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"Be authentic and tell the truth. In the end, people buy from people they know, like, and trust. Trust is the one thing our industry doesn't have a lot of." - Dave Slagle, Founder of ICON
Dave grew up in Berkeley in the '70s, around parents who treated nutrition and supplements as normal, and spent his teenage years as a competitive powerlifter.
He landed his first supplement industry job almost by accident, hired at one of the earliest Whole Foods Markets in the early '90s because of his grocery background, not his health science degree.
Thirty years later, he's worked every link of the supplement supply chain, retail counter, raw materials, contract manufacturing, clinical trials, and now runs a nonprofit built to defend one ingredient… creatine.
His reason is blunt.
The industry is full of marketing puffery around creatine gummies, bars, and drinks with no public data proving the creatine survives heat, moisture, or shelf life, layered on top of decades-old myths that creatine is a steroid or causes weight gain.
So he partnered with an independent testing lab to certify batch-level purity, because he wasn't willing to accept purity claims he considered mathematically impossible without proof.
He calls himself an "ageless athlete," borrowing the term from a philosophy he says most people get backwards: health span and strength span matter more than lifespan, and America is good at keeping sick people alive but bad at keeping healthy people healthy.
"If you want a recurring customer base and a good reputation in this industry, be authentic. Tell the truth. You may not close every deal, but you'll build one that lasts."
