When Maxine Laceby started making collagen in her kitchen, she wasn't disrupting a category, simply because there wasn't one to disrupt.
"We created a formula in our kitchen and launched it into a market that did not exist," she told host Peter Beckman in a recent Treyd Secrets episode. "Which is absolutely wild. Think how massive it is today."
That was 2017. Collagen supplements barely registered as a consumer category. Maxine and her daughter Darcy — a food science graduate who used her university lab to figure out what was actually working in her mother’s bone broth — were essentially starting from zero. No competitors. No benchmarks. No customers who already understood what collagen was or why they should care.
What they built in those early years was a market. What they’ve spent the last few years doing is defending it.
The education burden of being first
Being first to market is not the clean advantage it looks like from the outside. When nobody understands your category, you don’t get to compete on product alone. You have to spend time and money explaining what the product is, what it does, and why it works — before you can even make the case for why yours is better.
Absolute Collagen did that education through direct-to-consumer, through community, through customer calls and email flows and a 20,000-person closed subscriber group. They built the relationship before they built the brand infrastructure, because in the early years the relationship was the only thing they had.
"In the early days, there was no competition," Darcy explained. "People didn’t really understand what collagen was or what it did. And we had to do the education piece, but there wasn’t anyone saying the same story, the same narrative as us, because we were genuinely first to market."
That early-mover position gave them something valuable: time to accumulate proof. The clinical data, the customer testimonials, the expert relationships — all of it started building before anyone else was in the space. By the time competitors arrived, Absolute Collagen had a head start that was hard to replicate quickly.
Then the category filled up
It always does. A market that didn’t exist in 2017 is now crowded with collagen brands — many of them selling at price points Absolute Collagen won’t go near, making claims they can’t substantiate, and cutting corners on sourcing that Darcy can identify but most consumers can’t.
"We know that brands will say they’re clinically proven when they’re not," Darcy said. "We know that brands will do their clinical trials on double the dose, because their product isn’t as quality as ours. And then they won’t disclose that to consumers."
The commoditization question — how do you hold a premium position when cheaper alternatives flood in — is one of the defining strategic challenges for any category creator. Absolute Collagen’s answer has been consistent: don’t move. Hold the line on quality, invest further in science, and let the difference speak for itself.
Their marine collagen is sourced from 27 farms within a 100-mile radius of the manufacturing facility. The fish are processed within 48 hours. They are the only collagen brand, Darcy says, to have audited their supplier directly rather than relying on the manufacturer’s own data. The product itself has gone through eight iterations — not to change what it is, but to improve taste, texture, and bioavailability without compromising the formula.
"Yes, we could buy a lot cheaper collagen," Maxine said. "Every month we have this conversation. But I would not be taking it unless we can find something that’s the same quality as what we’re buying now."
That’s not a marketing line. It’s a genuine constraint the business operates under — and it shapes every sourcing decision they make.
Science as a long-term brand asset
Most supplement brands treat clinical data as a marketing cost. You commission a study, put the results on the packaging, and move on. Absolute Collagen treats it differently — as a compounding asset that gets more valuable over time.
Their clinical trial is the largest peer-reviewed study on a collagen supplement globally. That’s not a figure they arrived at accidentally. It was a deliberate investment in the kind of evidence base that takes years to build and can’t be easily replicated by a brand that launched six months ago.
The results are specific: a 60% increase in skin elasticity after 12 weeks versus placebo, and a 27% increase in new hair growth over the same period. They also measured what happens when people stop taking the product — results declined significantly within eight weeks across 100% of the subset studied. That data point alone has become a retention tool woven throughout the customer journey.
But the science investment pays off in ways that go beyond what you can measure in conversion rates. Dermatologists and trichologists — the independent experts who lend credibility to supplement brands — won’t attach their names to products they don’t trust. Absolute Collagen’s clinical foundation is what gets those relationships. And those relationships are what separates a brand with genuine authority from one that’s just spending on advertising.
"They would turn down other collagen brands," Darcy said of the experts on their panel. "So whilst you can’t necessarily instantly measure conversion, the halo effect that has — the people we have access to, the science that comes through to us — it builds."
The unexpected dividend: AI search
Here’s something most brands haven’t thought carefully about yet. Absolute Collagen has.
As AI-powered search and large language models become a more significant driver of how consumers find and evaluate products, the brands with the deepest, most credible bodies of evidence are accumulating an advantage that incumbents can’t easily replicate.
"Being around for the longest and having the best clinicals and the best data on our product is really positive for the citations that the LLMs pick up on," Darcy said. "So that’s been a real game changer for us, actually."
It’s a compounding effect: invest in science early, build the evidence base, get cited by the sources that AI systems learn from, and show up with credibility when consumers ask questions that the algorithm answers for them. A brand that launched in 2023 with a manufacturer’s study and a marketing budget doesn’t have the citation history to compete in that environment. Nine years of peer-reviewed data does.
Growing up as a brand without changing what you are
One of the harder things Absolute Collagen has navigated is the shift from scrappy first-mover to established premium brand — without losing what made them credible in the first place.
"If you went on our website three years ago, there was about 30,000 different messages that me and Maxine wanted to tell everyone," Darcy said. "The message was different, the branding felt different" across channels. Getting coherent — same voice, same story, same proof points, whether the customer was on Instagram, YouTube, or reading an email — took deliberate investment in brand leadership that hadn’t been necessary when they were the only ones talking.
The key insight from that process: nothing fundamental changed. The product is essentially the same as it was at launch. The sourcing standards are the same. The clinical ambition is the same. What changed was how clearly and consistently they communicated it.
"We have always done everything right, from a scientific, from an ethics point of view," Darcy said. "It was just: how do we talk about those messages a bit more? How do we grow up a little bit as a brand?"
B Corp certification — which Absolute Collagen has achieved — is a useful illustration. They were already doing everything required to qualify. Getting certified was, as Darcy puts it, "just the rubber seal of approval on the end." The work existed. The credential made it legible to the outside world.
That’s the consistent pattern: do the thing first, communicate it clearly second. In a category where many brands do the opposite — lead with the claim, figure out the substance later — it turns out to be a real differentiator.
What this looks like when regulation arrives
The supplement industry is heading toward greater regulatory scrutiny. Most brands in the space are quietly nervous about this. Absolute Collagen is not.
"I actually welcome it," Darcy said, "whereas other brands might be running away from it."
That confidence comes from having built the business the hard way — with real data, audited supply chains, and a clinical foundation that doesn’t depend on small print and favorable framing. When the rules get tighter, the brands that have been doing it properly will benefit. The ones that haven’t will have a problem.
"We’re there. We’re ready for it."
For any founder building in a category where trust is the product — health, wellness, supplements, anything consumers put in or on their bodies — that’s the frame worth adopting from day one. Not because regulation is coming (though it is), but because the long-term brand you’re trying to build can only be built on something real.
As Maxine put it: "What we’re trying to do here is build a brand that’s going to be around for 99 years, not just nine years."
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💜 Want to hear the full conversation? Listen to the Treyd Secrets episode with Maxine and Darcy Laceby on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
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