drove you to get your hands dirty in the development phase?
Braith Anasta: For me, it was never about just cashing a cheque or slapping my face on a tub of powder. Throughout my entire NRL career, my body was my livelihood. I know what elite performance requires, and I know exactly what it feels like when a product falls short.
When I met Rose and saw the uncompromising standard she was setting with Calmerceuticals, I knew this was different.
I didn’t want to be an ambassador; I wanted to be a creator.
Getting into the lab on the Gold Coast, working directly with the scientists, and iterating on the Ultra Performance range allowed me to inject decades of professional athletic experience into the actual science. We ripped apart the traditional formulas and built something that genuinely moves the needle for everyday people and elite athletes alike.
It’s about integrity, if my name is on it, I need to know it’s the absolute best product on the market, period.
Part 2: The Science & Lifestyle Benefits (Driving Reader Clicks)
Q: Creatine is traditionally associated with bodybuilding and heavy weightlifting. Why is the inclusion of pharmaceutical-grade CreaAssure in this adaptogenic formula a win for the everyday wellness enthusiast?
Rose Rayner: The research on women is stark. A twelve-month randomised controlled trial out of the University of Saskatchewan tracked pre and post-menopausal women taking creatine alongside resistance training.
Bone density loss at the femoral neck: 1.2%. Placebo group: 3.9%. A third of the bone loss. Strength gains: 64% versus 34%, nearly double.
The International Society of Sports Nutrition’s position stand on the female athlete now recommends 3 grams of creatine daily, published, peer-reviewed science that’s been sitting in the literature for years while the wellness industry moved at a crawl.
That’s exactly why CreaAssure earned its place in this formula. Manufacturing quality is the part nobody talks about, and it’s where creatine’s reputation gets wrecked. Most products on shelves are technically “creatine monohydrate,” but quality control varies enormously: contaminants like dicyandiamide and dihydrotriazine, inconsistent particle size, poor solubility.
That’s why so many people blame bloating and gut discomfort on creatine itself, when the real cause is what’s actually in the tub. CreaAssure is pharmaceutical-grade: 99.5%+ purity, impurity levels held below 50 parts per million, a fraction of the industry norm. Bioavailability independently verified at up to 3.2 times higher than standard market-grade creatine.
Less product. More effect. None of the compromises that gave creatine its bad name. In regards to our hero ingredient which increases testosterone, it very similar to how creatine has historically been marketed – towards men only.
But women need both just as badly as men do.
Here’s a stat that stops people. Testosterone is the most abundant biologically active hormone in a woman’s body, ahead of oestrogen.
Women carry androgen receptors throughout the brain, bone, and muscle, and by their 40s, testosterone levels have fallen by roughly half compared to their 20s. Fatigue. Low mood. Lost muscle. Lost strength. Most women are never told why.
The medical consensus on testosterone therapy for women wasn’t published until 2019, and even now it only endorses treatment for low libido, despite decades of evidence on testosterone’s role in energy and body composition. Creatine and strength have been sold to women as men’s territory for decades. Both hormones behind performance and vitality matter just as much for women as men, creatine for muscle and cognition, testosterone for energy and mood. That gap in research and marketing is exactly what we built Calmerceuticals to close.
The Founder’s Journey & Background
Q: Rose, Building a global top-1% wellness brand from a standing start in just twelve months is an extraordinary feat. What was the catalyst in your own life that made you say, “I need to formulate this myself and launch Calmerceuticals”?
Rose Rayner: It’s far bigger and greater than I ever could have imagined, and getting here from such early days is unprecedented in Australia.
We are Australia’s fastest growing supplement brand and I don’t think anyone could have expected our growth. It all started with my own personal frustration.
I was sick of, for want of a better word, the complete rubbish on the market: products dosed at trace levels that did absolutely nothing, packed with ingredients no one should be putting in their body, let alone paying good money for. Maltodextrin, fillers, synthetics, just noise dressed up as a product. I could see Europe and the US had far better options, and I thought, why don’t we have that here? I also knew that if I wanted it, there had to be other people that would want it too. That’s been my north star from day one.
Q: The supplement and sports performance space has historically been heavily marketed toward men. As a female founder launching a world-first adaptogenic performance formula, what has that journey been like for you?
Rose Rayner: Haha – I doooo always love this point – I get asked a lot about being a female founder – and I always like to push back a little bit…
I’m not a female founder, I’m a founder.
Do men that lead businesses get asked what it’s like being a male founder? No of course not so I always like to highlight it. I’m not a “female” founder – I’m a founder. Walk into most performance supplement aisles and the packaging tells you exactly who it’s for: loud, black, built for men. That’s not an accident, it’s decades of an industry deciding women were an afterthought in performance nutrition.
I built Calmerceuticals to essentially prove that wrong and champion what we as women need. Before Ultra Performance, we built Collagen and then PeriCalm, a supplement for perimenopause, a life stage the entire category has ignored for years despite it affecting half the population.
That wasn’t a marketing decision, it was a statement: if an industry won’t show up for women, build it yourself. Now Ultra Performance sits under the same roof as PeriCalm, same lab, same scientists, same standard of proof, because strength and performance were never a men’s issue to begin with.
CreaAssure, the fermented shilajit, the whole adaptogenic stack, none of it cares what gender is holding the sachet. It isn’t gendered marketing anymore; it’s about premium, clean science that helps everyone perform at their absolute peak.
Q: You chose to base your formulation team and lab right on the Gold Coast. How has the Australian lifestyle and access to local biotech shaped the DNA of your brand?
Rose Rayner: Being made right here in Australia, developed and created here, has been paramount to me, from day one.
We would have hit the market years earlier if we’d manufactured overseas, and it would have been ten times cheaper using cheap, mass-market ingredients. But that’s the antithesis of everything this brand was built for. I was intentional about building an Australian brand we could take globally and represent Australia with real pride.
Having a globally leading scientific team based right here on the Gold Coast, manufacturing right here, is a real point of pride for me. When people ask where we’re made, it’s one of my favourite questions to answer: right here in Australia, with one of the best scientific teams in the world. That shapes everything we do. The biotech talent here in my opinion is bleeding edge. Why would I go overseas when we can build world-first products proudly, from home?
Q: What’s next?
Rose Rayner: We are just getting started. The vision for Calmerceuticals has always been global domination in the premium wellness space.
We’re continuing to push the boundaries of what’s possible in the lab, exploring groundbreaking new delivery systems and untapping the potential of clinical-grade adaptogens.
Expect to see us expanding our footprint internationally, educating consumers on why they deserve better, and launching formulas that the industry simply hasn’t seen before. We’re not here to play the game; we’re here to completely rewrite the rules.
Ultra Performance is available now at www.calmerceuticals.com
