History of Puraz
Kiwi Warren Stirling founded Puraz back in 2004 and is still our sole owner and CEO. In his own words, he talks about how and why he started the business, and his plans for the future of Puraz.
In 1986, I founded Stirling Shearing Limited. The business was started with myself and one employee. Over 20 years this business grew to become one of the largest shearing contracting businesses in the Southland region shearing around 500,000 sheep annually and employing more than 60 staff. In 1998 we also purchased a coffee shop and in 2001 a café bar.
I was diagnosed with an aortic heart valve defect (of which I was born with) in 1996 and underwent open heart surgery to replace the defective valve with a mechanical valve. The recovery after open heart surgery and valve replacement can be a very long slow process and as a very active person and busy businessman I needed everything in my favor to get back to the fit and active person that I was. I became very interested in health supplement products to help my body cope day to day with this dramatic change and basically give it as much help as possible. After doing many hours of research on health supplements, I quickly came to the conclusion that there seemed to be a real lack of high-quality effective products available to the general public. I found the industry was dominated by products that contained active ingredients with little scientific evidence for efficacy and/or contained such small or inappropriate amounts of active ingredients, they simply couldn’t give people the results they were being promised.
By 2003, I was looking for a change and all three businesses we owned were sold that year. My wife Lynnette had an interest in the beauty industry and during a trip to the UK in late 2003 she came across a small company run by a cosmetic surgeon who was promoting collagen capsules for skin rejuvenation. She could see the true potential of collagen capsules in the fight against ageing skin. Around this time collagen supplements were a relatively new concept in helping to slow down the skin ageing process. In fact, there were only one or two other brands of collagen supplements available on the market worldwide at that time. We could immediately see a gap in the market, and hence why Puraz was born. We sourced the finest 100% pure collagen available to ensure these capsules were the most effective on the market. This philosophy at the early stage is still deeply ingrained in the company today.
The 100% Collagen product quickly became a household name and market leader in its category in New Zealand. The next few years were spent trying to keep up with growth as demand for the product went through the roof. From here, Puraz ventured into developing high quality effective health supplements that really made a difference. One area in particular was supplements for joint health issues, there just seemed to be a real lack of anything that was effective and the daily dosage of most products was too low to deliver any real benefit to the consumer. In 2007, we proceeded to do considerable research into an effective health supplement that would deliver a real difference to people with joint issues. After 2 years of research we knew we had come up with a product that delivers a real difference. PRO-d Joint Formula was launched onto the market in late 2009 and quickly became a huge success.
Our philosophy has always been to deliver high quality effective products to the market. During the past few years we have gone on to add more products to the supplement range always ensuring they contain the highest quality ingredients at the optimum daily dose to ensure they deliver a real difference to our customers. A key part of this quality focus has been the establishment of our own in-house manufacturing facility. Manufacturing our own products means we are in complete control of the manufacturing process and can guarantee quality of the finished product is at the very highest possible standard.
The future of Puraz is bright. Our focus is to continue adding to the Puraz range with high quality NZ made products and use natural NZ ingredients wherever possible. We will also continue pushing into overseas markets and increasing our global reach whilst keeping true to our roots and values here in NZ. We truly believe that our ethos is what sets us apart from our competition. It’s such a simple concept but it works. Give people honest health products that deliver real results and they will not only continue to use them, they will also tell all their friends and family how good they are.
Written by Warren Stirling
Founder, owner & CEO of Puraz
Find out why we call ourselves the collagen experts by visiting out About us page.