Shaun and Katie both live with the philosophy that everything we do as humans is more fully experienced when our physiology is well cared for and feels strong. When we take care of our bodies, our hearts and minds follow.
Although there are many products that we have used and loved over the years, we were missing the cornerstone supplements we need and trust to feel our best and continue growing mentally and physically on a daily basis.
We have wanted supplements that work with our bodies and accentuate our performance and energetic balance.
We want to be able to do more for longer with better cognition without overstimulating our systems or overriding our bodies’ cues.
So, Soulside was born out of what we wanted and needed for our personal lives and the trust that we could build a wellness company that is authentically inspirational, sustainable, healthy, and positively impactful on our community.
For Shaun, Soulside is the natural evolution of the work he has been doing for years in the health and fitness world. He was the guy biohacking performance and downing wheatgrass shots before anyone knew what wheatgrass was. He has guided thousands of clients over his career, including dozens of professional and amateur athletes through ultra-marathons, triathlons, peak ascents, competitions of every sort as well as entire lifestyle and fitness overhauls. His clients have graced the covers of Time magazine as well as topped the Billboard charts and are undeniably world shakers and trend makers. Plus, he's just a fun dude to hang out with :)
For Katie, Soulside was also born out of her own professional and personal experience. With a background in social work and a decade-long history with chronic illness, Soulside is the opportunity to combine professional skills and life lessons learned through her own healing journey and career working with people to improve their lives. She knows the power of dynamic wellness education, nutrition, thoughtful herbal products, and a supportive community through her own pathway to health and craved a place to share that knowledge and help people on their own journeys.
So when we met, there was an immediate alignment on values and purpose. Early on, we were dreaming of the products we wanted to formulate and the spaces we wanted to create. It’s true that just a month into dating we were stopping by potential yoga studio spaces and envisioning how we could create a wellness brand that encompassed the community feeling we were craving.
Amidst the pandemic, we had the opportunity to ask ourselves how to be in the deepest service, how to live in a way that felt authentic to both of us and how to create a container for our creative and entrepreneurial impulses.
So, we built out an old van and we hit the road to explore what was out there. We visited yoga and movement studios all around the Western USA, studied with master movement teachers, explored unique products on the shelves of natural groceries, and dreamt about what our brand would look like, feel like and be.
We paid attention to how it felt out in the world after the pandemic.
We got curious about what was missing from people’s lives, what type of support people were seeking, and how we could play a role in filling those gaps.
We recognized the need we all felt to be healthy and strong in our bodies and minds while facing the impact of COVID-19 on our individual and collective lives.
Van life highlighted our need to keep our energy sustained and our minds clear. It emphasized the need for products that are portable, easy to use, and effective. It guided us to streamline our possessions, our thought processes, and the tools we used to feel powerful and intentional in our bodies.
When we connected with one of Shaun’s friends who had a Spagyric herbal tincture lab, we knew we had to start there. The idea of creating nutraceuticals that were impactful and inspiring to a performance lifestyle lit us up. Creating a home to share the practices, mindsets, and other factors that have helped us grow over the years felt exciting and purposeful. Knowing we would create products that would be supportive to people’s daily lives was meaningful to us.
And so, Soulside was born.
We took our first branding meeting parked on a side street in Whitefish, Montana with our iPad propped on pillows in the van bed and a shoddy hotspot connection. We concocted our initial tinctures based on what we needed to support our daily energetic outputs and formulated them with the lab that would produce them at the quality standard we can celebrate. We tested the tinctures on fellow movers, athletes, and high performers to make sure we did in fact create products to be proud of.
And we got there.
We knew that when our testers were describing the positive impact the tinctures were having and asking for more opportunities to use them, we had created products that work and would help people.
The exciting part for us is that we get to keep creating and iterating. Anyone’s personal wellness journey is a lifelong path of learning, responding and evolving. There is no limit to how deep you can go. And Soulside is the same. We will forever have the opportunity to respond to our customers, learn new science, create meaningful products, teach purposeful concepts and evolve the brand to fill the gaps we see in the wellness world.
Soulside launched at the intersection of passion about wellness, personal and professional experience with all types of healing, inspiration, a big dose of adventure, grit and two people who had a vision for how to make the world better by helping people feel better.
