Why I'm Shutting SALIENTS (and ATHANASE) Down

There's no easy way to write this, so I'll just start.

After almost four years, I've made the decision to close SALIENTS. That means soon we will no longer accept orders, and we will no longer be producing ATHANASE®. 

How It Started

I founded SALIENTS and ATHANASE® in 2022. But it was never just about the product. I wanted SALIENTS to be a voice for men who feel invisible. We grow up hearing a lot about the problems men are supposedly responsible for in society, and less about the fact that men, quietly and in large numbers, are struggling. Higher suicide rates. Shorter life expectancy. Less likely to seek help, more likely to suffer alone. It's what some call the apex fallacy: judging an entire group by the men at the very top, the loudest or most powerful few, while ignoring the much larger number who are struggling underneath. I wanted this brand to speak to those men directly. I believe it's why the brand resonated so much with boxers in the UK, as the underdog story is a relatable one.

I brought experience from years in psychology, e-commerce, marketing and herbalism. I thought I knew what building a brand from scratch would take. In some ways I did. In other ways, nothing prepares you for it.

What Changed

For a while, it worked. There were strong months, real traction, a genuine community of subscribers was growing who believed in the product and brand as much as I did.

The turning point, if I'm honest, was the attempted launch in America. I invested real capital into expanding ATHANASE® into the US market, and it failed right at the point of launch, proving too costly to sustain. That single decision is what triggered the change from healthy profit to loss, not a slow drift, but one significant bet that didn't pay off.

Then, through 2025 and into 2026, the ground shifted under the UK side of the business too. Sales started declining, and at the exact same time, costs kept climbing. That combination, falling revenue and rising costs, at once, with no relief on either side, is about as hard a position as a small business can be in. There was no single villain in that story. Just a slow squeeze, month after month, until the numbers stopped making sense.

And then there was one more thing. One I didn't see coming, and couldn't have planned around.

The Machine That Switched Me Off

Running advertising campaigns was become the backbone of how SALIENTS reached people. And then, without warning, without a real explanation, and without a human being ever looking at my case, my personal account, the one tied to our advertising, was suspended by an automated system. No violation I could point to. No real appeal process that led anywhere. Just a machine deciding, in an instant, that access was over.

I won't name the company. I don't think I need to. Anyone who's tried to run a small business online in the last few years will recognise the feeling: increasingly, it isn't people at these tech companies making the calls that decide whether your business lives or dies. It's automated systems, trained to flag and shut down at scale, with little regard for the actual human and the actual livelihood on the other end of the decision. I lost the ability to advertise, overnight, with no one to appeal to and no way back in through the ordinary channels.

That was the final piece. Not the deciding factor on its own, but the moment it became clear that even the tools I needed to try and fight my way back from the US setback and the UK decline were no longer reliably in my control.

The Bigger Picture

I don't think this is just a story about one brand. I think it's a story about right now.

Unemployment is rising, and it's hitting younger people, especially graduates, hardest. There are more qualified, hungry, capable graduates than there are jobs for them to fill. At the same time, AI and automation aren't a distant threat anymore; they're already reducing the number of roles companies need to hire for, quietly and quickly, in ways that are still being underestimated. And it's not just jobs. It's the infrastructure small businesses depend on, increasingly run by automated systems making consequential decisions with no human in the loop. Fundamentally, it means that the 'pool' of customers with disposable income is reducing exponentially.

I built SALIENTS in a very different moment than the one we're in today. Customer acquisition costs have climbed. Consumer spending on discretionary health products has tightened. And an independent brand no longer even has reliable, human-accountable access to the platforms it needs to reach people.

None of this is an excuse. It's context. SALIENTS has its own specific list of what went wrong, the US bet chief among them, decisions I'd make differently with hindsight, risks I'd size differently now. But I'd be lying if I said the broader climate wasn't part of the honest answer to "why now."

It doesn't feel like the right environment to keep running this business. So I'm not going to keep running it just to say I didn't quit.

Losing Your Father - The Part That's Harder to Explain

There's one more piece to this, and it's the hardest to put into words.

Not long ago, I lost my father. And when something like that happens, it changes how you see everything. All the things that felt urgent before, the business, the setbacks, the pressure to keep pushing, they matter so much less. You start asking yourself what's actually worth the limited time and energy, and what you've just been carrying out of habit or stubbornness.

I won't pretend I have this fully figured out. But I know I need a fresh start. I need to cut out what's been stressing me for a long time, and give myself the space to rebuild from a place of calm. In a similar fashion, the idea for SALIENTS came after a 6 month break immediately after my facial paralysis. Sometimes you need to take a step back before you can go forward again. So who knows what I will come up with next.

Where Things Stand

We have roughly 3,000 units of ATHANASE® left in the UK. We won't be reordering. Over the coming weeks, I'll be making sure our existing subscribers, the people who've supported this from the start, get access to what's left, before we close the doors for good. Considering the rate of sales, it will likely be 3, maybe 4 months before we are out of stock for good.

What's Next

I'm not done building. I'm just done building this particular thing, in this particular way.

There's a version of me that wants to treat this as a defeat. I'm choosing not to. Every year of SALIENTS taught me something I couldn't have learned any other way, about products, about people, about how much harder this is than it looks from the outside, and about when to hold on versus when holding on stops being resilience and starts being stubbornness.

To anyone reading this who's watching their own business struggle against a market that feels harder than the one they started in, you're not imagining it. It is harder. That doesn't mean you failed. Sometimes it just means the season changed, and the honest thing to do is change with it.

Saj