Celliant is an ingredient added to material for multiple health benefits and Seth Casden is the CEO and co-founder of the company that’s bringing it to market. Sounds straightforward - but it’s been anything but.
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We're talking with Seth Casden, CEO and co-founder of Hologenics today. This company is a materials science company, think infrared and fabric combined. They develop products that they say amplify human potential. Their signature brand innovation is Celliant. In 2021, Hologenics was named to the Inc 5000 of the fastest growing privately held companies in the US for the third year in a row. An industry thought leader, triathlete, world traveler, Casden is a frequent speaker at industry conferences. He's been interviewed by and authored content for top tier media publications such as Forbes, Inc Magazine, Success, Fast Company, Thrive Global, and the list goes on. We will hear Seth's personal journey with Celliant today and how it transform his life and how he wants others to experience the same benefits.
We are Resilient Entrepreneurs, your go-to podcast for global business brilliance. We're Vicki and Laura, your co-hosts and the duo behind Two Four One Branding, dedicated to empowering new entrepreneurs like you. Today we're joined by Seth, who will share valuable insights, but before we dive in, a quick ask, hit that subscribe button, join our growing community. Together, we are making waves in the entrepreneurial world and a huge thank you for helping us to pass the 10,000 downloads mark.
Seth, a very, very warm welcome to the platform of Resilient Entrepreneurs.
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited for the show.
Thank you. We appreciate you coming here today. So let's start at the beginning because so much of who we become is shaped by our childhood experiences. So let's tap into yours a little bit. Can you tell us a bit of your journey, your youth, and maybe how that has shaped you into who you are today?
Absolutely, I love that question. And you're right, so much of our journey is based on our experiences and memories from when we were little ones. Like most boys, I loved playing outside, loved digging. My brother and I would make treasure maps, try and find the buried gold, look for dinosaur bones, and all that fun stuff. I really developed a passion for the earth and understanding geology and through that, realising that there are minerals in the ground that can really help us. We know about taking iron and other minerals, magnesium, to help our bodies, but there's also minerals that create energy and create infrared that can help our bodies as well. So that is a direct line from my childhood to what I'm doing now.
That's phenomenal. I don't think I've ever heard a story where there is such a direct correlation from then to the actual signature product that you've produced Seth. Please tell us about this fabric and how it all works. I'm fascinated.
Sure, it is fascinating. Infrared's becoming more and more widely understood and accepted. There are infrared saunas that have been around for a long time. Those are gaining in popularity and infrared is a wavelength of light that is just beyond visible, that when it's excited on the body, creates a whole host of physiological benefits. And what Celliant has done, what we've done at Hologenics is taken these minerals that you would use in an infrared sauna to create infrared and embedded them into textiles. And textiles for the most part start out as liquid, whether you're looking at polyester or nylon or a viscose, a cellulose, and we add our minerals inside at that point. And then when the yarn is extruded and the products are made, you have the minerals embedded into the garment or the product or the sheets, bedding, whatever the textile is used for, and it's powered by our body's heat. So we're all giving off about 100 watts of energy at any given time and that energy is absorbed by the minerals and the minerals naturally convert that to infrared and send it back into the body. And that's the genesis and the foundation of our science.
How long does it last? Does it get destroyed in the wash? How does this continually work? I'm so curious.
Well, that's a great question. It's a little bit like baking a cake. And if you think about once the cake is baked the ingredients stay in the cake, and so the minerals that are embedded in, don't leach out, they don't wash off and it lasts the life of the material and it can be laundered and used in any fashion the way a regular product would be. And there are other applications where it can be printed on and those have a useful life of the product, but most of our products are embedded and will last as long as you have the material, the efficacy doesn't get reduced over time or over washings.
Seth, apart from what might be an obvious benefit of general wellbeing, because as you mentioned, we do take magnesium and we're taking infrared saunas, so this makes sense at that level. What's your why? Why is it important for you to have this business super successful and let's say everybody wearing this clothing?
Sure, well, for me, it really drawn to how to improve our lives and how to perform at our best and there are so many things that were shown in society about how to be at our best, and a lot of that is geared towards having a better diet or having more exercise regime, get your 10,000 steps in, and we're always told we need sleep and better sleep. And our technology is something that's passive that supports all of those, regardless of what you're doing, it's going to help you be at your best without you doing anything other than just getting dressed or getting into bed at night the way you normally would. And so that was really exciting for me, being an amateur triathlete, getting the muscle soreness eliminated as fast as possible. And also when you're performing, if you can increase circulation of blood flow to our muscle group, that's going to help improve endurance, help improve strength. And really when you look at your body, it's at 37 C or 98.6, that's our core temperature, and so much of our energy is gone, going towards keeping and maintaining that homeostasis. And so using infrared as a source of energy for your body helps maintain that thermal regulation, and so I'm excited by all of that.
There's also medical applications that will require further research and study, but there's so many people out there that can benefit from having increased circulation and blood flow to any given area of the body.
Yeah, I want to talk about who this is really for? So who would you say is your main target market for this?
Going back to what I was saying, really anyone can benefit. There's products for babies, baby blankets, mattresses and then all the way up through as your body gets older and you get into the later stages of your life and you start getting aches and pains or knee or elbow and everything in between. And so we really see value for anybody that is looking to optimise their potential and be the best version of themselves.
So you mentioned that you are a triathlete also. Did that play into the development of this material? Or was it unrelated?
Well, I've always been interested and engaged in sports, played soccer from a very young age, and along the way would get my bumps and bruises and when I met the inventor of Celliant, I hadn't completed my first triathlon yet, but I saw the applications and the benefit. And really I got into triathlons later in life as a way to just have a great experience. I love the training and it's a great community of people and athletes that participate in those races. So it was a natural evolution of what we were doing with Celliant.
So you mentioned you met the inventor, tell us what this journey of Celliant and Hologenics has been. And we help entrepreneurs at the launch stage, so I'm curious to know what was the spark point? What led you to this point today?
Sure. Well, we've been doing this for almost 25 years. So it's been a long journey and it started with the usual entrepreneur spirit, a lot of excitement, a lot of energy and we really thought we had come across something that everyone would get behind and see the value, and when I met David Hornick, the inventor, we really had a kindred spirit in terms of working with small teams passionate about trying to make the world a better place and looking at how we could have some therapeutic modalities that would support traditional medicine and really have no harmful side effects. There's no downside to using Celliant and having Celliant be a part of your life. And so that combination of interest and passion led us on this journey and we've faced a lot of challenges along the way, but I think we've always been able to fall back and been grounded in our passion and belief in the science and the technology and we continue to build on it to this day, and it's really been an incredible journey.
Let's talk about some of those challenges, because if you've been in business for as long as you have, we all know that it comes with failures and missteps and accidents and all kinds of things along the journey. And often people, that's the thing that they worry about the most when they're starting up. What if I fail? What if I fall on my face? What if this whole thing is a disaster and I lose everything? So let's talk about failures and how you've overcome them in your business, because I think that can really help people who are stuck with moving on to the next phase. Do you have a good failure story you'd like to share?
Yes, there's been a lot along the way where I think, again, you have to have that resiliency, you have to really be clear of mind of why you're doing what you're doing and I think also your attitude around failure is so important. A lot of times people are very discouraged by a setback or what they might perceive as a failure. For me, I think my failure mindset is that that's really the only way to learn. I love the Thomas Edison quote that he didn't fail at making a light bulb 10,000 times, he found 10,000 ways not to make a light bulb. And I think another quote of his attributed to him is that ‘Giving up is our greatest weakness’. For me, I've never really wanted to give up or throw in the towel. I think I'm sort of challenged or emboldened when people tell me what I'm doing doesn't work or can't be true, it just makes me dig in harder and want to prove them wrong.The early challenges we had and failures were really around just how to make the product because adding minerals into the system of extruding yards is very challenging and they're actually designed and the machines are designed to remove particulates. And what we're adding is viewed as a contaminant by the supply chain, and so showing them that not only is it not a contaminant, but it's going to add value and to put our heads together and figure out a way to make the product work was really the biggest obstacle we needed to overcome. And it took probably over 10 years before we had a really commercially viable process with the hand feel that the consumer demands.
That is fascinating. And on that journey, Seth, you've raised over $10 million. You've established partnerships with leading brands like Under Armour. So tell us, tell us more about this journey.
Yeah, sure. And that's been a challenge. Being an ingredient brand is one that presents its own host of obstacles, if you will. The brands that build their products are so many components, and they have so many suppliers and their focus is on reducing costs, streamlining the process, and when you have a value add that's increasing cost and you want to be branded alongside them, that's a really challenging proposition. You have to really show the value that you create for their brand. Almost universally the brand that you're partnering with particularly in the beginning is more well known or recognised than our brand, and so the value isn't so much in the name as in what you're delivering. But consumers have gotten more sophisticated. They really are looking for true innovation, not gimmicks or just certain claims, but to actually have the science to back it up. So I think we really add a lot of value there and convincing Fortune 500 companies, you need the science, you need the testing and the validation. We now have 10 published studies. So I think that gives us legitimacy to speak from and to really provide a value that's significant and meaningful for the consumer.
Yeah, you said it took 10 years to come up with the viable product. What kept you going during that decade? That's a long time and I could see a lot of people wanting to give up. Did you get into a mindset of, that's it, I'm quitting, I'm going to go find a nine to five job and make my life easier? Did you ever get to that phase? Tell us what kept you going. I think that's the key there.
Yeah. During those 10 years in development, building out our testing, we were able to make socks and some products that are a little bit more forgiving in the manufacturing process. So the larger the fibre, the easier it is for us to add our components, but to be able to make the high end apparel shirts, like the Under Armour shirt I have on now, that really required getting down to about one micron, and a human hair is a hundred microns wide - so to give you an idea of the scale. And so during those 10 years or so, I think what kept me going was just an unflinching belief in what we were doing. The testimonials, the use cases, the letters we would receive from people of how the product changed their life, the products that we were able to make. We were able to make products for horses, and cats and dogs. And the stories we'd hear from their owners about how it benefited those animals where a lot of times we'd hear criticism that this is just a placebo effect. You tell someone it's going to help them and they think they're improved. But with animals, there's no placebo effect. So that really showed me just how incredible and how valuable this technology can be. There were times where I would set milestones if we haven't figured this out by such and such a date, and we didn't meet all of those, but the critical ones we were able to meet and we were able to deliver and that's really what allowed us to persevere and to keep going.
Yeah, I'm fascinated by your 25 year journey on this. It really is an epic journey. And I like to think of experiences or stories in the hero's journey framework, where there's always the hill to climb and then you're meeting your mentor and overcoming the challenges and slaying the dragon. So what would you say? There's two questions in there. I'll ask them both and you could decide how to respond. So first is, who is your mentor? Because there's going to be one, at least one along the way. And the other is, what dragon did you slay?
Sure, those are great questions. I've had a lot of great teachers and inspirational mentors along this journey, but the one that was there first for me, and I'd say had the biggest impact, was my high school English and Latin teacher, Dr. William Levy. He was such an extraordinary man who lived through so many changes in our society being born in the 1920s and growing up hearing stories from people born in the 19th century, and then living and participating in World War II and going through that experience and the friendships that he created along his journey, and then teaching at university level for 30 years and then sort of semi-retiring and deciding to see what impact he could have with younger children and teaching high school and junior high. The stories that he would relay with us and the wisdom through his anecdotes and his experiences.
He was really the first person in my life that wasn't always trying to give advice, and when you're young you have so many people that are telling you what you should be doing and how you should be doing it. And he really led me and encouraged me on a journey of self-discovery and taught me to ask questions of myself and to trust the answers, and to follow my passions and my beliefs and what I find to be true, regardless of what external noises and information I might be subjected to in my environment. And so that was really wonderful to hear on so many levels. He wasn't shy to criticise when I didn't give my best effort or sometimes those are our best mentors when they really call us out and challenge us when we're not at our best. I think one time I was talking in class when I shouldn't be and he said, “You know Seth, a D is not a passing grade”, and sort of announced my grade to the whole class and I was mortified and sought help with him. And I think I got that D pulled up to a B or so. That was a time I was particularly struggling at school. And it really left me with the, once I got over the embarrassment, that I'm going to do my best for this person and he's not going to accept anything less than that.
And I think the dragons that I've slayed really have been just my own obstacles, my own limitations, my own doubts. There's been companies that have told us they weren't going to work with us that have ended up coming back asking to work with us. Those are always great accomplishments and really validating to what we're doing. People telling us that we're not going to be able to make the product, but I always believe our biggest demons are the ones that we face in ourselves.
Yeah, we know that entrepreneurship is the best personal development course you'll ever go on in your life. Just by taking this journey, you have to deal with every side of yourself and learn and grow so much to be able to exist in this world of entrepreneurship because it is so challenging - I always say in all the best ways and I think it's quite a gift to be able to go on that journey. If someone could go back in a time, if you could go back in a time capsule and give yourself some advice for when you first started out on this journey in entrepreneurship, what would you like to tell yourself that might just make it a little bit easier?
I love that question. It's a little bit fanciful because so far we haven't invented a time machine, but it helps put things in perspective of what's important going forward. And I think for me, an entrepreneur is not a fallback vocation, people don't generally tend to do that as a last resort, it's usually because there's a passion, there's something they want to do, they have big dreams, they want to change the world. And that's a very daunting, can be lonely, scary journey and it certainly has been in my case. And I think what I continue to tell myself because we still face a lot of those same challenges, the problems usually just get bigger. My mom would say a little child, little problems, big child, big problems. And as the company grows, the problems can grow at magnitude. And I think the old adage don't sweat the small stuff is so important.
I think practising kindness to yourself is really critical, being able to not take yourself so seriously and still take your work seriously, but enjoy and learn to honour the ups and downs as much as you can and really be able to celebrate the small wins. A lot of times people discourage that because they say you haven't really accomplished anything, but it's all those small wins that add up. And at the end of the day, we need to follow our dreams and do what we love and believe in. And that's what really matters. And that's what sort of feeds into the resiliency and being able to push forward when people are telling you, you should give up because you have that strength and that conviction.
Thank you, Seth. So true. And do you believe you had this wisdom prior to this journey? Or has the journey developed that wisdom?
I think that we get aware or we become aware of certain things throughout life but then as we gain experience and age and wisdom, you understand things at a deeper level. So, my understanding of love when I'm an eight-year-old boy, it's going to be very different as a 50-year-old man. And all of those journeys that inform my understanding or my definitions or vocabulary are built on a series of experiences. I certainly didn't understand the way I do now and I probably couldn't have labelled a lot of what I was doing. I would have just said, oh, I'm doing what I think is right or I'm doing what I believe in. But as I've gotten older, I really understand the clarity that I had, even if I couldn't articulate it then, and the conviction and passion, I think, was not really evident at the time because I hadn't faced all of the challenges. I was just starting out. And so now, looking back 20 plus years, I realise wow, I've had all of these setbacks or challenges, but I'm still heading towards my true north and following my path and journey of what I believe to be true.
Yeah. And how important do you think that is? To follow your path and to follow your passion in order to reach success, however you define success.
I think without it, you're going to get sort of blown around, pushed around. There's nothing wrong with changing jobs and changing careers and realising midstream, you want to do something else. But if you don't have a real vision for what you're trying to, or what's meaningful to you. My job, Celliant, could have taken different, maybe paths or maybe been a different product, but fundamentally I wanted to do something that would help lift people up, help make the world a better place, help empower people, help people perform better. And this really checked a lot of those boxes. And I think without that, you're not going to have the fortitude and the determination to keep going because the challenges can become, at some point, seem insurmountable. There's a sort of saying, if I knew everything that was going to happen, I wouldn't have started in the first place. And you just kind of get in what you can carry, and so I think that's really foundational, important to have that.
And what you just described there to me sounds like a lot of resilience. So my question to you is where in this journey would you consider yourself to have had to be the most resilient? What's the most resilient point to date?
I don't want to cop out to that question, but I feel like there's been so many challenges along the way where they're all equal. If I gave up at any one of those points, we wouldn't be sitting here enjoying this experience. And so, we had a very long road in terms of validating our claims and really showing the world that the product works. I think that's been the fundamental biggest challenge. There's still people that think it's snake oil, it doesn't work, and there's other people that are convinced through their personal experiences absolutely that it works. So you're never going to convince everyone, there's always going to be doubters and sceptics. Some people are almost offended that you're telling them there's something so easy that they could improve by just putting on a shirt. They think that you must think that they're stupid, and so you're dealing with all kinds of prejudice and beliefs that people carry through childhood and in their lives. And for me, I just have to continue to know what I know to be true and trust and believe in that and sort of tune out the other noise. And at the same time, continue to answer valid questions and scepticism is good to have, we always appreciate a healthy sceptic because as they work through the science and they'll see how this works and why it works. And then those people usually become your strongest advocates. So, resiliency has been required pretty much every step of the way and it's still required. Going through COVID we had to downsize considerably. That was a challenge and now on the other side of that, people are looking more than ever for health and wellness and incorporating some form of support for their body. And so that actually became a silver lining for us. So we always try and see the positive and make lemonade from lemons whenever we get the opportunity.
That's great. I like exactly what you're saying there about the opportunities that are coming post-COVID, where mindsets around health and wellness have really increased. So people are seeking exactly what you have to solve their problems. So that's amazing. What's your big future vision for your business? Where do you really see yourself in the next, say, five, ten years?
I think for me, what I'm driving towards and what our company is driving towards is for people to be asking for this technology, maybe not by name for Celliant, but when they're looking for their bed or their sheets or clothing or even buying a car or flying on an aeroplane, oh, do you have infrared? Do you have Celliant? Right now, there's still such a massive undertaking of education and spreading awareness. For me, I think I'll feel that we've been successful when people will ask if there was a time where they didn't have infrared. Like I just thought that they always had it. I think that's really what I'm hoping, the world will adopt infrared as just something that's added to every textile that's made just as a way to help support and benefit our health and wellness.
And Seth, is your ingredient the only one in the game, the only one in the market? Or is this market now growing with competitors doing the same thing?
The market's growing, there are competitors. There's been other companies selling infrared materials for a long time. And so rising tides raise all boats. We're happy to see that people are validating what we're doing and that the science is real. It's always a challenge when you have something that's invisible to the eye, and we look for ways to show and create that user experience. And ultimately at the end of the day, people feel better and can lean into that. But, yes, there's always going to be people when they see success that want to come in and try and emulate that.
Yeah, it's natural, success leaves crumbs, right and people are going to pick them up and run with it. But I think you mentioned a good point in there about you were talking about the education aspect of business, especially a business like yours, how difficult that can be just to get people to understand the value of what you have and to understand what it can do for them. So other people, other competitors also educating the market, helps all. And I think that's an important point I want to bring to people's attention because as entrepreneurs, some of our biggest fears is that someone's going to steal my idea. Someone's going to copy what I do, someone's going to come along. So that mindset of other people coming along doing what I do actually helps us all grow is a little bit of a shift that most people don't get. So thank you for mentioning that. I do appreciate that. I think it's important for people to understand that point.
So, Seth, we would love to give you a break from the hot seat for a moment, because you've done such an amazing job, all conversation, and we're going to let you become the host for a minute and ask Vicki and I a question. So, if you're ready, we'd love to throw you out there and open the floor.
Sure, I'm going to ask a very self-serving question. What would it take to convince you that something you can't see or you may not feel, right when you put on actually works and is helping you? Is it studies? We want to see clinical data. Do you want to have a friend tell you that they tried it and it worked? What would make you believe that this is something that you should try and want to use?
Okay. So I will preface it by saying, I'm very aware that everybody experiences things differently and will believe, develop their own belief system differently. I'm aware that I'm the person who likes to see results. I'm a healthy sceptic, that gets in my way but I want to be able to prove it to myself. And so I would imagine that the best way to do that for me would be to be part of a trial where I was wearing an article of clothing in a structured trial over a period of time and I had a benchmark. I was told that it would help me with ABC and at the end of it helped me with ABC. After that, I'm a raving fan. I'm telling everybody I know, I'm trying to convince them. I'm buying them for Christmas presents. That's my M.O, that's how I operate in the world. But I would say that other people have very different ways of believing something. And as you mentioned Seth, some people need white papers, they need the scientists, they need to dig into the very fine details of how does this thing work? I need to understand it before I believe it.
So, that's me.
That's so good. Interesting. I'm very similar, I think, to Vicki. And it's so hard to remove the marketing hat and talk personally, because in marketing, we think that all of those things are important and the research and the testimonials and all of that layered on top of each other is what builds the trust for a business.
Personally, I'm a bit, I'm not the earliest of adopters. I'm not the one out seeking the latest, greatest thing that's just come out on the market but certainly as soon as it starts to pique interest, I'm one of those ones who like to be early. I do like to get on top of new things because I'm always interested and curious to try new things. So I would probably be looking for some research for something that's health benefit related. I don't want to just get sucked into a woo-woo because I don't want to be like the woo-woo guru, right? So I want to know that there's some research, there's some science, there's some real proof behind a product like this. But I think once I'm convinced of that, I think it'd be quite easy to want to be one of the earlier adopters and like, oh yeah, I need this product. And then like Vicki, I'd be the one telling others and sharing it because I do like to be in that space as well. I think that's a bit of just sort of being in this marketing world. I think that's kind of how we operate generally. So I think Vicki and I both have similar answers in that bit, but It's interesting and I see how it's a challenge with the invisibility of it all. How do you prove? How do you prove that it's not placebo? But why do we think placebo's bad? Not saying that it is, but I'm saying even is, there's some amazing parts to that too. So it's understanding science, I think would be the number one for me.
Yeah. And it does make me question this whole, as you were talking, I was thinking, yeah, an influencer definitely would not sway me. And then I started thinking about the marketing behind influencers. It's a fascinating science, possibly one for another conversation. But somebody who I admire and respect saying this is amazing, probably isn't going to sway me as much as other things, maybe a really close friend.
So, before we wrap up I'd love for you to list Seth, what some of the benefits are because clearly from this conversation I'm intrigued and I'm going to go to Under Armour and look for some Celliant written on their tags, powered by Celliant so what am I looking to resolve? What problem am I solving by wearing Celliant?
Sure. First, I just want to thank you both for your great answers. Those are the types of answers we come across. And, Laura, for your answer, we had one customer said, frankly, I don't care if it's a placebo effect or not, because if it still works, that's all that matters. And so, that's one end of the spectrum and it's an interesting point that you make. So luckily, we have both, I guess, a placebo effect from people trying it and it actually works.
As far as where to get it and what it can do for you, Under Armour is one of our premium global brands. Decathlon just launched in Europe for also athletic clothing. In Asia, we have Eon, which is Asia's largest retailer and in Australia we'll be launching with some brands soon. I know that's where you are as well.
The core benefit really is tied to increasing circulation. So when you increase circulation, there's so many benefits in the body and that helps offload other energy demands that the body might have. Recovery is when you're looking at lactic acid and eliminating it, the metabolic waste, that's a function of circulation. When you're trying to sleep, if you're too hot or you're too cold, thermoregulation helps bring your balance and bring your body into balance. And so really whatever spectrum your body is trying to move towards, if you're too cold, you increase circulation to bring heat to your extremities. If you're too hot, you increase circulation to bring heat away from your core. So, Celliant is going to help bring your body into balance, whatever direction it's trying to go towards. And there's a lot of people that are just looking for, who have cold hands, cold feet, it doesn't have to be a medical condition and just having an increase in circulation is going to help you feel more comfortable. If you sleep better, then you're going to have more energy. Fundamentally, at the end of the day we’re creating more energy for the body. We're putting energy into the body, just like you make vitamin D from sunlight, or plants make energy from photosynthesis. Having infrared onto the body, exposed onto the body, is going to help the body produce and have more energy. And that's going to be used for whatever you're doing that day, even if it's just sitting in a chair writing emails all day.
If anybody understands the need for more energy, it's entrepreneurs because we're the ones working 24 hours a day, brain constantly ticking, energy depleted, not getting enough sleep. We're the ones that need all the sophisticated tools like you're offering, Seth. This has been absolutely amazing, interesting. I am so intrigued. I want to learn more. So I'm going to be doing my research now. So thank you, Seth. We really appreciate your time today and your great advice for those who are looking to create that innovative new thing and how to continue with grit and resilience through what could be a decade long process of getting something to where it is. And then the years that come afterwards, it's not an easy journey. It's a very fulfilling journey. We can tell how passionate you are about it. You seem joyful and happy, which is always great to know that you can come through a journey like this with joy and happiness. And Seth, we just really so much appreciate your time today.
It's been my pleasure, thank you so much. Good luck to all the entrepreneurs out there. Stay with it. It is a great journey and very rewarding. It's a journey, not a destination.
And that's the perfect message to end on. Thanks, Seth.
