WE SPENT 15 YEARS HACKING THE WORKDAY
Mark and Ray met working in banking and have spent the last 15 years across corporate life, startups and entrepreneurship. Different jobs and different environments, but with one thing fairly constant: work has always been a big part of our lives.
Over that time, without really thinking about it as a system, we were constantly trying to make the workday work better. Coffee for energy. Berocca after a heavy week. Ginger shots when everyone in the office was getting sick. Rescue Remedy before something stressful. Electrolytes, creatine, nootropics, supplements, morning routines, meditation, exercise and sleep tracking. Whatever helped us feel better and perform better.
Mark went much deeper into the wellness side. He had spent years researching supplements, experimenting with ingredients and building his own stacks for work, training, travel and immunity. Ray was more likely to obsess over routines, productivity, training and how to structure a day around running businesses.
We weren't trying to invent a category. We were just two people who cared about our work and had spent years experimenting with ways to do it better.
Eventually, both of us ran into situations where the usual answers weren't enough.
WHEN WORK STOPS BEING A PRODUCTIVITY PROBLEM
For Ray, that became particularly obvious after leaving corporate life and moving full-time into entrepreneurship. Several difficult things happened personally and professionally at roughly the same time, and eventually the response wasn't just stress or tiredness. It was shutdown.
The strange part was that mentally, he felt relatively clear. He knew what needed doing. He had spent years working on mindset, mindfulness and his own emotional wellbeing. There wasn't a motivational quote, productivity system or new to-do list that was going to solve the problem.
His mind wanted to work. His body wouldn't move.
That experience changed the way we thought about work. We tend to treat knowledge work as though it happens entirely from the neck upwards. If somebody can't focus, we look at the brain. If they can't start, we look at motivation. If they're struggling under pressure, we look at mindset.
But the brain doesn't turn up to work alone.
Work can be mental, physical and emotional. Your nervous system, hydration, sleep, movement, nutrition and physiological state don't disappear when you open a laptop.
For Ray, getting back to work started surprisingly simply. Electrolytes, then L-theanine, creatine and other things he was already familiar with through training and wellness. The objective wasn't to become more productive. It was to get the body back into a state where work felt possible again.
Mark had arrived at a similar conclusion from a different direction. His own experiences had led to years of researching supplements and experimenting with nootropics, adaptogens, electrolytes and different stacks. He had become accustomed to looking at performance as something affected by the whole system rather than simply whether you could force yourself to concentrate.
Eventually, we compared notes.
THE PRE-WORKOUT FOR THE WORKDAY
At that point, the gap seemed strangely obvious.
There were supplements for energy. Supplements for focus. Supplements for hydration. Supplements for stress. Things we took before training and things we took afterwards to recover.
But very little started with the actual context we cared about: I am about to work. What do I need?
Our lives had always had a fairly simple rhythm of working and training, and the contrast between the two became increasingly difficult to ignore.
Before training, we prepared. We hydrated. We took creatine. We warmed up. We understood that our physical and mental state going into a session affected how we performed during it. Afterwards, recovery was considered part of training too.
Then we'd sit down to begin a working day involving concentration, decisions, meetings, creativity, pressure and interaction with other people and expect ourselves to immediately perform.
That's where PREWRK came from.
What if there was a pre-workout for the workday?
BUILT FOR THE WHOLE PERSON
That question shaped the formulation.
We didn't want to make another product that started and ended with the brain. We also didn't want to create the strongest stimulant possible and call that performance.
The workday we'd experienced wasn't only cognitive. It was physical and emotional too.
So PREWRK had to think more broadly. Activation mattered. Cognition mattered. But hydration, physical state and regulation mattered as well.
That eventually led to a 19-ingredient formulation combining patented actives including Cognizin®, Zynamite®, TheaGreen® and Coffeine® with creatine, electrolytes, amino acids and adaptogens.
The aim was never to have the longest label. It was to use meaningful doses and high-quality, traceable ingredients, including patented ingredients where they genuinely added value, and build the formula around the demands of work rather than around a fashionable ingredient.
PREWRK became the pre-workout for the workday.
But building it led us somewhere bigger.
WHAT IF WORK WAS MORE LIKE TRAINING?
Once we stopped thinking about work as something happening exclusively in the brain, the athlete comparison started to make much more sense.
An athlete's performance is obviously physical, but nobody serious about sport thinks the answer is simply to make the muscles work harder. Nutrition matters. Psychology matters. Sleep matters. Recovery matters. Emotional state matters. Preparation matters. The nervous system matters.
The athlete is treated as a system.
Why shouldn't we think about people doing demanding work in the same way?
Regulation became the word that connected a lot of this for us. A workday is constantly asking you to shift state. You might need to be switched on for a run of back-to-back calls, then settle into deep work, then move into a more open creative state, then physically get yourself across town for the next meeting.
A Teams notification can pull you out of concentration in seconds. Bad news can change your physiology before you've even had time to think about it. A difficult conversation can stay in your body long after the meeting has finished.
High performance isn't about staying in one ideal state all day. It's about being able to move between states without every change knocking you off course. Sometimes that means increasing activation. Sometimes it means settling yourself. Sometimes it means recovering quickly after pressure so the next task doesn't inherit the last one.
That is what regulation started to mean to us in the context of work. Not calmness for its own sake, and not avoiding stress. The ability to adjust to what is happening in you and around you so you can continue to perform.
Once we started thinking about work in terms of state and regulation, ideas we'd heard from people such as Naval Ravikant started to click differently. Naval has talked about working like a lion, rejecting the assumption that humans should produce at a constant rate like machines. He has also described knowledge workers as intellectual athletes, moving through periods of training, sprinting, resting and reassessing.
The wider high-performance world reinforced the same idea. Performance psychologists and coaches working across elite sport, founders and leadership talk about regulation, recovery, mental fitness and performing under pressure as fundamental parts of performance.
It gave language to something PREWRK had already started teaching us.
Performance isn't just what your brain can produce. It's the state of the person producing it.
THE INTELLECTUAL ATHLETE
That's what we mean when we talk about the intellectual athlete.
It isn't just a founder or CEO. It could be a doctor, designer, lawyer, engineer, creator, business owner or someone doing a conventional 9-to-5 who cares deeply about what they do.
And treating yourself like an athlete doesn't mean turning work into another form of grind. Quite the opposite.
Athletes don't try to compete at maximum intensity every waking hour. They prepare. They perform. They recover. They adapt.
The same is true of demanding work. Sometimes you need activation for a presentation or an early start. Sometimes you need enough regulation to stay composed through back-to-back calls. Sometimes you need to protect a few hours for deep work. Sometimes you need the looseness and mental space that allows creative flow. Sometimes resilience means absorbing a difficult message without letting it derail the next three hours.
And sometimes you need to stop.
Our shorthand became:
Train → Sprint → Rest → Reassess.
That is a very different model from hustle culture.
PREWRK MADE US REALISE WORK NEEDED A SYSTEM
This is where PREWRK became WRKIN.
Once we'd built something specifically for before work, we started noticing all the other moments where people were already piecing together their own solutions.
What happens after a demanding day when you need to recover? What about the nerves before a pitch or high-stakes meeting? Travel, jet lag and trying to perform on a work trip? Staying well through periods when everyone around you seems to be getting sick? The different physiological demands women can experience while trying to perform consistently at work?
Sport already has this ecosystem. You don't walk into a sports nutrition shop and find one product labelled "performance". There are products for preparation, hydration, endurance, recovery, sleep, joints, immunity and different types of training. The intellectual athlete deserves the same.
So we began mapping the system.
PREWRK is the beginning. Preparation for the workday.
POSTWRK is next. Recovery after demanding days.
SOCIALWRK for the moments before a pitch, presentation or difficult conversation.
LIGHTWRK for lighter days and weekends when you want to stay in the game without full intensity.
WRKTRIP for travel, disrupted routines and performing outside your usual environment.
HERWRK for the physiological realities that shape women's performance at work.
STAYWRKIN for immunity and resilience. Because sometimes the best performance is just staying well enough to show up.
And we're working with clinical partners on the longer game too. What it looks like to support performance across a lifetime, not just a workday. That is a different conversation, and we are taking it seriously.
Not generic supplements with office-themed packaging. Each one starts with the same question that started PREWRK: what does the person need here?
That is WRKIN.
The ambition is a system of targeted products for different parts of working life, with the same emphasis on meaningful dosing, premium ingredients and formulations designed around a specific context rather than a marketing trend.
The point is simple: when something shows up in your workday, you should not have to piece together a solution. Whether it is preparation, recovery, travel, pressure or the reality of working in a body that does not follow a straight line, WRKIN is being built so there is something for that moment. One product at a time. One working context at a time.
A DIFFERENT WAY TO THINK ABOUT WORK
Supplements are only part of that system.
Because if our original insight is that work happens through the whole person, then the answer can't only exist in a pouch either.
Mindfulness matters. Mindset matters. Diet matters. Exercise matters. Breathwork matters. Sleep and recovery matter. Your environment matters. Knowing yourself matters.
Sometimes a supplement might help support the state you need. Sometimes the answer is going for a walk. Sometimes it's five minutes of breathing before a difficult meeting. Sometimes it's eating properly, training, meditating or closing the laptop because you've done enough.
Over time, that's the territory we want WRKIN to explore.
We call it mindful workday performance.
It's not about extracting another 10% of productivity from every hour. It's about understanding that good work comes from a human system, and learning how to prepare, perform, regulate and recover accordingly.
We spent 15 years trying different ways to make ourselves work better. PREWRK was the first thing we decided to build for it.
WRKIN is the system we're building around everything we learned.