It began as a health food shop in Australia but today Blackmores is a leading brand in complementary healthcare. The founder, Maurice Blackmore, was a firm believer in natural medicine and this same faith is well alive in Marcus, a second generation Blackmore, who is running the show. Marcus has brought in another talent in the shape of Christine Holgate, and together they make a striking combination. They sat down with Anandhi Gopinath and Elaine Lau to relate how it all started.

It’s a rare treat indeed to meet a chairman whose surname matches the logo on his business card. “Marcus Blackmore”, the card reads, and it belongs to a ruddy faced, smiling gentleman in a navy blue jacket, armed with a mischievous grin, a glint in his blue eyes and a loud, hearty laugh.

Marcus shares his name with Australian health supplement brand Blackmores, the leader in its category in its native country and a forerunner in the regional health supplement market. Marcus is the second generation Blackmore to run the company after his father, founder of the brand, Maurice Blackmore, who passed away in 1977.

The company in his capable hands has done well since its early days as a health food shop — Australia’s first — in 1938 in Queensland, transforming itself into a leading brand in complementary healthcare today. In his older years, realising his own limitations in taking the business further, Marcus brought in more capable leadership in the form of CEO Christine Holgate, a delightful Englishwoman with an easy smile and graceful manners.

Together, they are a striking combination: One is focused on the heritage of the company — how to continuously stay true to its values — while the other is focused on the economics of it all — how to keep Blackmores relevant into the future.

As the Blackmores story unfolds, it becomes clear that it was Marcus’ father who gave the company the direction and focus it has today. Emigrating to Australia  from England in the 1920s, Maurice turned to naturopathy to cure his own troubled health. But he did it the right way, by engaging in formal studies on the subject in Queensland and in the US.

He then started the health food shop that would become Blackmores, went broke and went to fight in the Vietnam War. A wife and two children later, Maurice decided it was time to start the first naturopathic clinic and college in Australia.

“His patients would tell him, ‘I’ve been to four or five doctors, and they haven’t done anything for me but you have, and I’m really interested in what you do. Can you help me?’ So many of these requests came in that he was eventually convinced to do this,” says Marcus.

“The first naturopaths at the time in Queensland were generally mature people simply because natural health has a huge role to play in chronic disease. It has a role in acute disease, but it is chronic disease that the medical professional generally doesn’t do well with. Out of frustration, people go to naturopaths so his students were generally older people who found this worked for them, and wanted to help others with it too,” he adds.

Maurice’s students did well and went on to open clinics based on a franchise agreement. While the colleges and the health food shop were thriving, Maurice was already looking at branching out into other things. He began experimenting with mineral remedies, and was soon able to supply his students with products to be sold. “My mother worked in the business as well,” reminisces Marcus. “We’d buy the mineral powder and she would pack them into hard gelatine capsules, one at a time, to be prescribed to my father’s patients. It was a fairly rustic business, I suppose; you wouldn’t be allowed to do those things today.

But most businesses start like that, and then develop based on the vision of its leader.”

The forward-thinking Maurice also soon started what was the first co operative arrangement in Australia when he sold portions of the business to his students, retaining a small percentage for himself. “It never was a completely owned family business, but that wasn’t really the point. He was a true pioneer in the business,” Marcus says proudly of his father. “His priority was to develop naturopathy into a profession, not to amass personal wealth.”

Maurice did everything he could to ensure that the profession would be taken seriously, even though he knew it may not be recognised as such in his lifetime. “In those days, my dad was called a quack… naturopathy wasn’t exactly a high-profile profession in the community. But my father was a consummate professional and a lot of the attributes of the business today are no different from what he established in the first place and hopefully that I’ve carried on. I mean, I don’t wear a tie that much but you’d never see my dad without one. If you walked into my father’s clinic, it was like the Mayo Clinic. Nurses would have uniforms and badges and these watches that hung from a chain, pinned to their uniforms. It felt like a real hospital,” Marcus recalls.

Marcus joined the company’s staff force, but not before working in shipyards, a short stint in Johnson & Johnson and joining the Australian Armed Forces for a few years. “My father and I always had differences of opinion about things... I loved my father but he was a Gemini, and if you know anything about Geminis, you’ll know they’re only good half the time,” he quips. “He fired me three times but blood’s thicker than water, thankfully, so he kept calling me back.”

Maurice retired in 1975 and passed away two years later, at which time Marcus took over. The company that Marcus inherited was, of course, very different from what Blackmores is today, yet it seems that Maurice was anticipating what the business would have been in the future and prepared the company accordingly.

Maurice left a hugely successful legacy for Blackmores that is centred on research. In the late 1990s, the research became a formalised function within the company with the appointment of a research manager who is based at the Southern Cross University in Lismore, New South Wales. The university is where Australia’s first four-year degree course in naturopathy was established within the School of Natural and Complementary Medicine.

Research is a key part of the business not just because of Maurice’s insistence, but also because the industry requires it. “One of the problems is the lack of professionalism within the profession and the industry, and we’re always subject to criticism by the medical orthodoxy.” Marcus observes. “And my father was so particular about having the research to justify our claims. Fish oil, for example, is the biggest selling supplement in our industry in the world at the moment. But the practice dates back for decades; Mother England was raised on having a spoonful of cod liver oil every day! It’s become more popular now, as the science has proven the practice to be right.”

Apart from research on its own products, Blackmores also gets involved in collaborative projects with other institutions.

According to Marcus, the company has a large number of affiliations with research centres like the Southern Cross University and the Heart Research Institute in Sydney, of which he is chairman. Blackmores’ range of vitamins for women was developed together with the doctors at the Women’s & Children’s Hospital in Adelaide, and the co-enzyme Q10 that Blackmores produces is used in a cardiology research programme at The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne.

“We can tell you that our products are credible, but if the Heart Research Institute says this is our recommended approach, or if the only thing the Macular Degeneration Foundation recommends is Blackmores, that’s very different from us saying our products are great,” says Holgate.

Maurice’s dream has thus come true in more ways than he could have imagined — not only has naturopathy become a legitimate profession in Australia, the humble health food shop he started is now a major supplier to the industry as well.

We have all become quite a pill-popping lot. As we question the value of our daily diet and the quality of food in recent times, reaching out for a bottle of vitamins is commonplace. While that favourite multivitamin that people dutifully swallow started off by being sold to complement their diets, many people today treat it as their primary source of essential vitamins and nutrients.

Yet, supplement companies are often the targets of scientific research that emerges on and off to prove that supplements don’t work. In recent times, some groundbreaking studies have discovered that vitamin C may not protect us from colds as we always thought it did. Yet, amidst the surge in the H1N1 epidemic, sales of vitamin C supplements have shot straight into the stratosphere.

We are rocking back and forth between research that is for and against health supplements, and the final answer lies in convenience and need — I will take vitamins if they are readily available, or I will take vitamins if we are getting sick.

“Vitamins don’t grow on trees, and you wouldn’t need vitamins if you eat all the right foods. If you pick your oranges fresh off the tree, you know it’s full of vitamin C. A lot of times, we buy our fruit after it has been in a chiller somewhere and lost much of its nutrients,” says Marcus.

“We were part of a research programme for children in Australia and New Zealand, who faced a mild iodine deficiency. We provided some of them with supplements and some with placebos, and the children on the iodine supplements got smarter! Were they getting enough iodine in their diet? No they weren’t, and there’s plenty of other evidence to suggest we don’t eat properly,” he points out.

Holgate picks up on the point immediately. “These children were normal schoolchildren, not visibly sick or with particularly bad diets. Even if they had enough iodine in their bodies to avoid being very ill, the little bit that they received in their supplement showed improved brain function. They didn’t need it as a prevention thing, but taking it had a very positive impact.”

While research statistics like these prompt us again to consider supplements, the fact is that natural medicine has been around for a long time, and if it really didn’t work, it would have disappeared by now. Chinese, Indian and Indonesian herbal medicines, for example, have been around for thousands of years, and share the same philosophical values as natural medicine.

One of the best selling treatments in the world today is gingko, a traditional Chinese herb. Fish oil is another popular supplement, while garlic pills are hugely popular for both stronger immune systems as well as to ward off heart disease. “Once the research is done, it tends to prove many of these remedies legitimate and very effective,” says Marcus.

Why then is natural medicine not more often considered or widely dispensed as a cure? The answer lies in simple economics.
Natural medicine lacks the research facility that is so freely afforded to synthetic drugs because it is less lucrative for all parties involved — once a particular herb is identified for its use in a particular disease, any company can grow the herb, harvest it and bottle it for sale. Completely new synthetic drugs, on the other hand, are developed in secret labs, receive hundreds and thousands of dollars in funding, and are assured of exclusivity for a number of years — it’s more prudent to do this rather than make something everyone else can. While this seems like a very mercenary approach when it comes to something as important as medication, it’s still a business that needs to be run.

Mercifully, economics can also swing the other way. Folic acid, now a common supplement for pregnant women to prevent neural tube defects in babies, was never recommended until authorities realised the cost of supporting babies with these defects.

After that, government health departments were eager to recommend folic acid as a preventive measure. The first to do so in the world, says Marcus, was the Australian health department. “Research in the US showed that you could save Medicaid up to US$2 billion if everyone took a simple multivitamin every day. The evidence is there, but most governments aren’t listening for the opportunity,” he observes. Essentially, it’s about acting on the realisation that it makes more economic sense to put money in prevention rather than cure.

“There are three angles to the future of natural medicine, actually,” Holgate explains. “One is the government and how it plans to fund a health budget — obviously, natural medicine is cheaper. The second is that there aren’t enough doctors, especially in rural areas, so the idea is to get the pharmacist to play a bigger part in the health solution. The pharmacists are more likely than doctors to recommend complementary treatment. It’s also about actual people… when countries have a difficult economic time and people get hit by that, job security is a bigger issue. Families care more about their health because no one wants to be out of work. This year, when we were in the US, we heard that unemployment is 10.9%, but the vitamin market was growing by 6%.”

The issue of government-funded medical aid applies in countries with heavily subsidised medical budgets, which Malaysia doesn’t entirely adhere to. The option to consume natural medicine is very much a personal decision for the average Malaysian, and according to Marcus, an accepted idea thanks to our age-old habits and practices that relate to natural medicine.

Many of us will remember our mothers and grandmothers shunning the use of Western drugs in favour of natural remedies like flower teas, herbal drinks and specially prepared concoctions. “It was a lot easier for Blackmores to start in Asian countries... they are used to the philosophy. Our business is predicated on providing our customers with products they already have a predisposition to wanting,” says Marcus.

In Malaysia, Blackmores’ top-selling product is its fish oil, and also popular are products related to beauty and ageing. H1N1 caused vitamin C sales to increase, and economic turbulence saw high sales of Executive B, which is formulated to help the body combat stress. “The industry isn’t as trendy as it used to be,” says Holgate. “Each market has different best-selling products, which has got to do with what’s happening in each market. Out of almost 300 unique products, we have about 40 core products that are pretty stable.”

Australia, Thailand and Malaysia have the most stringent regulations in the world when it comes to complementary medicine, which has a huge advantage — anything that makes it to the shelf is a testimony to its high level of quality. It adds to the cost — up to 10%, says Marcus — but it’s a good thing because it serves as a filter for brands that get sold here.

Even so, Blackmores still clamours for attention among a sea of equally, if not more attractive, fishes. In pharmacies alone, the competition is stiff, especially amidst brands like Safwa, which comes with both the Australian stamp of quality and a halal certification. Specialised health food stores like GNC also make supplements, and direct marketing channels like Amway and Cosway add to the challenge of staying ahead.

But Holgate is unruffled. “There is a lot of growth opportunity in Malaysia, whether it’s new products or new distribution channels. So, I think our future intention for Malaysia is ‘a lot more’. Fair to say, I’ll see you soon,” she laughs. “It’s been a very good market, and we’re investing more and more into the region.”

Ultimately, its staying power lies in the values of the company and what it means to consumers. “It’s about trust, about peace of mind,” she adds. “You pick up a bottle of Blackmores and you’re assured of the quality. That’s a real differentiator for us — the quality and the trust that exist in our products.

“That’s actually really important, going forward — that we really understand our brand values and don’t compromise on them. I’d like to see Blackmores like an authority on family health, and to establish ourselves as the top brand in Asia.”

This article appeared in Options, the lifestyle pullout of The Edge Malaysia, Issue 782, Nov 23-29, 2009