Body of Work’s Daily Dose of Self-Care

Best friends Jacqueline Maslan and Alex Brown bring a beauty-inspired perspective to vitamins, with a focused formula for women in their 20s and 30s.

Before they founded Body of Work, Jacqueline Maslan and Alex Brown were working for different vitamin brands and comparing notes over cocktails. Their frustrations were specific: sugar-heavy gummies, underdosed ingredients, and claims that promised more than the formulas could deliver. With experience in product innovation and PR between them, the longtime friends began discussing what they would do differently.

“We met up for cocktails one night and started swapping our frustrations with the category: gummies packed with sugar, extreme claims, underdosed nutrients,” Alex recalls.

The two had known each other for most of their lives. Between their friendship and complementary professional backgrounds, they could see the beginnings of something they wanted to build together.

“Between the two of us, we had the formulation knowledge and the brand-building experience,” Alex says. “It felt almost irresponsible not to try.”

That conversation became a new supplement brand focused on women in their 20s and 30s where Jacqueline serves as Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, while Alex is Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer. Their first product is a daily multivitamin with 11 selected ingredients, delivered in two small, vanilla-coated tablets. Around it, they are building a brand that approaches nutrition with the visual appeal of beauty and an understanding of how much women already have on their plates.

A Woman They Recognize

The Body of Work customer is already interested in taking care of herself. The founders wanted to acknowledge that effort while addressing the possibility that her diet might still leave nutritional gaps.

“Even the woman who does everything ‘right’ … can fall short on the nutrients she needs,” Jacqueline says.

Women in their 20s and 30s felt like a meaningful place to begin. These are years of establishing careers, navigating relationships, and developing routines that can accommodate increasingly full schedules. Jacqueline saw room for a product that spoke more directly to that experience, rather than relying on a broad, one-size-fits-all idea of women’s health.

She also understood that the customer didn’t necessarily want a more elaborate routine. A new product had to justify the money, attention, and daily effort it required.

That thinking shaped Alex’s approach to the brand as well. Her career had included leading celebrity partnerships, but she knew early on that celebrity would not be the foundation of Body of Work’s strategy.

“This audience is incredibly discerning about where she spends her dollars,” she says. “She’s looking for brands she can see herself in, and she trusts the people closest to her: her friends, her parents, her doctor.”

The founders wanted to build a company that could earn a place in those conversations through a relatable identity, useful information, and a product experience worth repeating.

Every Ingredient Has to Earn Its Place

According to Jacqueline, formula development began with the USDA’s Usual Nutrient Intake report. The team reviewed the data to identify common dietary shortfalls among the women they wanted to serve, then worked with female medical and nutrition advisors to refine ingredient selection and dosing.

Customer conversations contributed another perspective. Women’s interest in beauty benefits, including skin and nail health, helped inform the development process alongside the nutritional research.

The resulting approach is captured in the brand’s phrase “precision, not excess.”

“Precision means every nutrient has to earn its place, at an amount that’s been studied, and nothing is there just to look good on the back of the bottle,” Jacqueline says.

Her product innovation background had made her attentive to the distance that can exist between a formula and the promises made about it. She wanted the team to be able to explain its choices, including why an ingredient was included and how its dose had been selected.

Bringing different professional perspectives into development helped challenge the founders’ initial instincts. Jacqueline describes discussions involving an OB-GYN, a dermatologist, and a registered dietitian, each approaching the formula from a different angle. She credits the OB-GYN advisor with recommending folate, while the dermatologist suggested decaffeinated green tea extract in response to customer interest in skin benefits.

Beauty became part of the product’s positioning because women were asking about it. For Alex, those interests belonged within the wider conversation about taking care of yourself.

“We’re always going to respond to what our customers care about,” she says.

Making the Daily Experience Better

A vitamin can have an appealing ingredient list and still be unpleasant to take. During development, women repeatedly brought up the same frustrations: large pills, bad tastes, and nausea when taking certain products without food.

“The biggest lesson was that the best vitamin is the one you’ll actually take,” Jacqueline says.

Body of Work’s response was a small tablet with a light vanilla coating and no sugar. Jacqueline describes the formula as designed to be stomach-friendly, including when taken on an empty stomach. The founders wanted to account for the ordinary moments that determine whether a product becomes a habit.

“Those details sound small, but they’re the difference between a bottle that sits in the cabinet and one that becomes part of your routine,” she says.

The attention to experience extends to the packaging. Alex wanted something women would be happy to leave on the counter, with a beauty-inspired identity that felt playful and premium.

That decision makes sense for a product asking to become part of someone’s day. Its appearance, the way it tastes, and the ease of taking it all contribute to the relationship a customer develops with it. They are also details the founders can continue to learn about through feedback, well beyond the initial purchase.

Your Big Sister’s Friend

Alex had a specific relationship in mind when developing Body of Work’s voice: “your big sister’s friend.”

It suggests someone approachable and knowledgeable, with recommendations to share and an interest in seeing you do well. For a vitamin brand, that voice creates room to explain something without making the customer feel as though she has wandered into a lecture.

“We wanted women to feel like Body of Work was made by people who get them, because it was,” Alex says.

The team returns to that idea when evaluating messaging and design. Does it feel relatable? Can the customer recognize herself in it? Does the product feel attainable within her existing routine?

Those questions give the brand a perspective that extends beyond looking good on a shelf. Body of Work wants to become a resource women can return to for information about nutrition, health, and lifestyle, with a tone that makes those subjects easier to engage with.

Care Beyond the Counter

Whole Self Care®, the philosophy at the center of Body of Work, connects physical, mental, and emotional well-being.

Alex sees fatigue with the glossy, perfection-driven image of wellness that has filled so much brand content over the past decade. As filtered and generated imagery becomes more prevalent, she believes people are looking for businesses that reflect experiences they recognize.

“Whole Self Care really embodies that,” she says. “It’s the idea that your mental and emotional health count just as much as your physical health, and that taking care of yourself can be simple.”

That gives the brand space to talk about care beyond the product it sells.

“Sometimes it’s a vitamin, a walk or a phone call with your best friend.”

Friendship feels like a natural part of the story for a business built by two women who have known each other for most of their lives. Their understanding of care includes the relationships that support someone through her day, along with the routines she chooses for herself.

It also acknowledges the customer’s limited time. She may enjoy wellness and beauty, but those interests exist alongside work, relationships, responsibilities, and days when plans change. The founders want their product to fit into that life.

Showing the Work

Jacqueline is candid about sharing consumers’ skepticism toward supplements. She says that skepticism has informed the testing and communication standards the founders have set for Body of Work.

She describes a process that begins with quality testing individual ingredients, followed by testing the tablets for quality and potency. The finished tablets then undergo third-party contaminant screening, with an additional independent round of testing through the Clean Label Project. According to Jacqueline, the multivitamin has also earned the organization’s Purity Award.

Testing for quality and contaminants serves a different purpose from demonstrating a product’s benefits, a distinction that matters in a category where ingredient research often becomes part of the marketing story. Evidence also varies by ingredient and intended use. The National Institutes of Health, for example, notes that research supporting biotin supplementation for hair, skin, and nails remains limited.

Jacqueline says the brand aims to keep its claims tied to research relevant to the doses it uses.

Education is another part of that effort. Through her Instagram series, “WTF: What the Function,” she explains the role of individual nutrients in plain language.

“We want to give our community tangible, bite-sized information so they can make the right nutrition choices for themselves, rather than just telling them what to do,” she says.

That willingness to explain gives the founders an ongoing responsibility as the business grows. A customer should be able to understand what is in the product, what its testing covers, and the basis for the benefits being discussed.

A Focused First Chapter

Launching with a single hero product gave Body of Work a clear introduction. Jacqueline says the focus helped the team sharpen its messaging, gather customer feedback, and build community around a specific daily routine.

She reports that 89% of subscribers stay beyond three months, an internal retention figure the founders see as encouraging as they learn more about their customers’ experiences.

Future launches will begin with those customers, too. Jacqueline describes three questions that will guide the process: whether there is an unmet need, whether the team can address it at an appropriate dose, and whether a new product would make the routine simpler.

“If the answer isn’t yes to all three, it won’t carry the Body of Work® name,” she says.

It is a useful standard to establish early. Jacqueline and Alex have built their first product around a woman whose time and attention are already spoken for, and they intend to keep her circumstances central as the business develops. Their next ideas will have to make sense for her, just as their first one did over cocktails.