Deborah’s company wins Best Women’s Health Product award
By Aimee Walsh
Inspired and motivated by her own struggle with fertility, Deborah Brock decided to begin researching to bring a ‘first of its kind’ fertility supplement to the market, creating her brand ‘Nua Fertility’.
The supplement - NuaBiome for Women is a natural pre-natal fertility supplement specially developed to help support female fertility.
Deborah Brock with the OTC Award
“I started the company in 2017, we experienced our own struggles with infertility and trying for a baby and it becomes a passion - if you struggle, you want to help others that are struggling and going through it,” Deborah tells The Echo.
“I was lucky enough to get onto the New Frontiers Phase 2 programme and I was able to then leave my job in the Partnership, which was a big step.
“I began exploring, then working in fertility health, specifically microbiome and the impact that your gut health has on your overall fertility and I started working with some researchers in APC Microbiome Ireland in Cork and then put it forward to develop our product.
“It’s the first product of its kind which is a combination of vitamins, minerals and good bacteria in one product for fertility.
“We are one of the first companies to start building on the connection between the microbiome and how that impacts your overall fertility and trying for a baby.
“Today unfortunately not everybody has a perfect diet, so supplementation is there to support that. Nutrition is very important when you are trying for a baby, so this is not a substitute, but it is something you can take in combination with it.
“We talk about a fertility jigsaw, where you need to look at the pieces that give you the bigger picture which is your lifestyle, nutrition, diet, smoking, alcohol and supplementation and now we are saying the missing piece of that jigsaw is your microbiome.”
Officially brought to market in August 2019, the product has achieved the prestigious ‘Best Women’s Health Product’ award, at the 2021 OTC & Retail Pharmacy Product Awards less than a year after hitting the shelves.
Speaking about the joy of winning the award, Deborah said: “We are absolutely thrilled, we only launched last August so we are still young and new as a start-up and last December we actually won gold in the National Start-up Awards, which was huge for us.”
Before starting Nua Fertility, Deborah worked as the Lifelong Learning Manager for South Dublin County Partnership and spent over 14 years working in the community in Tallaght, something she said “inspired” her to start her own company.
“I absolutely loved it, I was working with so many innovative programmes across the county from youth up to adults,” she said.
“I think the work in the partnership was all about innovation and testing things and challenges and I loved that, and I would have learned a skillset through that time.
“It was always about the community of Tallaght and the people you worked with and how we could support the community and I have taken that into this role.
“The other key thing about working in the partnership is that we always teamed up with experts and that strengthened what we were offering and doing in the community, and that’s what we have done here with this company [Nua Fertility].
“We align ourselves with these brilliant people who are working in the field of fertility and that is just catapulting what we are doing. It has definitely helped me and inspires me daily.”
Deborah says that they have big plans to launch a fertility supplement for men and hope to bring the products to the global market.
“We have started and looking for investors, so that will be a big piece of work that we are doing. We are on the cusp of going into Enterprise Ireland and getting additional support through them which is amazing and starting to sell internationally and throughout Europe.
“We are now in really late discussions with distributors in Australia, so we are going Global, quite big. We had global ambitions from the beginning, we have a mission to help others and we want to do that and continue to do that.”
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