Lekha Vyas, founder and CEO of SYNQ Wellness, joins Sunny Ray to discuss building a plant-based, oral dissolving strip alternative to GLP-1 drugs. Vias spent more than 15 years leading brands inside P&G, L'Oreal, and Estee Lauder before founding her own companies, including men's skincare brand LV Lab. She explains that SYNQ Wellness was born from a personal loss: her mother's 2021 cancer diagnosis, which left her unable to swallow food or water and required a G-tube. That experience pushed Vias toward direct-to-bloodstream delivery, first through a micro-needle patch and eventually an oral dissolving strip built on dihydroberberine and other actives that target blood glucose and metabolic pathways. After seventy-nine formula iterations, she built the brand in public, gathering 4,000 pre-launch reservations from real conversations in Reddit and Facebook weight-loss communities. Vias discusses her company's patent-filed formulation, a third-party human trial as proof of efficacy, and a go-to-market strategy centered on TikTok education, an AI mascot named Strippy, and community popups instead of paid ads. She closes by reflecting on where metabolic health heads once GLP-1 drugs eventually go generic.
A beauty industry veteran turned personal loss into a 30-second dissolving strip designed to help people wean off GLP-1 drugs.
What is SYNQ Wellness, and why should the listener care?
SYNQ Wellness is an oral dissolving strip technology, starting with a GLP-1 alternative. GLP-1 drugs work and are fantastic for people who need them, but there is no real path for people to ever get off of them. There is a huge segment of people who want a natural alternative, and that market does not really exist today, so we built something that closes that gap.
After 15 years running brands at P&G, L'Oreal, and Estee Lauder, what did that teach you that a first-time founder cannot buy?
Working inside big Fortune 500 companies gives you structure, but you get siloed into one business unit. As you move up you start connecting dots cross-functionally. In my last corporate role, at a PE firm incubating celebrity CPG brands, I learned to take ideas from concept to scale. That experience also taught me a lot of red tape, and as a female founder I kept asking myself if I was ready instead of just starting.
Why leave large-cap beauty to build something that has to clear a scientific bar rather than a marketing one?
A lot of products in this industry are marketing first, so for me a product has to be at least fifty percent efficacy and fifty percent marketing. My mom was diagnosed with cancer in 2021 and eventually needed a G-tube because she stopped swallowing food and water. I tried building a micro-needle patch to get nutrients into her blood directly, and that search led me to oral dissolving strip technology. She passed away, and this became my mission.
What was the first version of SYNQ Wellness that did not work?
The first version was a micro-needle patch. It worked beautifully, but it required FDA medical device approval, cost millions of dollars, and could take over ten years, so we scrapped it. Then we tried a formula with several actives and ran into manufacturing issues finding a supplier who could work with that efficacious weight and molecular structure. We went through seventy-nine iterations of the formula before landing on the final product.
How do you talk about a natural alternative to a pharmaceutical without overclaiming?
We are not competing with the drugs, that has never been our goal. We built a strong medical and pharma advisory board to keep our claims accurate. We use dihydroberberine, a more bioavailable form of berberine, to target blood glucose through AMPK, then layered in seven actives across four more metabolic pathways to enhance the body's natural GLP-1, reduce cravings, and boost metabolism, all without the GI side effects of the drugs.
In a category full of supplement noise, what is your actual moat?
Our moat is the combination of our formulation, which we have filed a patent for, and the oral dissolving strip delivery technology applied to it. We also ran a third-party human trial to validate that the product is actually efficacious, not just marketing. The delivery technology itself is not proprietary to us, but how our formulation performs on the strip is.
How do you plan to acquire customers when paid social for weight loss is a minefield?
Paid social for weight loss is expensive, especially on Meta, so we are leaning into education first, lots of TikTok content and podcasting like this. Our mascot Strippy answers consumer questions, and we are building an AI layer that assesses people's goals and biomarkers to tell them if they qualify. We will drive conversion through Amazon and TikTok, do community popups in New York, LA, and Miami, and only start Meta ads around month three.
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