Building our Formulation Team

The journey to PILLAR Performance started alongside my professional rugby career.

I was amazed by the way Omega 3 fish oil and curcumin allowed me to carve out more years in my injury-ravaged career than anyone ever thought possible.

I saw the way professional sporting programs had limited access to the type of products they needed, formulations not made for purpose but rather to meet commercial outcomes.

This sent me down a long path of research, building my understanding of the industry, ingredients and manufacturing; identifying a glaring gap when it came to performance-focused micronutrition.

Detailed research on ingredients and formulations, countless peer reviewed journals, athletic performance studies and conversations with experts all followed as I immersed myself in micronutrition and its athletic benefit.

However, I knew my passion for micronutrition and my own personal research could only take me so far, and despite my lived experience in the professional sporting landscape, I knew I needed to work alongside the right sort of person and practitioner to build PILLAR’s inaugural offering.

Thanks to my existing connections in professional sport, I was able to seek out several of Australia’s leading performance experts from strength and conditioning coaches to physiotherapists, but most importantly sports dietitians.

After having conversations across the industry, I was recommended to speak with Pip Taylor – a former World No.1 triathlete and Chair of the AFL Sports Dietitians Association (SDA) amongst numerous other positions.

I quickly learned what a revered figure Pip was within the industry and professional sport more generally, and we immediately hit it off. We shared the same values on performance nutrition and the lack of education around micronutrition.

It was these conversations where the origins of PILLAR was born. Together we commenced the journey to formulate a sports micronutrition range to service elite athletes and trainers – based on the best sport science research and featuring the leading active ingredients from across the globe.

We went about building our Formulation Team, canvassing leading thinkers in the sport and performance space to help us build the ‘PILLARS’ of sports micronutrition for our opening launch range.

The PILLAR name and brand ethos were brought to life.

Pip’s innate understanding of performance and nutrition both individually and collectively have been instrumental in guiding the direction our opening range has taken.

Pip understands the importance of micronutrients in the overall nutrition puzzle and now works with our elite athletes to not only manage their overall nutrition, but also their micronutrition to ensure optimal performance across their annual calendar.

Pip has been integral to the establishment and direction of PILLAR’s opening offering and we are already working on exciting, new developments that we can’t wait to share with you.

- Damien Fitzpatrick, Founder, PILLAR Performance