David Friedeberg

Most supplement labels are a small act of theater. A "proprietary blend" hides the doses. A glossy claim outruns the science. David Friedeberg read those labels for ten years, looking for something he could give his own family without a footnote of doubt, and kept coming up empty. So in 2017 he stopped reading other people's labels and started writing his own. That company is OXOMIO, and its tagline reads like a dare: The Luxury of Wellness.

OXOMIO is a wellness and supplements brand that pairs what Friedeberg calls "the purest natural ingredients on Earth" with biotechnology, formulated in-house with medical experts. Synbiotic blends for the gut. Collagen complexes for skin. Multivitamins, prenatal options, and gender-specific kits. The product range is broad, but the organizing idea is narrow and stubborn: tell the truth about what is in the bottle, then make what is in the bottle worth telling the truth about.

To understand the obsession, start with the house he grew up in. His father is Pedro Friedeberg, the surrealist whose Hand Chair sits in design collections around the world. In that household, conjuring something from nothing was not a special occasion. It was Tuesday. "Realizing the impossible," as the company's own heritage page puts it, was simply ingrained. David inherited the appetite for making things, then pointed it at a less obviously poetic target: the inside of a capsule.

His route there was anything but linear. He started as a fine-art dealer, founding Friedeberg Fine Arts in 2003 and trading in paintings, sculpture, prints, and furniture. He managed operations at the restaurant Javier's, then served as COO at Carrera Brutal. He launched a venture called Miscrianti in 2015. Somewhere in the middle of all that he went to Harvard for an MBA, and later returned to school for a Global Executive MBA at INSEAD. The through-line is not an industry. It is a temperament that keeps collecting careers and refuses to sit still in any of them.

The turning point that became OXOMIO arrived in Japan. Traveling through the country's natural landscape and its tradition of medicinal plants left a mark, and gave Friedeberg both a sourcing standard and a personal motto: kenkou dai-ichi, 健康第一, health above everything else. It is not a slogan he keeps on a wall. He keeps it in his calendar. His day starts before 5:30 in the morning, a routine OXOMIO has happily documented for anyone who suspects the founder outsources his own wellness.

What separates OXOMIO from the shelf of competitors Friedeberg spent a decade distrusting is the map. The company sources proprietary ingredients across four corners of the planet: Phyto-C, GPM, and OptiMSM from North America; Peptan, AnaGain, Membraderm, and ExceptionHYAL Star from Europe; Superba Boost krill oil pulled from the waters off Antarctica; and Juvecol, KeraGEN-IV, and Lactospore from Asia and the Pacific. It is less a supply chain than a treasure hunt with a passport, organized around a single question Friedeberg keeps asking: where on Earth is the purest version of this?

He is candid about why he bothers. By his own account, the industry runs on a quiet trio of sins: cheap ingredients, hidden formulas, and labels that say more than they should. OXOMIO's pitch is the inverse. Be honest about the dose. Show the formula. Source like it matters. The "luxury" in The Luxury of Wellness is not gold foil on the box. It is the rarer luxury of being able to believe the box.

Today Friedeberg lives between San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and Austin, Texas, married, with a daughter and an Akita-inu, a Japanese breed that fits the rest of his sensibilities a little too neatly. He still keeps a hand in the art world through Friedeberg Fine Arts, and advises at Loyal VC. But the center of gravity is OXOMIO, the company he built because the one he wanted to buy from did not exist. The surrealist's son turned out to be a literalist about exactly one thing: what a label should be allowed to say.