Nutrition experts Jade Spooner and Amal Wakim have iced their journey from living on a couple hundred dollars a week to owning a multimillion-dollar business with a dream debut on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Asia Pacific list.
Best mates Ms Spooner, 28, and Ms Wakim, 29, co-founded fitness phenomenon Equalution in Sydney in 2016 after losing 50kg between them in the aftermath of quitting their IT jobs at Google.
Equalution offers personalised meal programs that combine healthy and favourite foods and an app that tracks nutrients consumed.
The idea for the app came to the pair when they achieved their weight loss, which they say came through a balanced diet of 80 per cent wholefoods and 20 per cent indulgence, within reason.
Last month, the duo were featured by Forbes in its 30 Under 30 (Asia Pacific) index under the category of Retail and E-commerce.
The nomination was influenced by the fact Equalution ranked No. 14 out of 50 companies last year for revenue growth over three years on Deloitte Technology’s Fast 50 Australia list.
During the past two years, Equalution’s revenue grew 987 per cent.
Ms Spooner, from Sydney, said she paid herself a $ 240 weekly wage in the first week of operation.
Now, Equalution is a multimillion-dollar business with several thousand clients globally.
Ms Spooner said the Forbes gong was a reward for the initial struggles.
“It’s such a massive honour to be recognised by Forbes in the competitive Asia Pacific Region,” she told NCA NewsWire.
“We have worked so hard, consistently, over a long period of time and never gave up on our vision.
“We did a lot of free transformations at the start which built our reputability and brand awareness.
“In the beginning, we paid ourselves a $ 240 wage each week. We’d work throughout the night, often 16-hour days, as we either had no staff or very few staff.
“That all makes the Forbes recognition so satisfying. It’s a reward for hard work.”
Ms Spooner said she was confident the idea would be successful as they had identified a gap in the nutrition space.
“Amal and I knew that it would have this sort of impact, when we first started no one else was doing what we wanted to do and there was also no mobile app that was able to facilitate flexible dieting as we had envisioned the user experience,” she said.
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