Jennifer O’Connell quit her job in law to risk everything to start a supplement company called Sisterly with two of her friends, Aoife Matthews and Louise O’Riordan. The trio saw a gap in the wellness market for a product that supported women’s hormones, immunity and energy levels – and they wanted to provide it, despite having no experience in the field.
After three careful years consulting with a panel of medical experts, they launched their signature product, The Elevator, an award-winning formulation containing 23 synergistic nutrients that has become a non-negotiable product for over 3,000 subscribers, including Olympic track and field athlete Sonia O’Sullivan and skincare entrepreneur Liz Earle.
Sisterly turned over £1m in its first year and is now stocked in high-end retailers including Harrods and Whole Foods.
I worked as a barrister for over 20 years and was really obsessed with triathlons in my spare time. Despite being physically fit, I had a very weak immune system and had to take antibiotics and inhalers almost every eight weeks. I dialled it back when I had my son but then I caught three rounds of Covid during the pandemic and a dose of shingles. It just felt like my immune system wasn’t working, and I felt like I needed a new approach.
The seed of the idea for Sisterly came when I asked my friend and co-founder Aoife Matthews, who had just done a qualification in nutrition, what supplements I should be taking. She said that, unless you have decades worth of experience, you need to speak to experts about correct doses and synergies of nutrients because it’s so complicated. We decided to create something that could support energy, hormonal balance and immune support for busy women. Like a female-specific multivitamin in a powder form, because our other co-founder, Louise O’Riordan, who I lived with in New York, hated taking six pills per day.
For three years I worked both as a barrister and developing the product. Louise and Aoife dealt with the day-to-day management and I would do meetings at night with experts to try to establish what we needed in our formulation, which we called The Elevator. Three years is a long time but we wanted to get it right. We worked with a team of advisers with decades of experience; a GP and hormone expert, a phycologist (a scientist who specialises in the study of algae and cyanobacteria), a food scientist, a nutritional therapist and a sports nutritionist. As a barrister, I’d seen experts with all the qualifications in the world argue that black was white and white was black, so it felt important that there was a consensus view among our expert panel – that’s why it took so long.
We were shocked by what the food industry thinks is acceptable. We went through four manufacturers to find one that shared our vision not to put sucralose (artificial sweetener) over the nutrients we put in The Elevator to disguise the flavour. The Elevator contains magnesium, vitamin D, B complex, vitamin C and coenzyme Q10, and they told us they’d hide it and not put it on the label, but we refused. The supplement industry is not tightly regulated. People are always looking for newness, but, actually, novelty is part of the problem. It creates confusion and overwhelms consumers. We wanted to stick to science and only include ingredients that have been shown to be effective at the dose we’ve used in human trials.
Eventually, I went to see my pension manager and spoke to him about my finances. We worked through a plan of how I could afford to leave law. I took baby steps and made myself comfortable before taking the leap. We self-funded Sisterly initially, then had a round of funding with family and friends; people who’d known us our whole professional lives who knew we wouldn’t walk away from careers we’d built up for 20 years unless we were serious. Then an Irish government agency called Enterprise Ireland matched that funding.
When we turned over a million in our first year we felt like we were in the clear. It was hard for us to even contemplate that that might happen when we first started out. But once we were there, we knew Sisterly was going to work because our spending had been absolutely minimal. We prize being able to sleep at night so we’re not as aggressive about growth as other companies. We’re not out there looking for more investment. We’ve streamlined our packaging, kept marketing spend low and relied on the quality of the product to deliver word-of-mouth growth. When Harrods said they’d stock us, that was a huge moment.
There were a lot of learning curves too. During the early stages of the brand, we had a surge in customers unexpectedly. It just caught fire. That coincided with our manufacturers experiencing mechanical issues in the plant. So, our demand went up and our ability to produce products disappeared. I was on a family holiday in Portugal while we were desperately scrambling to find new manufacturers. I remember being parked on the side of the road in the Algarve in the baking sun, afraid to turn on the air conditioning in case I ran out of petrol. It was awful. We managed to fix the problem without running out of stock but we’ve now put in safeguards with backup manufacturers. It’ll never happen to us again.
You can figure anything out if you apply enough rigour. It was a strength that we weren’t from a nutrition background with white coats because we were so conscious that we needed the best advice. I learnt never to settle for the first answer, to cross-check everything, check their homework and make sure it’s a reliable answer. It’s more about whether you’ve got the energy to keep going until you unravel an issue than knowing it all. I learnt that as a barrister. Doing a case, you’re an expert in plumbing one day and product liability the next. You just have to apply your mind to it.
If you have an instinct or urge to do something, my advice is to do it. Think about how you’ll feel sitting in the rocking chair in the nursing home if you don’t. Find people with skills that complement yours and hold each other accountable. Just put one foot in front of the other and take baby steps. Don’t look at the finish line, just decide your next 10 small moves and get on with it.
Jennifer O’Connell is a champion of FFinc Forward Faster Accelerator 100, a UK-based business accelerator programme designed to help female-founded companies scale their growth faster, which was launched in September 2025. For more information, go to https://ffinc.co/
