A View from the Top with Tej Lalvani, boss of Vitabiotics and Dragons’ Den star

The entrepreneur tells Andy Martin why he believes his products really work, how Vitabiotics stands out from their rivals and the secret to becoming a Dragon in the famous Den

(Vitabiotics)

Tej Lalvani is late for our meeting. In fact he had to jump out of his taxi and run from Oxford Circus to the Langham Hotel, arriving slightly out of breath.

“It’s lucky I took my vitamins this morning,” he says. He is a walking, talking, fit-looking 44-year-old advertisement for the power of Wellman and its maker Vitabiotics, which is the company he heads up when he’s not being a dragon on the BBC’s Dragons’ Den.

Lalvani may be a shrewd businessman, but he’s also very much a family guy. He pays due respect to his father, Professor Kartar Lalvani, a chemist born in India who got a PhD in micronutrients from Bonn and went on to found the company back in 1971.

According to legend, Lalvani Sr was sitting watching television one day when he suddenly piped up, “That’s the girl I want to marry!” The programme he was watching was Miss World and the woman he was pointing at so excitedly was Miss India – and the future Mrs Lalvani and mother of Tej.

The entrepreneurial spirit drove the young Lalvani to have his first business card printed when he was only eight. It said: Tej Lalvani, Scientist. “I used to mix up all sorts of potions and convince myself I had come up with a cure for mosquito bites,” says Lalvani.

He sold computer games at school in Bangalore and started off in the family business sticking labels on boxes and driving a forklift truck around the warehouse in Park Royal.

He came close to following in his father’s footsteps and studying medicine, but decided in the end to focus on business. But even if his business card has had to evolve, he still insists on the scientific side to selling vitamins. He objects to people making wild claims for their products. “We try to ensure that everything we say is backed up by science.”

Lalvani agrees that, in an ideal world, you would remain fit and healthy by virtue of eating (and drinking) all the right things and having the perfectly balanced diet. “But real life is hectic and imperfect and it’s difficult to get everything you need from food alone.” Vitabiotics offers to fill the gap between optimal wholesomeness and the reality principle.

Their big insight was to be condition-led. They came up with Visionace, a combination of vitamin A and antioxidants, which was shown to have an impact on dry-eye syndrome, a condition affecting eyesight (“limited benefits”, says an ophthalmologist friend – but I’d take that).

Lalvani says he has personal proof of its efficacy on the immune system. His wife Tara is a dental surgeon. “She used to get all these colds and flus,” he says. “Not surprising when you’re sticking your face in people’s mouths all day. Now she takes Immunace and she’s never sick. I think that’s why she married me.”

Lalvani is a great believer and can, I suspect, soften the hardest sceptic. “You know how tricky it is breeding in captivity?” he says. “There’s a gorilla at London Zoo. She couldn’t conceive. Then she took Pregnacare. And now she has a baby!”

In the wake of the change in the One Child policy, Vitabiotics has pushed Pregnacare in China. There could be a population explosion, but at least, providing they all take Perfectil (like Nicole Scherzinger on the poster), they should have perfect skin, hair, and nails.

I probably won’t be taking Pregnacare, but I admit I’m tempted by the fetching posters of David Gandy looking cool and swearing by Wellman. You don’t have to be a supermodel to want “health and vitality”. Lalvani says, “My mission is to help people feel better, look younger and live longer. But the main thing is to improve the quality of life.”

Vitabiotics have developed products for every stage of life. There is a Wellbaby and a Wellkid and a Wellteen (“for him” and “for her”). “Teenagers have the worst diet,” says Lalvani. “It’s been shown that those that took Wellteen improved their behaviour by 50 per cent.” He does agree that there is always a placebo effect. “A lot of our work is factoring out the placebo,” he says. “We only want trials that stand up in the medical community.”

They get emails from consumers, praising or blaming. Lalvani gets to see them all and will often reply personally. Which is one reason why he can legitimately claim to be an “indy” company in opposition to “big pharma” of the likes of Centrum and Seven Seas. A few years ago, Vitabiotics had 75 per cent of the market in fertility supplements. Then Centrum and Seven Seas blitzed the market. Now Vitabiotics has an 85 per cent share, going by Nielsen figures. Lalvani is particularly chuffed about that. “We did the research. We had the data. And we go into the medical community with our studies.”

Lalvani says he has to thank his wife for the gig on Dragons’ Den. When she heard the BBC was looking for a new dragon a couple of years ago, she was the one who called and put his name down. One of the would-be entrepreneurs Lalvani chose to back on the programme is James Dawson and his product, “TEA+”, a vitamin-enhanced tea. Lalvani has personally overseen the rebranding and the packaging and the distribution deals with Boots and Holland & Barrett. He pulls out his phone and shows me pics of the new design that he came up with. There is no mistaking the big plus sign.

Lalvani likes the fact that the programme has a lot of younger viewers. “I was in Dubai recently and this 14-year-old boy came up to me and said how much he loved the show. We’re living in a start-up culture. Kids are inspired by it.”

Now he is turning his attention to the huge online market, but he is not anticipating any easy wins.

“What worked two years ago doesn’t work now. Consumers are more discerning. There is more scepticism. You can’t just have someone on Instagram holding up your product – that won’t work anymore. You need to have an authentic voice.”