fourfive is a name that is now synonymous with CBD in the UK. One of the early success stories to emerge from the CBD boom, the brand’s clean and honest branding was pioneering in its departure from the hemp connotations and green leaf logos.
The brainchild of friends and international rugby stars George Kruis and Dominic Day, the name reflects the numbers on the shirts of the two players at the time. “We’re simple guys!” Kruis tells us. Simple as the name may be, the concept behind the brand was the result of necessity. “Both Dom and I had had operations at the beginning of 2018. At the same time, the World Anti Doping Association (WADA) took CBD off the banned substances list.”
Looking for a way back from injury without reliance on painkillers and pharmaceuticals, Kruis and Day wanted to find a healthier alternative. “As athletes, you are always looking for the 1 percenters and any way possible to legally get back playing. The rehab part of being a professional is a tough enough time. Dom had seen a fair amount of hype around CBD in the US and Canada. He bought some in England and we both found it had some great benefits to our recovery programmes. Although keen to get stuck into more CBD we had read a lot around the lack of testing and poor quality product so we decided to take things into our own hands.“
It was that need for testing that inspired the duo to explore their own path and create the UK’s first BSCG and Informed Sport tested CBD products. Brands that achieve BSCG certification have to undergo rigorous testing to ensure products they supply meet exacting Olympic standards; the risk of testing positive for even trace amounts of THC can be disastrous for professional sportspeople.
fourfive’s diligence to testing and quality has allowed the brand to flourish, partnering with leading high street retailers such as Boots and Next, and has even seen them become official wellness providers to a range of different professional sports clubs. These partnerships have led to the brand thinking about health and wellness as a whole, resulting in the recent release of a range of nutrients and vitamins. “Once we had felt comfortable with the level of testing and quality on our CBD range we decided to look into what else we had been taking as athletes throughout our career. We were genuinely shocked to find out the level of quality when we looked into the wellness products we had been taking,” says Kruis.
“We decided to look into what else we had been taking as athletes throughout our career. We were genuinely shocked to find out the level of quality…”
“As professional athletes, we had been expecting we were getting the best products. What we found were poorly formulated products that contained sweeteners, ingredients with poor absorption levels and countless situations where there were just enough minerals present to hit certain medical and marketing claims. For example, our multivitamins contain brown rice flour instead of chemical sweeteners and calcium ascorbate instead of calcium carbonate, aka chalk! As a result, we decided to change this outdated approach and made a range of wellness products with the quality and efficiency of absorption at the heart of it.”
So what does the future hold for a brand like fourfive? A firm focus on testing and quality seems to be central to all of the founder’s plans, with some new products in the pipeline too, Kruis tells us: “We will be continuing to look into products that our customers, retailer and professional clubs are pushing for. These will predominately be in the wellness sector and, as always, we will take the appropriate time and research to make wellness and CBD products that align with our main goal of creating high quality and effective products to help support people who are trying to live a healthy active lifestyle.”
Find fourfive’s whole product range at their website https://fourfive.com
