Feel's Boris Hodakel on Vegan Collagen and the Gulf's Beauty-From-Within Bet
The Feel founder on building the world's first vegan collagen, a needle-free answer to GLP-1, and why Dubai has become his launchpad into the Middle East.
Boris Hodakel has been to Beautyworld Middle East three times, and each visit has been a bigger bet than the last. The first, three years ago, was reconnaissance with a British trade delegation. This year the founder of Feel came back with a Dubai office, a larger stand and a single hero product. "We're very serious about this region right now," he says. "Dubai [is] the launchpad for the Middle East, for most Western brands, to be honest. I think it's the right stepping stone."
Feel is a "beauty from within" brand, the London supplement company Hodakel started more than six years ago. It now runs around 20 products, but for the Gulf he narrowed the range to one category. "We felt that collagen is really booming," he says. "So we came here with just one product to be super focused on that."
Betting the stand on vegan collagen
That product is what Hodakel calls the world's first vegan collagen, and "world's most effective vegan collagen, according to five clinical studies." Vegan collagen has long sounded like a contradiction, since collagen by definition comes from animals. Feel's route around that is an ingredient called VeCollal. "It didn't exist four years ago," he says. "So we were the first ones to discover that there is a vegan collagen alternative, and we took it to market very, very quickly."
Alongside it sits the rest of Feel's catalogue, which Hodakel reels off as the UK's most-reviewed multivitamin, the UK's most-reviewed menopause supplement and Europe's first anti-cellulite supplement. About 12 of the 20 lines have already made the trip to Dubai.
A needle-free answer to GLP-1
The product drawing the most questions is Feel's metabolic booster, pitched as a supplement alternative to GLP-1 injections. Hodakel is careful about how he frames it. "There are ways to influence your body to produce the hormone more," he says. "It's a combination of nurturing your gut to tell your brain to produce more, or ingredients that tell your brain to produce more of that hormone. The effects are subtle, but the side effects are non-existent."
That is the pitch against the injectables: not speed, but safety. "You don't see overnight success. It is a routine," he says, contrasting it with the "saggy skin" and "reduced sensitivity to insulin" he associates with the drugs. "Some people just don't want to inject anything in their bodies, to be honest."
The effects are subtle, but the side effects are non-existent.
Clean science without the in-house lab
Feel's positioning rests on being science-led, but Hodakel is quick to say what that does not mean. "It would be wrong to say that we have a team of scientists in-house, because we're not Oxford University," he says. "We don't have these people on payroll." Instead the brand builds each product with an outside network of doctors, specialists and manufacturers on a project basis, or licenses an already-tested ingredient, as it did with VeCollal.
The discipline, he says, is in what Feel chooses to make. "We're all about science, and we take verticals where we can make a significant difference or we can be really knowledgeable about it." That rules out the commodity end of the shelf. "We focus more on what the goal is or what the routine should be, and we build products for that routine."
Why the Gulf, and why now
Feel is strong online in the UK, where, Hodakel says, "we would do as many sales per month as that retailer would do per year." The next chapter is physical: retail, pharmacy and grocery partnerships. "We're live on Deliveroo, we're about to go live on Spinneys, but pharmacies we've never touched," he says.
The wider bet is on the category itself. "Beauty from within is a fantastic category, because it's a shift from fixing from the outside to fixing from the inside," he says. He sees several tailwinds at once: "growth from a category, growth from the collagen segment, growth from the market, and we have channels to grow. So I think this is the place and time to be." He also finds the region easier to scale across than Europe. "Migrating from one region to another here is easier than going from Germany to France, Italy," he says, where "one blueprint doesn't apply to each country."
Defining a category rather than competing in one
Part of the appeal of Beautyworld is who is not there. "Supplements are not well-represented here," Hodakel says. The floor is dominated by fragrance, skincare and cosmetics. "We're not competing with anybody here that much, which is great. So I'm not coming back home worried."
He is candid that the trade-off is visibility against the "work of art" mega-stands around him, the ones with "lamps hanging down, projectors." His approach is to earn the bigger stand rather than front-load it: "come here, do the business, get some business, come back, bigger stand, more business."
The last word: clean label, and vegan that performs
Hodakel closes on the brand's core claim. "We are all about clean label," he says, meaning "supplements that we build for people who don't want to put anything else but the ingredients that they're looking for." And he wants to retire the idea that vegan means compromise. "Vegan these days doesn't mean niche, it means that it is highly effective as well," he says. "Being science first and vegan combines the efficacy and sustainability with the most effective ingredients in the world. It's not the cheapest brand, but if you understand supplements, you would understand the value of what we do."
For an industry watching the lines between cosmetics and nutrition blur, Feel is a useful signal of where beauty-from-within is heading: clinically framed, ethically positioned, and increasingly aimed at the Gulf shopper who is only just discovering the category.
Vegan these days doesn't mean niche, it means that it is highly effective as well.
Boris Hodakel is the founder of Feel, a London-based "beauty from within" supplement brand he started more than six years ago. He has grown the range to around 20 products, including what the company calls the world's first vegan collagen, built on the VeCollal ingredient. With a new office in Dubai, he is now expanding Feel from a largely online UK business into the Middle East, across retail, pharmacy and grocery.