Why This CEO Rebuilt His Best-Selling Product Before Taking It to Target

For years, anyone who asked me about creatine got the same answer. Buy Creapure or Creavitalis and skip everything else. I take creatine every day. I’ve written about why you might want to as well, and I’ve worked in this industry long enough to know how often a label and a scoop disagree.

So when Jeff Byers told me Momentous had moved on from Creapure, I wanted to know why.

“Creapure is amazing,” the co-founder and CEO said, and he was quick to give it credit for the role it played in building Momentous. The change came from what the company calls The Momentous Standard: keep raising your own bar, even when you’re already at the top of the category. “We believed better can be done,” Byers said. That belief is what led to Signature Spec.

I helped launch Momentous more than five years ago, and I wrote about Byers last year when he had just pulled a product bringing in $500,000 a month because the science no longer held up. He has a habit of making expensive decisions. This one may be his biggest, because he made it in the same year he took the brand into Target.

That combination is why I think every founder building a trust-based brand should pay attention. Mass retail has a way of wearing premium brands down. Margins tighten, formulas get cheaper and the marketing gets louder than the product. Momentous is trying to scale without any of that happening. I’ve watched it from the inside, and the company’s approach deserves a close look.

Innovation can look boring

Creatine is one of the most studied supplements on the shelf, backed by more than 685 human clinical trials across ages, doses and durations of up to 14 years. Once a category’s science is settled, most brands compete on format, flavor and price. That’s how we ended up with creatine gummies, and with independent testing that found three of five popular gummies failed, one with less than 25% of the creatine on its label.

Byers went the other direction. “Innovation is quality. Innovation is sourcing,” he told me.

His team found a new manufacturer and wrote its own specification. The result, Signature Spec Creatine, is made in a facility to a 99.99% purity standard, with strict limits on heavy metals. It’s purified with reverse osmosis water filtration in place of the chemical wash common across the industry. It’s also screened for PFAS and microplastics, which standard certifications don’t require. Every batch moves through six stages of testing across four independent groups: Eurofins, Light Labs, NSF Certified for Sport and SuppCo.

As someone who takes creatine daily, I care about those contaminant limits. Anything you take every day for years deserves a higher bar than something you take once.

As a marketer, the line that stuck with me was about the business. Owning the spec, Byers said, “created a robustness in our business that we hadn’t had.” Buying a great branded ingredient means sharing control of quality and supply with a partner. Owning the spec puts both in your hands.

My advice to founders: If your product looks like a commodity on paper, look at the parts customers never see. Sourcing, testing and process take years and real money to build, which is exactly what makes them hard to copy. Investors should be looking there too.

Give every channel a job

Momentous landed on end caps in nearly 600 Target stores this summer, ahead of a rollout to every store in October. That came months after it entered more than 600 The Vitamin Shoppe locations. The timing lines up with Target’s own plans to grow its wellness assortment by 30% in 2026.

What struck me is how clearly Byers defines each retailer’s role. The Vitamin Shoppe carries 20 to 25 Momentous products and serves as the brand’s home base. “If Momentous had a retail location, it would be The Vitamin Shoppe,” he said. Target carries 12 products and is where new customers discover the brand for the first time.

I asked Byers whether anything changed for Target. The answer was no. The creatine on an end cap comes from the same lots sold to professional and college teams, and everything is still made domestically.

My advice to founders: Before you sign with a big-box retailer, decide what that channel is for. In my work with wellness brands heading into retail, the ones that struggle usually skipped this step and let the retailer decide their assortment for them. A discovery shelf should carry your most essential, easiest-to-understand products. A destination partner can carry the full story. If the margin only works when you water down the formula, the deal is wrong.

Simple is a strategy

When I asked which product might not survive the company’s next science review, Byers said none right now. Then he talked about flavor. The team is moving to real flavors and fewer ingredients, rebuilding its chocolate protein with just cocoa, and leaning on raw ingredients like vanilla bean and cinnamon. Its sleep formula was reformulated with magnesium threonate and now costs less.

The new launches follow the same thinking. Daily Hydration has 100mg of sodium and 50mg of potassium per serving, built for work, travel and light training. Most of us are already getting plenty of sodium, and research using national survey data found 90.7% of U.S. adults exceed the 2,300mg daily limit, while fewer than 2% get the recommended amount of potassium. Many popular electrolyte mixes were built for marathons and then marketed for desk days. Byers calls that overkill for everyday life. Momentous saves the heavier dose for Fuel, its drink for long, intense training.

The brand also recently launched a Pre-Workout powder that lists every ingredient and dose, with no proprietary blends, in a category known for hiding both. It pairs 150mg of caffeine with 300mg of L-theanine, a combination studied for focus without the jitters and it’s become a go-to for me.  

Then there’s fiber, the category Byers is most excited about. “Fiber feels like where we were with creatine three or four years ago,” he said. Consumers are thinking about long-term health, and he believes fiber is in its early innings. I agree, and I’d watch this space closely.

My advice to founders: Adding is easy. Cutting takes discipline. Every ingredient you remove is one less thing to source, explain and defend.

Trust is earned slowly

In January 2026, Momentous announced a multi-year partnership with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Byers described a three-year process in which Arnold’s team looked at suppliers, manufacturers and track record, and watched the company pull Fadogia and keep reformulating. “This was not about money,” Byers told me. “He would have picked somebody else.”

I’ve spent much of my career building partnerships between brands and the people who represent them. The ones that last look like this. The diligence runs both ways, and the decision rests on years of behavior.

Standards live in the team

Fast growth is usually where culture breaks, and Byers learned that firsthand. After an earlier merger, he spent six to nine months rebuilding a company that had lost its way.

“Teams ultimately build those standards or kill those standards,” he said. Momentous now has more red tape than ever, and Byers sees his job as protecting the scrappiness that got it here. “Don’t underestimate the values that you put in place.”

Momentous could have kept using one of the best creatines in the world, and no one would have questioned it. Byers and his co-founder, Erica Good, chose to raise their own bar instead, then put the result in front of millions of Target shoppers. Target will test whether Momentous can hold its standards at scale. After five years of watching this team make the expensive call, I’d bet on it.

For years, anyone who asked me about creatine got the same answer. Buy Creapure or Creavitalis and skip everything else. I take creatine every day. I’ve written about why you might want to as well, and I’ve worked in this industry long enough to know how often a label and a scoop disagree.

So when Jeff Byers told me Momentous had moved on from Creapure, I wanted to know why.

“Creapure is amazing,” the co-founder and CEO said, and he was quick to give it credit for the role it played in building Momentous. The change came from what the company calls The Momentous Standard: keep raising your own bar, even when you’re already at the top of the category. “We believed better can be done,” Byers said. That belief is what led to Signature Spec.