A note before we begin —
This is the first of what I hope will be many letters from me about Unived. I have been running this company for fifteen years and have, until now, written almost nothing about it in public. The decision to start writing is recent. The reasons are simple.
What Unived is.
Unived is a nutrition supplement company. I started it in 2010 with the conviction that the supplements available in India at that time — and to a large extent, even today — were not built around evidence. The labels made claims the ingredients could not support. The doses were imitative. The quality controls were assumed, not verified. I wanted to build something where the formulation came first, the evidence was visible, and the testing was real.
Fifteen years later, Unived is a private, self-funded company based in Mumbai, with a manufacturing plant in Vapi. We have a catalogue of just over 125 SKUs across sports nutrition and wellness. We test every batch — at TÜV SÜD, Bangalore Analytical, or Equinox, named on every certificate of analysis. We have recalled and destroyed roughly ten-fifteen batches in fourteen years rather than ship anything we could not stand behind. Most of what we have built has been built quietly.
Why now.
That quietness has, I think, been a mistake. Or at least, a missed opportunity. The most thoughtful customers we have are not the ones who bought because of an advertisement. They are the ones who read a label, then a certificate of analysis, then a study, and decided we were worth their attention. Those customers deserve more than packaging copy. They deserve to understand the business behind the bottle — how decisions get made, what we get wrong, what we are trying to build next.
So I am going to start writing.
What's in these letters.
These letters will be honest about the company. The good and the inconvenient. I will write when we have shipped something we are proud of, and I will write when we have had to recall something we should not have shipped. I will write when a year goes well and when a year goes poorly. I will write about decisions I am still thinking through, not only the ones I have resolved.
I will not be writing on a schedule. I will write when there is something to say. Some quarters will have two letters; some years may have one. The cadence will be set by the substance, not by an editorial calendar.
For subscribers.
If you subscribe to be notified when a new letter is published, you will get one email or one WhatsApp per letter. That is all. No marketing. No newsletter. No "tips and tricks" interspersed between letters. The subscribe form exists because some readers asked for a way to know when there was something new; it does not exist to build a marketing list.
If you would rather not subscribe, the letters are public and will remain so. Bookmarking this page works just as well.
What's coming.
There is much I want to write about. The story of how Unived got started. How the team was formed. Who from the core team has stayed, and how their role has evolved. The countless years of struggle. Failed initiatives. Product recalls, batch failures. The next product we are about to launch and the three we shelved before we got there.
I will get to all of it, in time. For now, this letter exists to say: these letters are starting, this is what they will be, and this is what they will not be.
If you have read this far, thank you.
Kind regards,
Amit Mehta