It has been a couple of years since we last looked at Fine Hygienic Holding. We have followed their journey from manufacturing tissues, to providing masks during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, to launching their own line of disinfectants. Since then, the company has seen an extremely strong close to 2022 that set several records and is undergoing a period of exciting momentum.
So, when we speak again to Fine Hygienic Holding’s CEO, James Michael Lafferty, it is no surprise to discover that the company is bringing more innovations to the market.
“We have launched into the wellness space, expanding our footprint,” Lafferty announces. “We have always been in the wellness sector through paper products, but now we are moving into supplements that have direct impacts on human health. We are building a more diversified portfolio, impacting our consumers’ health, and improving their lives even more.”
With a new sector, comes new challenges, and it is understandable that Fine Hygienic Holding has encountered a learning curve on this journey.
“You need to go through the school of hard knocks and learn certain things,” Lafferty admits. “We made mistakes and learned how to navigate the business. We are producing products we have never made before, learned new things, and consulted with global medical and wellness professionals to bring a product to launch in the marketplace.”
That product is “eon”, the culmination of a five-year project. The product itself is an herbal blend with several valuable health benefits supported by a robust background of scientific study.
Innovation Where They Find It
While many companies in the sector boast about their in-house research and development capabilities, Fine Hygienic Holding sources its innovation from a much wider array of resources.
“We don’t do our own R&D. I have come from companies that did and it’s very limiting because you only listen to your own people,” Lafferty insists.
“It means you have 12 people in the world doing all your innovation. Instead of that, we do open sourcing. We are open to the whole world, all these brilliant people and their discoveries.”
Fine Hygienic Holding is sourcing innovative technology from India, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United States and beyond, approaching and licencing any research that seems promising. eon, and Fine Hygienic Holding’s new supplement, Motiva, are developed by doctors and inventors, but not from the company’s own labs.
“It’s far superior to the traditional model because you are open to any great idea that can happen anywhere in the world, rather than a small group of people in a lab on your facility,” Lafferty says. “People write to me every week to present us with new technology. I sit in presentations all the time, just listening, and if we like it, we discuss how to work together legally.”
But just because Fine Hygienic Holding sources its innovations from outside the company does not mean it does not have its own in-house problem-solving to do.
The longevity herbal blend in eon is only one example.
“It’s great but producing it in mass quantities is a different matter,” Lafferty says. “Rather than picking the leaves off the hillside, you have to grow it on mass. We could not find a market to buy
the necessary raw ingredients, and when we started mixing it, we found some of the ingredients attack and neutralise other ingredients over time.”
It means that Fine Hygienic Holding had a successful product on its hands, but one that it would have to completely rethink to bring to market.
“We realised we could not produce a ready-to-drink product because it would only have a shelf-life of two-to-three months,” Lafferty points out. “So instead, we developed a freeze-dried product, sachets you mix in water and drink right away.”
There is a saying about necessity and invention, and Fine Hygienic Holding demonstrates the truth in it, with its solutions turning out to be a blessing in disguise.
“It is easier to ship sachets than bottles that are mainly water,” Lafferty says.
“But realising this meant we had to relook at the whole product. It took years to go through all those challenges.”
A Better Life
The work has paid off, and nobody knows that better than Lafferty.
“I ran a marathon in my early 40s and dehydrated in the race and by the time I was done my kidneys had shut down,” he tells us. “I was hospitalised. I had dialysis, and they came and told me my kidneys were permanently 25% damaged.”
Lafferty points to a key measure of kidney function, its “glomerular filtration rate”, or GFR. The normal range for GFR is 60 out of 100.
Anything below that is kidney disease. After the marathon incident, Lafferty’s GFR never rose above 61, regardless of the steps he took. But then during, the clinical testing for eon, there were some surprising results.
The whole group that took the herbal blend had improvement in inflammation, as hoped for, but within the group, a subset had a tremendous improvement in their kidney functions.
“When we first got it, I started taking it right away, and my energy really picked up, which doesn’t make sense because the herbal blend doesn’t contain caffeine or taurine, it has no sugar,” Lafferty says. “I was confused but noticed almost right away my workouts could go longer, my energy was quite amazing. I went to the hospital and asked to do the full blood panel, paying out of pocket, and they told me my GFR was 86, which I have not had since my 20s. My kidneys are now completely normal functioning.”
Clinical studies have shown EON to have benefits that include reducing and controlling inflammation and pain, improving gastrointestinal health, reducing pre-diabetes risk factors and even stress. The tea is a powerful source of antioxidants, helps to regulate normal metabolic balance, supports cardiovascular and respiratory health and improves kidney and liver function among a subset of study participants, while also improve mood, vitality and sleep.
With this product under its belt, Fine Hygienic Holding is ready to expand, although with three new products in its portfolio, Lafferty is in no hurry to add more.
“New products have to pass very rigorous criteria,” Lafferty says. “We don’t sell products that are not scientifically backed. There are people out there selling supplements and making miracle claims, but we want to see the data. So right now, I don’t have the next product to launch because we are still seeing what is out there. I am watching presentations every week, but the bar is high. We want good, peer-reviewed research and I make no apologies for that.
If we promise people to improve their lives, we have to deliver on it.”
