The future of kona - First Endurance

11 MOVES FOR FUNCTIONAL FLEXIBILITY
N ° 270/OCTOBER 2006 WORLD’S LARGEST TRIATHLON MAGAZINE
RUN TUNE-UP
FOR LATE
SEASON
LAB RABBIT
RECOVER & REBUILD
FOR 2007
THE FUTURE
OF KONA
FUEL UP
TO GO LONG
®
CAN AMERICANS
GET BACK IN
THE MIX?
2006 IRONMAN
ARIZONA WINNER
MICHAEL LOVATO
$4.99 / Canada $6.99

Breaking
and
entering
Proving there was a market for highend
nutritional supplements for distance
freaks, First Endurance has
found success in becoming
the Ferrari of sports-supplement
companies
By T.J. Murphy
Sports nutritional supplements have
become indispensible tools of the trade
for serious multisport athletes.
From a retrospective position, it’s hard not to think that back in the
beginning of nutritional supplements for sport it would have been fairly
easy to concoct a worthwhile product. Consider training and competing
in hot weather. A dose of keen observation might tell you
something like this: You sweat profusely out there, and you burn lots
of energy. So there’s a long, grueling football game, for instance, in
the hot, humid Florida weather, and you might wonder about stirring
up a drink that replaces some of the 10 to 20 pounds a lineman sweats
off. You figure there’s a lot of salt in all that sweat and the lineman is
John Segesta/wahoomedia.com
burning lots of energy, which could also be defined as sugar. This
extraordinarily simplified scenario is essentially how Gatorade came
to be, a supplement originated in the 1960s to help the University of
Florida football players, the Gators, seek out more hustle in the last
quarter of the game.
Another famous tale that has inspired many to try their hand with
a supplement company was the late Brian Maxwell. Maxwell, a 2:14
marathoner back in the 1980s, was leading a race when he bonked.
Not content with what a sports drink might offer, he turned his
76 OCTOBER 2006 WWW.TRIATHLETEMAG.COM

kitchen into a laboratory and baked up the first batch of what would
one day be known as PowerBars. Incidentally, Maxwell turned his
fledgling enterprise into a $150 million dollar per year moneymaker.
Gatorade, which now exists on a level that is challenging to imagine,
is sold in some 50 countries and generates a staggering $3 billion
per year in sales. Now, the sports-nutrition market is clogged with a
huge range of supplements. Some companies experience success and
quickly build on that success; most are not so lucky and just last a
couple of seasons.
Who are those guys?
Go back about a decade and you had two skinny anomalies within
the walls of Weider, the famous bodybuilding nutrition company based
in Salt Lake City, Utah. Robert Kunz, a research specialist, and Mike
Fogarty, a marketing specialist, may have seemed a bit out of place.
“Rob was a triathlon fanatic, and I was a cycling fanatic,” recalls Fogarty.
“I weighed about 155 pounds. It was at times a little odd to be
working with these guys who were 250 pounds and couldn’t walk up
the stairway because their lats were so wide.” Kunz and Fogarty, both
WWW.TRIATHLETEMAG.COM TRIATHLETE MAGAZINE 77

John Segesta/wahoomedia.com
working at Weider at the time, shared not only a passion for endurance
athletics but also a vision for one day creating a nutrition company that
patched up what they felt was a glaring hole in the market: that of a
high-end sports-supplement company that focused singularly on the
needs of training and racing for aerobic endurance.
Five years ago, the pair—having severed its ties with Weider—took
the plunge into converting its sports-nutrition knowledge into a company
that had no interest in ever becoming a popular brand on the grocery
stores shelves. “We wanted one thing and one thing only,” Fogarty
says, “to make products and sell products for the high-end endurance
athlete, an area we felt was being largely ignored. We would have no
interest in competing with companies that are looking for the widest possible
market. The products of most sports-nutrition companies are created
with the goal of serving a certain price point; in fact they are pricepoint
driven. We would never do that. Competitive athletes want the
best product possible, regardless of price, and Rob and I both knew
this, because we were both competitive athletes. So for us, the product
would come first. Our thought was: If we build it, they will come.”
Crisis equals opportunity
Their mission statement in place, Fogarty and Kunz had a precarious
start. “We began with a ‘during-exercise’ drink,” Fogarty says. A difficult field
in the first place because of the vast number of competitors, their plan to
exploit the rare-air niche with the all-important initial product met with a
daunting ad in a magazine. “I opened up a [magazine] and saw an ad for a
new drink, Piranha, from EAS. It was just too much. We wouldn’t be able
to make our mark. But this turned out to be a blessing in disguise.”
Fogarty and Kunz elected to launch First Endurance into business with
Optygen, a supplement designed to increase endurance performance.
According to Kunz, the creation (and market success) of Optygen was
proof their business model would be effective for the high-end market
they were working to attract. “The way most companies bring a new
product to the market,” Kunz explains, “is that the marketing people
come up with an idea and a price point and take it to the research department
to develop. We reversed this process. Our products begin with
what research is indicating is effective. We then create prototypes and
give them out to athletes to try, and we would rely heavily on their feedback.
When we have the product we believe in, we deliver it to the marketing
side of the company and go from there.”
Buffalo2Step.com
Co-founder of First Endurance Robert Kunz is a top age-group athlete and
was a USAT All-American in 2005.
78 OCTOBER 2006 WWW.TRIATHLETEMAG.COM

John Segesta/wahoomedia.com
Greg Remaly, a First Endurance athlete, topped a
strong field at Memphis in May earlier this season.
In the early days of giving out the product, Fogarty says they knew
they were onto something. “People who were trying it would come
back to us and say, ‘Please don’t put this up for sale. This is a secret
weapon.’”
Fogarty says they worked hard to use their specialized knowledge of the
industry to their advantage and also to make sure the product was 100percent
legal. The product wasn’t cheap—today you can buy it through
the First Endurance Web site at a price of $50 for 90 capsules—but as
Fogarty and Kunz imagined, an appetite for the product existed. Their
success fueled the creation of more products, and, in 2005, Kunz was
honored by Outside magazine as “One of the world’s top 25 boldest and
most visionary leaders of adventure, fitness, gear and sport.”
Committing themselves even deeper into the heady universe of
endurance geeks, First Endurance established a research board and a
team of sponsored athletes. Members of Team First Endurance include
triathletes Mike Lovato, Josiah Middaugh, Jamie Whitmore and Greg
Remaly, which both Kunz and Fogarty say they rely on deeply for feedback
in their formulation of products. Talk to the sponsored elites, and the
one First Endurance product they’ll especially gush about is Ultragen.
One look into Ultragen and you can see that, true to their word, First
Endurance products will probably never be available in the checkout line
of Wal-Mart. A recovery drink mix, First Endurance says that Ultragen
is designed to meet the needs of the athlete who is in a hard training phase
or essentially just walked in from a 20-mile run or century bike ride:
time-released protein, a complex of vitamins, minerals and glutamine
meant to counter rising cortisol levels (it’s rising cortisol levels that can
80 OCTOBER 2006 WWW.TRIATHLETEMAG.COM

lead an over-cooked triathlete to catch a respiratory infection), glutamine
for muscle repair and more.
When preparing Ultragen for the market, just like First Endurance
did with its during-exercise drink, EFS, the company fished for feedback
not only on the effectiveness of the supplement but also on factors such
as taste. “When we were creating EFS,” says Fogarty, “we realized how
individual the desire for a certain level of sweetness is, and we know
how critical it is to take in the factor of taste fatigue.” Their solution, in
the case of EFS Sports Drink, was to create multiple flavors with varying
degrees of sweetness. Fogarty credits such nuances to their prototype
program. “When we send out prototypes, which we try and get into
as many hands as possible, it’s the complaints that we’re really hoping
to get. The criticisms help us get things dialed in.”
Along with paying attention to what athletes have to say about First
Endurance products, Kunz likes to emphasize how much work they
put in to make sure First Endurance holds tight reigns on quality control,
particularly in regard to issues that surround doping.
“Our quality control at First Endurance is second to none,” Kunz
says. “In order to assure no cross-contamination and no banned substances
in any of our products, we have gone far beyond the minimum
FDA requirements to assure the highest quality possible. One, we
[review] all ingredient suppliers to assure they do not broker or distribute
any banned substances. Two, we develop and own all our formulas,
keeping full control of all variables. Three, we manufacture our products
in facilities that have far more stringent controls than U.S. Pharmacopoeia
and GMP (Good Manufacturing Practices). Our facilities
adhere to the Therapeutic Goods Association and Pharmaceutical
Grade Manufacturing practices. This level of manufacturing is the
highest available anywhere. Four, we also ensure that our manufacturer
does not manufacture any products with banned substances. Finally,
we religiously review the USADA and WADA banned-substance
regulations to ensure our products are legal.”
No-nonsense solutions
Whether most athletes who end up purchasing First Endurance
products will ever have to worry about being tested, the effort apparently
works as solid PR for getting the message out about what the company
says it’s up to: serving the serious athlete in a serious way. “I think
what has worked best for us in terms of marketing has been word of
mouth,” Fogarty says. “For years, [pro cyclist] Levi Leipheimer liked
using our products, but he always reminded us that due to contracts, he
couldn’t put us on his jersey. We said, ‘No problem’; we understood. But
guys like him out there talking about how much they like Optygen or
Ultragen—words like that spread.” Leipheimer, incidentally, is now in
a situation where he is officially recognized as being sponsored by First
Endurance.
Can two racing-mad endurance geeks make it in the supplementflooded
world? “The company couldn’t be healthier,” Fogarty reports.
“Sales are going up every month. We don’t have any debts, and it seems
like we’ve made it to a tipping point.”
They have built it, and the people—sweaty, skinny and fleet-footed
people—have started to come.
82 OCTOBER 2006 WWW.TRIATHLETEMAG.COM