Melanie Lawson marketed her omega-3 oil as not smelling or tasting fishy. Then, one day, in the early months of her business, a packaging mistake resulted in her bottles stinking of fish.
When the bottlers were putting the cap on, if they had any fish-oil residue on their gloves it oxidised and turned the cap yellow. “It would look and smell disgusting,” Lawson recalled.
This discovery happened just as the company was about to fulfil its first order of 600 bottles to Space NK, the high-end beauty retailer. Lawson was forced to recall all the products to be recapped. She oversaw the process personally and said it was a “big lesson” in quality control.
Business for Lawson, 52, is personal. She founded Bare Biology in 2013 after she struggled with post-natal depression and went looking for a natural solution. The Brighton-based supplement brand, still known for its high-grade omega-3 as well as other minerals such as magnesium, recorded sales of £6.3 million and a pre-tax profit of £1 million this year. For 2026, Lawson is projecting even healthier sales of £9.5 million and pre-tax profits of £1.5 million.
Born in Lincolnshire, she had “quite a troubled childhood”. Her mother was a homemaker and her father was a serial entrepreneur, although his ventures were “not always hugely successful”. Her parents divorced early in her life. “It has played a big role in things that are important to me now as a mother and also as a business owner: stability, financial security — all the things I didn’t have as a child,” Lawson said.
She had shown an aptitude for languages from a young age and, at nine years old, she was sent to France for a year on her own. Lawson said her father thought it would “toughen me up a bit”, but she found the experience “quite brutal”. During her time in France, she started exhibiting signs of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), a condition that would play a big role in the founding of her business. Lawson would not receive a diagnosis for her OCD until she was in her thirties.
Having moved to Spain with her father at the age of 11, she “ran away” back to England at 19 with friends’ help. Lawson took a course in Spanish and Italian literature at Durham University and after graduating in 1996, moved to London. She secured a marketing internship and eventually worked her way up to becoming a group account director at the marketing agency Proximity in 2005.
Lawson did a degree in Spanish and Italian literature at Durham University
ALAMY
In 2001, she had met her future husband, Clive Lawson, a client who had been made redundant. After going out for a drink to “commiserate”, they admitted their mutual feelings and married a year later.
Lawson left the corporate world in 2006 to become a full-time mother. While she loved being a mum, the flipside was that her OCD got “really bad” and she experienced pre-natal and post-natal depression around the arrivals of her first and second children.
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However, Lawson did not want a repeat of her own experiences of childhood — when her mother was “in and out of hospital” due to mental health conditions — and was determined to “beat it”.
“My mother was a wonderful, gorgeous, lovely woman who had a lot of illness. I thought I don’t want my children to have that same thing.”
Her midwife put her in touch with a support group and her GP referred her to a psychiatrist who took her through cognitive behavioural therapy. She also started researching the role of nutrition, because she wanted to avoid taking medication.
“There really is nothing wrong with medication and it absolutely has a place,” said Lawson. “It saves lives, including my mother’s. But I had it in my head for some reason that if I do that, I have failed. Which is silly, but it’s how I felt.”
A chiropractor suggested omega-3 to her and she started researching the benefits of it during pregnancy. She took the oil after her second pregnancy and found that she started noticing differences gradually.
“I wouldn’t burst into tears quite so easily; I was just able to cope. And then after my third child, I was absolutely fine.”
Lawson began working on Bare Biology in 2011 when, without prior knowledge of the industry, she contacted a fish-oil manufacturer in Norway. She visited the factory and, after being assured of the quality, convinced it to sell her one barrel — much less than that company would usually deal in — paid for on her husband’s Amex card. Bare Biology still uses the same supplier today.
Lawson first took omega-3 after her second pregnancy and started noticing the difference: “I wouldn’t burst into tears quite so easily; I was just able to cope”
ANDREW HASSON FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
She secured a bottler in the Midlands willing to package small batches in glass bottles and launched in August 2013. On the first day, she sold one bottle to a friend.
Lawson focused her strategy on nutritionists, booking a trade show that October. There she secured her first wholesaler, The Natural Dispensary, which still accounts for nearly half the company’s business. She also set out a list of retailers to target; top of that list was Liberty, the London department store, which she said she had always been “obsessed” with.
In 2014, she responded to an open call from Liberty for British suppliers, queuing for three and a half hours to do a two-minute pitch. Lawson thought her liquid fish oil would be a “hard sell”, but the judges told her it was the best pitch they had heard all morning and said they wanted to stock it.
Being listed in Liberty helped “open doors” to other retailers such as Space NK, Planet Organic and John Bell & Croyden.
Ask me anythingBest way to start the day … standing on the grass on bare feet, for grounding.Best decision I made … hiring a finance director in the early days, because I could potentially have gone a bit awry with cashflow without him.Worst decision I made… starting a podcast. It did really well but I nearly had a nervous breakdown.The best business tip I received … from Tim Ferriss’s book The 4-Hour Work Week: be your own target audience.
The company broke even in its first year and turned a profit of £80,000 in its second. Lawson attributes part of her success to hiring a finance director in 2015, to help with tight cashflow.
She has never taken outside investment because running the business is “hard enough without someone breathing down my neck”. She initially used director’s loans to fund the company, taking £40,000 from the family’s savings in the first year and £30,000 from her husband’s bonus in the second; these were gradually paid back.
From there, the company started expanding its product range, first selling fish oil in capsules, then collagen, vitamin D and magnesium. Next year, Bare Biology will be launching a creatine product.
“We’re not really a trend-focused brand,” Lawson said. “Nutritionists always say, ‘We really like it that you do only a few products, because we know that you do them really well.’ The customers appreciate it because they don’t get overwhelmed.”
Bare Biology has a “pretty lean” team of 15 staff, but is planning to hire more in the new year as the company continues to grow.
“People think the first bit is the hardest, but I don’t think it is. I think this is the hardest bit. When you get to our size, you get quite big challenges. Sometimes now, I think maybe I should just sell it. Then I very quickly think, no, I’ve got so much to do — there’s so much ahead of us. I’ve only just got started, really.”