Why We Built Supbox: The Problem No One Was Solving
The Problem I Didn’t Know Was a Business Idea Yet
The first time I really felt the problem Supbox would eventually solve was during lockdown in 2021. My usual whey protein ran out at pretty much the worst possible time. If you can remember protein prices had jumped massively, side by side with home gym equipment, and my old tub was empty.
I remember looking at other smaller brands with scepticism, what if It absolutely $hit? So instead of risking it, I did what loads of people would probably do, I crawled back to my now more expensive familiar brand. At the time, I wasn’t thinking about starting this business. I just had a problem and no obvious solution.
Fast forward to late 2024 and it happened again, only this time the problem was sheer boredom. I’d been rotating through the same three to four big supplement brands for years. They were good, but I wanted to try something different.
So I did the grown up thing and searched Google for for any kinda multi brand protein sample box..... Nothing. That was the moment the idea became obvious.
There were hundreds of supplement brands, thousands of flavours, and more choice than ever. But barely any easy way to try a proper mix of them without buying full tubs, full boxes or full cases.
As far as we can see, that gap still exists today. And that gap became Supbox.
The Supplement Market Is Too Loud
The biggest problem I see in supplements right now is saturation. Every brand says they are cleaner, stronger, more advanced, more natural, better dosed, better tasting or somehow just… better. But they can’t all be better than everyone else.
It reminds me of those dumb red pill podcast clips where everyone somehow rates themselves a 10. If every brand is a 10, how are we supposed to know what is actually good? That is the part I found annoying.
I could have started another supplement brand. But honestly, I don’t think the market needs another tub with a different logo telling people it has reinvented protein powder.
What I think it needs is a better way for us to test products for ourselves. Try that new flavour. See how it mixes. See how it sits. See if the pre workout actually suits us. Then we can decide whether it deserves our money.
And it works both ways.
We need a cheaper, easier way to discover products as prices get out of hand. Brands need a better way to get those products into real people’s hands. That is the gap I want Supbox to fill. A discovery channel for the supplement industry.
We Didn’t Want to Build Another Supplement Store
We want Supbox to become the place people go when they want to try something new. Not because we claim one brand is better than another, but because we make it easier and cheaper to find out for yourself.
You should be able to try different brands, flavours and products without committing to full tubs, full cases or a cupboard full of expensive regrets.
But I also never wanted Supbox to feel purely functional.
If you’ve seen our branding, you’ll know we’re a bit out there. It’s loud. It’s colourful. It has personality. Our social media is the same. We want it to feel human, exploratory and fun rather than like another typical company talking about optimisation every five seconds.
One of my favourite things is seeing people react to the boxes in person for the first time. Their eyes literally light up. They start looking through everything, picking things out, I ALWAYS hear "Oh I never heard of these before". How fun is that?
That reaction is exactly how we pictured Supbox from the beginning. Especially when someone receives one as a gift, there's a mix of curiosity, excitement and anticipation before they’ve even opened the box.
That is why we don’t really see Supbox as a supplement store. We’re a selection box business built around the experience of discovering supplements.
The products matter, obviously. But so does the feeling of opening the box and not knowing exactly what you’re going to find. The supplement industry can sometimes feel like a dry bowl of oats. We’re trying to add the flavour. Make it more human. Make it more fun. And at the same time, give people a genuinely useful way to explore more of what the industry has to offer.
The Idea Was Easy. Building It Wasn’t.
From late 2024 into early 2026, most of my time went into figuring out whether Supbox could actually work. I researched other box companies, looked at what they did well, where they fell short, why some disappeared, and what current businesses still seemed to be missing.
The question wasn’t just “is this a good idea?” It was “can this survive as a real business?”
We started pitching the concept to supplement brands. A lot of them ignored us.
Fair enough, really. At that point we had no customer base, no sales history and basically no proof that anyone cared. But a few brands were open from the start.
Those early conversations meant a lot. We could explain the idea properly, hear their feedback, and get a feel for whether the industry actually saw value in it. Most of them liked the concept.
The only real question was whether we could deliver it.
We built almost everything ourselves
To keep costs down, we did, and still do almost everything in house apart from a few specialist jobs. That meant working out the box dimensions, the shape, the branding direction, the website, the memes, the product photography, the social content, the packing process... basically anything we could avoid outsourcing.
I've always been very creative and a bit obsessive with ideas. My family and girlfriend have joked for years that I’m probably somewhere on the spectrum. Maybe I am, maybe I’m not, but if that’s the reason my brain constantly throws out strange ideas, I’ll take it.
I used to draw comics as a kid, so the visual side of Supbox was probably always going to be a bit chaotic. I came up with the overall box concept, the characters (named Broc and Peach), memes, dimensions and style, but I didn’t illustrate the final artwork myself. For that, we found an incredibly talented artist in Mexico who took the ideas in my head and turned them into the finished designs.
Before launch, we showed the boxes around and asked people what they thought.
A lot of people described them as having a graffiti style. Weirdly, I had never really thought of them that way as it wasn't our intention. But once someone says it, you can’t unsee it.
Then came the slightly uncomfortable part: actually launching
Up until that point, everything was theoretical. We liked the idea. Brands liked the idea. Friends and family supported it as they should. But would a complete stranger actually spend their own money on one?
We didn’t do some massive polished launch campaign. In March 2026 It was basically a quiet launch to the roughly 200 people following us at the time.
Then we waited.
Our first order came through 1 hour and 29 minutes after launch. That one felt different. Not because it was a huge sale, but because someone who didn’t owe us anything had looked at the idea and decided it was worth paying for.
By the end of that soft launch, we had made 15 sales. Not exactly Amazon numbers. But for a brand nobody knew, with a product category we were basically trying to explain as we went along, we were absolutely chuffed.
For the first time, Supbox wasn’t just an idea anymore. Someone had actually bought it.
What Customers Actually Taught Us
Once people started buying Supbox, we finally got something better than opinions from friends, family and ourselves. Real customer behaviour.
The first thing that became obvious was that people genuinely liked the branding.
They liked that the boxes looked different, felt fun to open, and didn’t look like another plain supplement parcel.
A lot of people also told us they saw Supbox as a really strong gift idea, which made sense. There is something about opening a box full of different products, flavours and brands that feels more exciting than just getting one tub of protein wrapped in a bow.
Another thing people loved was finding products they had never seen before.
That is probably one of the clearest signs that the discovery side of Supbox is working.
We deliberately left the buying options open
When we launched, we did want to be a subscription company but we didn’t want to assume we knew how people wanted to buy from us.
So we gave them options.
They could:
Buy a ready made box
Build their own box
Subscribe for a cheaper recurring option
For the custom boxes, we added a £25 minimum spend so people would actually create a proper selection rather than buying one lonely protein bar and calling it a day without experiencing the exploration side of Supbox.
So far, the results have been interesting.
Our pre-built boxes and Build Your Own Boxes are pretty evenly matched.
That tells us two things. Some people want the full lucky dip experience. They want us to choose the products, send the box, and let the surprise be part of it or it's for gifting. Others love the idea of Supbox but want more control. They still want variety, but they want to choose exactly what goes in.
Subscriptions are a smaller part of our customer base. The main subscription box is our Full Mystery Box, which was always designed to be the all-rounder gift box. It brings together the types of products found across our other boxes and gives people the widest mix.
That has helped us understand something really important: There isn’t one perfect way to experience Supbox. Some people want surprise.
Some people want control. Some want both at different times. and that is fine.
Meeting People in Real Life Tells Us Even More
We also do a lot of events because there is only so much you can learn from analytics. A website tells you what someone clicked. A conversation tells you what they actually think.
When someone walks up to the stand, picks up a box, starts looking through it, asks questions and reacts to the branding, you get a completely different type of feedback. You can see the curiosity. You can see when the idea clicks. You can also see when it doesn’t and that matters too.
Not everyone is interested in Supbox, and we don’t expect them to be. Those conversations are useful because the people who are not interested often show us where the barriers are.
Maybe they only buy one trusted brand. Maybe they don’t use supplements much.
Maybe they don’t immediately understand why a selection box is useful. That feedback is just as valuable as someone saying they love the idea.
The events have also confirmed something we hoped would be true from the start. People like talking about supplements. They like comparing flavours, brands, pre-workouts, protein bars and all the random things they have tried over the years. Supbox gives us a reason to have those conversations and every one of them helps us understand what people actually want from this business
Where We Want to Take Supbox
If Supbox is going to become the place people go when they want to discover new supplements, we can’t just be a selection box company. The boxes are useful, they are foundational to the experience but objectively speaking, they are just the delivery method.
The bigger challenge is building the network behind them. That means creating strong relationships with brands and finding a way to stock as many products as possible in single-use or trial friendly formats.
The more brands that join Supbox, the more useful Supbox becomes. More brands means more choice. More choice means more reasons for people to visit.
And even if someone doesn’t care about the surprise, the artwork, or the experience of opening one of our boxes, there is still a very simple utility:
they can try more products without committing to full-size purchases.
That alone has huge value.
Discovery is not just about products
There is another side to all this that I think becomes more important every year.
The people behind the brands. The founders. The athletes. The people developing products.
The people who are trying to build something genuinely interesting in fitness.
As AI becomes more involved in everything we do, I think the human side of brands becomes even more valuable.
So one of the things we are planning next is a YouTube channel where we can meet brands, visit businesses, talk to the people behind the products, and show more of the industry itself. Because discovery should not stop at “here’s a new protein bar.”
Sometimes the story behind the product is just as interesting as the product itself.
Supbox was never meant to have just one pillar
I’ve always thought of Supbox as having three foundational pillars. Right now, the boxes are the only one of them we are actually using. The more people we meet and the more the business develops, the clearer the other parts become. In fact, we’ve recently added a fourth pillar and this one is probably the biggest. I can't say to much on that just yet.
But Imagine an international, Amazon-style supplement store where you can discover brands and, wherever possible, try products before committing to full sizes. A place built around discovery first.
And eventually a huge network of supplement companies all sitting in one place.
Is that ambitious? Absolutely. Is it slightly delusional? Hell yeah. But I think you have to be a little bit delusional to try and build something that doesn’t already exist.
The goal has never been to sell as many boxes as possible. The goal is to make discovering supplements easier in an evert growing saturated supplement market. The boxes were just the first step.
This was just a brief article on Supbox so far. Hopefully in several years, we can look back at this with the good feeling of the "good old start up Days".
A final personal note
Before finishing this, I want to say thank you to everyone who has supported Supbox so early on. We are still a very young company.
We know buying from a new, small business comes with a level of anxiety. You do not have years of history, thousands of reviews, or a household name reassuring you that everything is going to be good with us.
You are basically looking at what we have built so far and deciding whether you believe in it. That means a lot to us.
Ironically, that is the exact problem we are trying to solve for supplement brands too. There are loads of smaller or newer brands making genuinely interesting products, but customers are naturally hesitant to spend £30, £40 or £50 on something they have never tried before.
So while customers are taking a chance on Supbox, we are trying to make it easier for them to take smaller, smarter chances on the brands we work with.
Every early order, every review, every message, every conversation at an event, and every person who tells a friend about us helps build that trust and grow into what we believe Supbox will become.
We are still learning. We will get things wrong. Some ideas will work brilliantly. Others will probably end up in the same place as the protein flavours nobody wanted to finish.
But the goal has stayed the same from the beginning:
make discovering supplements easier, more affordable and a lot more fun.
We have some pretty ambitious ideas for where Supbox could eventually go, but none of them happen without people being willing to back the idea while it is still small.
So if you have bought a box, built your own, subscribed, stopped at our stand, followed us, shared something we posted, or simply told us you think the idea has legs, thank you.
You are part of the early story. And hopefully, this is still the very boring first chapter compared with what comes next.
Levi & The Supbox Team
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