Cleo Davis-Urman is the co-founder and CEO of Barrière, the transdermal vitamin patch brand now in more than 4,300 retail doors including Target, Walmart, and Anthropologie. She got there from luxury fashion, employee number five at Moda Operandi and later fashion director at Saks Fifth Avenue, by way of 100,000 medical-grade masks she sold during COVID and a blood panel that showed she was dangerously deficient in iron, B12, and vitamin D after ten years of taking a reputable oral supplement.

In this episode she explains why up to 98% of a swallowed supplement can be lost in digestion, why the real problem was adherence rather than formulation (about 85% of Americans start a supplement routine and fewer than 40% stay with it), why she manufactured to German and UK standards rather than take the faster route through an unregulated US supple ...