What happens when three brilliant women — all of whom have a wealth of skills and knowledge in their own fields — meet at a conference? They band together to create an ethical, mission-driven supplement company that puts women’s health first. Of course.

Cecilia Tse, Thara Vayali, and Helkin Berg are the masterminds in question. A somewhat unlikely trio — Tse has a professional background in finance and M&A, Berg is a Division 1 athlete and former tech CEO, and Vayali is a Naturopathic Doctor — the three women bonded over harrowing shared experiences with medical dismissal, burnout, and patient care. 

As Vayali puts it, Berg’s experience with debilitating burnout stoked the fire for hey freya before the company was even conceived.

“This is for access,” shares Vayali. “As Helkin likes to put it, we’re kicking the door open and we’re holding it open for everyone else.”

All three founders reside in different regions across North America: Vayali, Chief Medical Officer, in Vancouver; Berg in Portland, Maine; and Tse, hey freya’s CFO and COO, in Berkeley, California. 

hey freya launched to the public in beta mode in February, 2023. The product they first launched into market is the Measure Stress Test (only available in the U.S.): an at-home spit test that, after being sent to a lab for analyzing, comes back with a full, comprehensive report on cortisol levels and adrenal function, complete with lifestyle and wellness recommendations. 

“Cortisol is responsible for a lot of things, including our ability to fall asleep and stay asleep, feel well-rested when we wake up, our ability to concentrate and focus, our libido, our creative juices, it’s our weight fluctuations. It’s responsible for so many things. [When Helkin experienced severe burnout], it was actually a cortisol test that she took which helped her put her on her path to recovery,” shares Tse. 

As for hey freya’s supplement line, there are four supplement products and one hydration formula on the market and available for purchase online. All products are expertly formulated by Vayali, using optimal combinations of effective ingredients that do exactly what they’re supposed to — there’s no corner cut, no cheap filler, every product is vegan and is third-party tested — eliminating the need for bottles and bottles of products that may or may not support your symptoms and health goals. 

The start of the core lineup is THRIVE. As Tse puts it, THRIVE is hey freya’s extremely powerful daily multi-vitamin designed for stress support. Handcrafted by Vayali with a blend of 20 ingredients including clinical-grade vitamins, minerals, and herbs, THRIVE supports fatigue, libido, hormone balance, and mental clarity. REST is a melatonin-free sleep aid; NOURISH, another powerful multivitamin, is formulated with DHA and omega-3 to manage inflammation, and support healing, stress management, and metabolism.

“And we have CALM,” adds Tse. “It’s like an alternative to CBD, it gives you the chill without removing your ability to concentrate and your cognitive function.”

A new addition to hey freya’s product line is QUENCH: a hey freya team favourite that, according to Vayali and Tse, is formulated on a World Health Organization-approved formula of balanced electrolytes and is powered by astaxanthin, a sustainably sourced algae. 

When concocting their products, Vayali intentionally chooses forms of each vitamin and mineral that are more effective than standard forms in common supplements. For example, both THRIVE and NOURISH have Vitamin A as a core ingredient instead of betacarotene, which is commonly used in supplements but is far less effective.

“We’re not here just to make supplements,” says Tse. “We’re really here to help all women advocate for themselves, feel empowered in their own choices, and pursue what excites them … We’re really doing what we say we’re doing.”

Products from hey freya are available for purchase online. Learn more about the founders, their story, and their mission here. 

Learn more about hey freya’s founders in an extended interview below.
Some responses have been edited for clarity and brevity. 

Brittany Tiplady: I’d love to start the interview by just getting to know more about your personal and professional medical backgrounds. 

Thara Vayali: I have a degree in Nutritional Sciences. And so that’s where my initial journey into health and community-based orientation towards health started. The Nutrition Science pathway is really focused on how you change community health and then [the question of] how do you change groups of people? I also did a Master’s in Environmental Education at Royal Roads University. And the focus of that [degree] isn’t necessarily Environmental Sciences, as much as the question of how do we connect people to the planet. That’s really the focus behind it. 

I graduated with an ND and practiced as a Naturopathic Doctor for over a decade, working almost exclusively with women’s health. And within that, my priorities were around counseling, herbal medicine, using the background of my Nutritional Sciences degree with a focus on fertility, women’s health, adrenal health, and cortisol rhythms.

Ceclia Tse: I’m based in Berkeley, the Bay Area but I’m originally from Sydney, Australia. My background is as a finance and M&A [Mergers & Acquisitions] professional. I am the daughter of Chinese immigrants who really hammered into us that we should be professionals. That was kind of the criteria: go and be professionals. And I was good at math and I loved that. So, that’s where I started. I was [in finance] for about 15 years advising companies on how to go public, raising capital…when I experienced my own burnout as I was getting closer to making partner. The “Why am I even doing this?” began to emerge. 

And then fortunately, was able to recover from that and ultimately become PwC’s Well-Being Strategy Leader. On the way there, I also pursued credentials in wellness just because it was something that I was passionate about. I thought there had to be another way to do this kind of pushing, pushing, pushing, and putting myself at the bottom of the list all the time. So I became a 200-hr yoga teacher, for example and I studied all these various well-being modalities: I studied Integrative Nutrition, I studied mindfulness, and also Mental Health First Aid by the National Council of Wellbeing.

I was told at a young age that I’d “need help” conceiving and to just “take the pill until I wanted to have kids.” After nearly 20 years and some therapy sessions, I was able to distinguish the reluctance to pursue fertility treatment from the decision to pursue having children.

And then over time, I learned that I needed to do IVF to start a family and it just illuminated to me how obvious the gaps were in women’s health and the experience with women’s health, that I wanted to combine my technical skill, my passion for well-being with women’s health, specifically to form hey freya.

BT: How did you three meet and what brought you together?

CT: The three of us were all at a juncture in our lives where we felt that we just weren’t satisfied with what we were doing. We all attended a virtual women’s health networking event, on the heels of COVID. 

The three of us met independently, and we all wrote each other’s names down. There wasn’t much to go off of… but of what little was shared, we knew we wanted to remain in conversation. Our third co-founder who wasn’t able to join us today, Helkin Berg, she’s had a long career in tech, starting companies being the CEO, and after seeing firsthand the many gender inequities particularly in tech, she was at the juncture in her life where she decided that whatever she did next, had to be with women and for women. And so the three of us really united on that. Helkin also had the inspiration to form hey freya based on her personal burnout story. And the product that we launched to go to market with is based on her direct personal experience.

TV:And I’ll just add a little colour to what [Helkin’s] experience was because as a physician, I was really just shocked. For Helkin, she was postpartum. She has an older child and then a set of twins. And she was a Division 1 athlete, so she had trained hard. She knows how to grit and bear through things and she recognized that her symptoms were different and something was wrong. [That fact that she] went to her doctor, with three kids at home — every person who has that many children at home understands how hard it is to get out of your house — meant this was serious. At the physician’s office, she described her symptoms and the doctor looked at her and laughed at her and said, “Helkin, you have three kids. What do you expect?” 

And that’s where the fire to build hey freya came from. It took her two years and thousands of dollars in insurance, obviously, because she has access to that insurance, to find the solution that was going to work for her, which turned out to be relatively simple in terms of testing and taking nutrients that were going to help her. But she recognized that she had access, she had privilege, she had all these routes to get what she needed and it still took her two years, and she said, “If this is what it’s like, for me, how could this be for anybody else? We have to find a better way.”

BT: What’s the goal and the mission behind hey freya and who are these supplements for?

TV: Our focus for hey freya is that we’re a women’s wellness brand, but we’re in pursuit of better care, that’s able to provide energy and the rest necessary for our collective liberation. We do that by providing clean solutions for health. The idea of us being a supplement company is really an outcome or a downstream way of approaching what it takes for women to achieve the energy and rest they need so that we can all be liberated.

BT: What were some of the gaps you were looking to fill in this industry? And how did you align your individual values with your mission? 

CT: As Thara mentioned, Helkin is someone with disposable income and she’s privileged. If you were to look at the three of us, she’s the tall skinny white blonde. And that’s not lost on her. We enjoy talking about it because not only does she feel like the way she looks works in her favour in society, she presents in this way and she has an Ivy League education. So if it was hard for her [to get medical help] how hard must it have been for the people that don’t look like that? 

Diversity is another gap that we’re really looking to fill. I know for a lot of people that can be the flag that they wave, but we’re trying to be really creative with how we bring that to life. In our angel fundraising round, for example, we include a statement to say that we would make best commercial efforts to allocate at least 51 per cent of the committed capital to diverse cheque writers. So, it’s one way that we’re trying to really lift the tide for all of us and create wealth for many first time angel investors. 

BT: I want to shift gears a little bit. The supplement world: it’s a little dizzying. For example, if you go into a Body Energy Club, there’s rows and rows of bottles. What do you even choose? And what’s going to work? And where do you put your money? Is that something that pisses you off? Is that another part of “the fire”?

TV: Walking into any store that provides supplements, does it piss me off? So, I would say there’s elements that tick me off, and there’s elements that don’t. One is that the supplement industry is really unregulated. And I don’t find that to be the problem, I think that it’s important that people have access to over the counter, let’s say, home remedy, things. 

[But it] starts to become so expensive for small businesses to be able to operate because everything is going through paperwork. I do think that there’s a really important space for unregulated supplements, except for the fact that in all of that space, there’s very little credibility of who’s creating them. We need to place more trust in the people who create the products that are out on the market. It doesn’t really piss me off, as much as I see as a real problem being the push to regulate, versus the push to have more credible people creating.

BT: Right. So for example, hey freya’s website has not only a wealth of information and resources but it really shows who you are–the people that are making this product, so that there’s a sense of accountability. 

TV: I think with all small businesses, the more that we can build up who is doing the work, the better. [We should know] who is behind [the company] and who can be held accountable so that the user understands who it is making the product and what their skill set is, to be able to trust them. 

The other piece that pisses me off, more than whether or not supplements are regulated, is that over the last 40 to 50 decades, women have slowly had the education about their body pulled away from them, one disease at a time. And that is why when you walk into a store, you have no idea what to go by other than the label, because we have not been given the tools to even think about what’s going on in our bodies. And that pisses me off more than what feels like a red herring of the supplements being regulated or not. We can’t make the choices from an informed consent perspective, because we have not been really allowed to know about our bodies, we haven’t been given the opportunity. 

Supplement wise, I have a background as a Naturopathic Doctor. My practice was, I would say, well known in Vancouver for not offering supplements — it was a very strong ethos that I carried that there was a really strong conflict of interest to hold supplements in my office that somebody could not get anywhere else. 

And at the same time, knowing that that’s my background, what I did see was a real gap in what was available to women between the ages of 25 to 50. I was noticing that women were patching together their own solutions. So I would be there to coach them and help them decide what to use. And to me, even though I didn’t carry supplements in my office, I could really see that this was something that women were begging for. And as long as I wasn’t the sole provider of that product, I felt like this is almost like public health. This is something that we need to be able to offer to women, and they get to choose after they learn about their bodies and what they want to take, and it doesn’t have to be complicated. This could appear in one or two bottles to really address the concerns they had.

BT:  I’d like to talk about the influencer industrial complex, and supplements. A lot of products are being shilled online that maybe shouldn’t be or they’re coming from the wrong advertisers. What did you advise your patients and what do you advise people now to look out for when they’re buying health care products?

TV: I think there’s a couple of pieces here. One, is that influencers and influencer marketing that is out there, like any form of marketing in our commercial capitalist world, is predatory. It’s predatory and it’s opportunistic. And so there’s nothing actually inherently wrong with that because what’s happening is they’re seeing an opportunity. There’s a gap that is not being filled by the healthcare profession.

In that element, we need to pull back and recognize that the issue is around where the credible sources are and where the healthcare practitioners are and not where the women are. There’s a vacuum of information where the women are because they’re not being heard…[so,] they’re going to end up listening to others and others will fill that gap. The way I see it is that there’s opportunity in two spaces: one is for more credible voices–which you do see happening now with younger physicians that are taking up space on [social media]. If the whole environment [around healthcare] is all advertisements, how can you tell what’s real and what’s not? But if you have people who are not doing ads, but are actually trying to educate and inform, you can feel that difference. And so as a listener, you can make the judgment yourself because the healthcare providers are in the space too.

BT: Cecilia, do you have anything you want to top up on that? 

CT: Women aren’t going to doctors, they’re self- diagnosing. A lot of us, as soon as we feel remotely uncomfortable we’re googling our own issues. With the fall of Roe v. Wade in the US. there’s even less trust than there was before. That’s something that’s really important to us, because we feel that women have enough on their plates. They don’t need to feel worse, they don’t need to be made to feel worse about what they’re not doing to take care of themselves.

BT: Okay, let’s get more into hey freya’s products. What are your personal favourites?

CT: Me, I’m breastfeeding my six month old, so I’m on NOURISH. And I love QUENCH, I have it daily. I have one right here! 

TV: I formulated all of them but THRIVE is definitely my favorite because it really gets to the core of healing around adrenal dysfunction which is what so many women are coping with right now. And so I love it personally for myself, but QUENCH is probably my realistic favorite.

BT: What is making you feel the most proud about this business?

TV: I was talking to my partner about this the other day, because he asked, you know, “oh, is this moment stressful?” as there was something happening. And I looked at him and I was like, “Oh, no, I wake up every day so happy to build this business no matter what.” Like, we were talking about misogyny and racism and the difficulty the other day, and we’re talking about budgets — we can go all over the place, and in every direction that we have to talk about I am so thrilled because our goal is not simply the product, it is not simply THRIVE and it is not simply getting cortisol tests. This is just the beginning and it feels at a core level, the three of us have aligned so well on “the why” behind what we’re building. And that is what helps me feel the least stress I have ever felt, which is really strange to say, as a co-founder of a startup.

CT: I would underline that. I’m so proud that we really do know our shit, Brittany. There’s not a day that passes that I’m not blown away. 

Thara’s formulations are incredible. When we were at Expo East, we had people deep in the know of the supplement world and they would come up and pick up our packets, our packaging, read the bottles and the eyebrows would raise because they noticed that it was not only different, but also more expensive to produce. Because, Thara hasn’t just put things in for marketing purposes, she’s thoughtfully combined the most optimal combination of effective ingredients.

I’m just so proud that the products that we are making are genuinely intended to do what we say they are doing. It’s not just marketing, when we see the testimonials or feedback that customers send us, we all do happy dance together and high fives and we just can’t wait to reach more women because we really do believe, and this does sound cliche, but the most important thing, the most powerful thing a woman can do is take care of herself.