The Interview: Heights co-founder Dan Murray on building a science-first wellness brand

The wellness market may be more crowded than ever, but Heights has carved out a distinctive position by focusing on science, habit-building and long-term health rather than quick fixes. Co-founded by entrepreneur Dan Murray, the brand has grown from a direct-to-consumer start-up into one of the UK's fastest-growing supplement businesses, recently expanding into Boots while building a loyal subscription community.

Before launching Heights, Murray made his name in fashion tech with Grabl, a social shopping app that taught him the importance of human behaviour and habit formation - lessons that have become central to the Heights philosophy. In this interview, he discusses the journey from fashion to wellness, why trust and scientific evidence are at the heart of the brand, the challenges of standing out in a saturated market, and what's next as Heights embarks on major new partnerships.

Heights co-founder Dan Murray

Let’s start with your career history. I believe you started out in fashion tech. Tell me about that and how you moved into wellness.

Growing up, my family was in fashion manufacturing, so it means I actually had interest in this space anyway. My last business, Grabl, was in fashion tech, and it was known as the Tinder of fashion. Obviously, that's very different to what I do now, but to make a successful mobile app, ours had millions of users. You need to understand one core thing about humans, and that is how we build and keep habits.

How did you get Heights off the ground? I read that Stephen Fry was an early backer. There seems to be a supplement for everything these days (I think I take many of them).

If you can't create a successful habit loop on your app, you will never have a successful app. I used this insight and experience to apply to the supplement space because if you think about it, the best supplement in the world is the one that you actually remember to take.

The hardest problem to solve in supplements in health and wellness is the desire to do something every single day when it's not urgent and no one's asking you to. That is sort of the definition of wellness versus medication, and as a result, it is very complicated to get right. So, using everything that I learned about human behaviour and habits, we put this into our thought process for designing a daily product that looked beautiful, stood out, and avoided the doomsday cupboard of broken promises that is anyone's supplement cupboard. As a result, it meant that people kept our bottle out on their desk at work or their bedside table. If something's out of sight and out of mind, they don't take it. When something is visible and in view all the time, they will remember. As a result, we help people build healthy habits, and ultimately, if you do that over enough time with incredibly high-quality ingredients, you will reach your Heights.

Steven Fry was not an early backer, but he was an early customer. He was our first paying customer, and he's still a customer to this day, so probably our most successful long-term customer story.

Although a lot of our early customers are still customers with us five or six years on, which is amazing, we just got very lucky with that. A friend knew him, could send the product to him, introduced him to it, and then he signed up on his own accord and gave us an incredible testimonial and review about his experience. It really helped cement us as something different and credible in the market.

How do you deal with a crowded market?

Standing out in a crowded market is indeed very difficult. We have always set up as a scientific organisation with a decade-long view of how to build science efficacy and ultimately proving what we do works over time. Our view is that no one really needs another supplement. The world doesn't need another supplement company, but the world does need more proof and more evidence. We stand for that, and then we try and simplify big categories of supplements into essentially multivitamins of various categories so we can simplify your routine but remove all the nasties, caking fillers, and junk thats in other supplements.

Can you talk a bit about regulation in the wellness space? How do you provide trust and safety for your customers?

Well, following the science and being at the forefront of any kind of efficacy conversations means it's pretty easy to stay within the regulations. They are pretty stringent, but for us it hasn't really been a problem, because we never cut corners. In fact, we create new corners for ourselves just to have something with more evidence and more impact for people, so this isn't really a challenge for us.

Let’s talk retail. Where can you buy Heights and what are your plans to further your retail footprint?

Since 2020, we've been heights.com D2C only, but we recently took our first retail step into Boots and have been scaling massively there. We are currently with Vitals, which is the number one wellness product in Boots in the UK at the moment, so we're very proud of how that's been going.

I have many of my wellness daily non-negotiables on subscription (otherwise I’ll forget to take them). Is the subscription mechanic a strong channel for Heights?

So subscription is 99% of our business, and we would rather discourage someone from buying Heights at all than encourage them to just buy for one month. This is all about building habits. You don't change your health in a day, a week, a month. You have it because you change your identity and you identify as someone who understands they have nutrient gaps and you're looking to fill your best over the long term, and that's the only way you reach your Heights.

We lose a lot of customers at the top of the funnel who would not want to sign up for a subscription and don't want to come to our website or do any of those things. What we benefit on the other side is a really loyal customer base who commit to the journey and then, as a result, feel incredible and give us these incredible testimonials, of which we've got tens of thousands.

You’re a keen angel investor and have supported many startups. What is it you look for when you’re picking businesses to back?

My very simple rule with startup investments: if it's not a friend, then it is generally the passion of the founder, how much they care about solving the problem and generally like more health and wellness. I prefer to invest in companies that are in health and wellness.

What’s next for Heights?

Heights has some really cool partnerships coming up in the next couple of years that I can't really talk about yet. We are on the precipice of two quite incredible big partnership deals that are a testimony to the incredible evidence that we have as a business. I'm really excited to share more of that with the world - the first of which has recently gone live as a partnership with Heights X Alpine Racing F1 and even supplying the England team this summer!