19 SOUNDS LIKE A LOT.
We know.
In a world of single-ingredient supplements and minimalist formulas, nineteen ingredients can look excessive. But we didn't start by deciding how many ingredients PREWRK should contain.
We started with a different question: what actually makes someone perform well across a working day?
The answer turned out to be more complicated than energy.
You need to wake up and get going. You need to concentrate, remember, make decisions and solve problems. You need enough drive to start difficult things, and enough cognitive endurance to stay useful as the day goes on.
Then there's everything else.
You need to communicate with people. Deal with pressure. Move between tasks. Adapt when something unexpected happens. And all of this is happening inside a body that needs water, minerals and cellular energy, and responds continuously to sleep, food, movement, stress and its environment.
Work is cognitive, physical and emotional.
Once you look at work that way, trying to solve the entire thing with one ingredient starts to look like the stranger idea.
THERE IS NO HERO INGREDIENT.
Supplement products are often easy to understand because they have a protagonist.
Caffeine for energy. Creatine for physical performance. Electrolytes for hydration. L-theanine for calm. Citicoline for cognition.
All useful. None describes an entire workday.
PREWRK contains 85mg of natural caffeine through Coffeine® because alertness matters. But caffeine sits alongside TheaGreen® L-theanine and Zynamite®, rather than being asked to carry the entire activation system.
Then there's Cognizin® citicoline on the cognitive side of the formula. 3g of creatine monohydrate sits underneath cellular energy demands. CocoMineral®, potassium and Himalayan salt form part of the hydration and electrolyte system.
On the other side of activation are ingredients including TheaGreen®, taurine, magnesium and Rhodiola rosea. Different ingredients, different roles, one formulation.
No single one of those ingredients is PREWRK.
The system is the product.
BECAUSE YOU'RE A SYSTEM TOO.
We divide performance into neat categories because it makes products easier to understand.
Energy. Focus. Hydration. Stress. Physical performance.
But your body doesn't recognise those category boundaries.
Your physical state can affect how you think. Stress can make concentration harder. Hydration matters while you're sitting at a desk just as it does when you're moving. Mental effort still requires energy.
The person answering emails at 9am is the same person presenting at 11am, dealing with a problem at 2pm and trying to think creatively at 4pm.
One person. Different demands. Interacting systems.
So rather than isolate one part of the workday, we wanted the formulation to reflect the person experiencing it.
SOME INGREDIENTS AREN'T WHERE YOU'D EXPECT THEM.
Creatine is probably the best example.
For decades, we've associated it with gyms, strength and physical performance. Put 3g of creatine into something designed for the workday and it initially seems out of place.
Until you stop treating the brain and body as completely separate things.
Creatine plays a role in cellular energy metabolism in both muscle and brain tissue, which is why its potential cognitive applications have become an increasingly active area of research.
The same thinking explains why a product for work contains an electrolyte system.
You're still losing fluid. Your nervous system still relies on electrolyte balance. Your physiology doesn't suddenly become irrelevant because the difficult thing you're doing is happening on a laptop.
Your body comes to work too.
MORE ISN'T BETTER.
Nineteen isn't a magic number.
Twenty ingredients wouldn't automatically make PREWRK better than nineteen. And a five-ingredient formula isn't automatically inferior because it's simpler.
Complexity for its own sake is bad formulation.
Every additional ingredient creates another consideration. Dose, interaction, taste, solubility, tolerability, manufacturing and cost.
So the objective was never to fit as many impressive names as possible onto the back of a pouch.
Every ingredient needs a reason to be there.
That's also why the doses are openly declared rather than hidden behind a proprietary blend. The current formula contains 19 clinically dosed ingredients and seven patented actives.
THE INTERESTING PART IS WHAT HAPPENS BETWEEN THEM.
An ingredient list tells you what's inside a product.
It doesn't necessarily tell you how it was formulated.
Caffeine alongside L-theanine is a different proposition from simply asking caffeine to carry the entire activation system. Cognizin® alongside N-Acetyl-L-Tyrosine approaches attention and drive through different nutritional pathways.
CocoMineral®, potassium and sodium aren't necessarily the ingredients somebody buys a performance product for. But they form part of the physical foundation underneath everything else.
Even BioPerine® isn't there because anybody wakes up thinking they need black pepper extract before opening Slack. Its job is within the wider formulation.
That's the difference between an ingredient list and a formula.
WE STARTED WITH THE WORKDAY.
PREWRK could have been much easier to explain if we'd built a caffeine drink.
Or a nootropic. Or an electrolyte powder. Or a creatine product.
But none of those categories described what we were trying to build.
We were interested in the period between starting work and finishing it, and everything that asks of you cognitively, physically and emotionally.
So we worked backwards.
What helps you activate? What supports cognition? What belongs underneath sustained performance? What can balance stimulation? What does the body need while the brain is working?
Nineteen ingredients wasn't the brief.
It was the consequence.
We didn't start with 19 ingredients.
We started with the workday.