I started Vesper because I got tired of lying with my silence.
For seven years I worked behind a pharmacy counter in Rotterdam. People would come in clutching supplement bottles they'd ordered online — often expensive, often well-reviewed, almost always wrong. Under-dosed magnesium oxide for sleep. Gummies sweetened with sugar alcohols that triggered the exact digestive issues they were meant to fix. "Prenatal" vitamins with folic acid instead of folate, in amounts too low to matter.
I'd smile. I'd say "this won't hurt you." I'd watch them leave. And I'd go home and stew.
The supplement industry in 2018 was — and still is — a pharmacist's nightmare. Label claims aren't verified. "Clinical dose" means nothing legally. A company can put 25mg of an ingredient studied at 400mg on their label and call it the same thing. The worst part: the good ingredients exist. They're just not in the bottles customers are buying.
I wanted a shelf of supplements I could hand to my mother, my sister, a stranger — and be certain, clinically, that the dose on the label was the dose in the capsule and the dose that would actually do something. — on why Vesper exists
So in the winter of 2019 I rented a small compounding space above a bakery on Witte de Withstraat, bought a cGMP-certified encapsulator, and made one formula — magnesium glycinate, chelated, 400mg, third-party tested. I sold it to fourteen of my regular customers. Within a month they were asking for more things. Glycine. B-complex. A better prenatal.
Six years later there are eighty-two formulas and a team of four. We still test every batch. I still write every label. And every person who emails us asking for advice gets a real answer from a pharmacist — usually me, sometimes my colleague Elise who joined in 2023.
It's not scalable. That's the point.