The Accidental Entrepreneur

How Detroit’s “hustler spirit” inspired a national brand of natural weight management products.
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Life Brand - Samia Gore, founder and CEO of Body Complete RX in Reston, Va., was born in Detroit and grew up on the west side. Her wellness and lifestyle brand has grossed more than $10 million over the last five years.
Life Brand – Samia Gore, founder and CEO of Body Complete RX in Reston, Va., was born in Detroit and grew up on the west side. Her wellness and lifestyle brand has grossed more than $10 million over the last five years. // Courtesy of Samia Gore

As the founder and CEO of the wellness brand Body Complete RX, Samia Gore is a successful entrepreneur. But she’s the first to admit it took longer than usual to decide that going into business for herself was the best, and only true option, for her.

“It’s funny,” Gore says. “I see a lot of stories about entrepreneurs, and they talk about their early childhood, where maybe they sold candy or had different little side hustles. But that’s not my story.”

Gore’s journey began in Detroit’s Sinai Hospital. “I was born there in 1981,” she says. “I spent many of my early years on Sussex at Six Mile Road, on the west side, where my grandparents lived in the early years of my life. And then my parents moved us to Canton Township, where I spent my middle school years.”

Gore’s parents had distinctly different careers. Her father is a singer and an entertainer who has performed with groups like the Four Tops and the Spinners, while her mother worked for the United States Postal Service for 34 years and retired as a manager.

By the time Gore finished middle school, the family had moved to Southfield, where she attended high school and had one distinct goal for her future career.

“I’d always grown up with a thought process of just going to corporate America,” she says. “Get your degrees and go in the corporate world, get a job, work that job, and grow up the ladder in that particular profession. And that’s what I actually did. I got my bachelor’s degree at Eastern Michigan University, and then I received my master’s degree from Central Michigan University.”

And Gore says she wasted no time getting on with her career.

“I started immediately,” she says. “As soon as I received my master’s degree, I started with the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs in 2006 as a human resources intern. I received a full-time position with the Department of Veteran Affairs and worked at the VA hospital in Ann Arbor for several years. Then I went to work at the VA headquarters in downtown Detroit for several more years.”

In 2010, Gore received a promotion and moved to Washington, D.C., where she worked at the VA’s headquarters as a training and development manager in human resources. She was already on the path she thought she desired — having a safe and comfortable career as one of the thousands of people working at a large government agency. At the same time, she was starting a family. And that’s when her well-planned and predictable career took an unforeseen and dramatic turn.

“After I had my fourth child in 2014, I picked up 80 pounds and weighed close to 300 pounds,” she reveals.

Determined to lose the weight, she searched for a solution across a new frontier.

“It was the early stages of social media,” she says. “Instagram was really just a space where people were sharing their daily lives, what they were eating or doing, with pictures or whatever. And I thought, hey, this social media platform might be a good way for me to share how I’m losing the mommy weight I picked up in my pregnancy, and also keep me accountable.”

Gore promptly launched her own Instagram page. “I called it ‘Transformer Mom,’ ” she says. “I went on this entire weight loss journey. And then when I lost probably about 40 pounds, I went on a mommy makeover journey.”

Gore’s “mommy makeover” involved considerably more than losing weight.

“I had a tummy tuck, a breast-lift — all of the things a woman might want to have after having four children,” she says. “But in 2014, plastic surgery was still kind of a secret, and some women care about things like that. I’m a very open person, so I started sharing information like where I was going to get the surgery, and whatever else I was doing. And it was wildly popular, because nobody was really sharing that information.”

Gore soon realized her audience wasn’t limited to women who just wanted to lose weight. Some of her followers were contemplating plastic surgery.

“All of the top surgeons around the world were my followers,” she says. “People began coming to me for advice and for recommendations, and who should they go to for the surgery? I grew an Instagram page to over 150,000 followers. It was just me sharing the experience of losing the weight, and then having the surgery for the mommy makeover.”

Soon, Gore couldn’t keep up with all the requests that kept pouring in.

“So, I wrote a book,” she says breezily. “I basically became the go-to person to ask for this kind of information, and instead of me responding to all of these comments or direct messages every day, (I thought), let me just write a book and explain exactly what I did and share the advice I would give to anyone who wants to do what I did.”

The book, “Plastica: Step by Step Guide to Plastic Surgery,” was published in 2016. But instead of simply answering questions, Gore was barraged by a fresh slew of queries from her followers, who wanted answers to problems she hadn’t anticipated.

“A lot of the people that were following me at that time needed to lose weight,” she says. “They were having these mommy makeovers, but they weren’t losing the weight before the surgery. So they were unhappy with the results they were receiving. And then, two years later, they would gain all the weight back and now they’re asking me, what did you do?”

Gore soon had the answer to that pressing question. “It wasn’t just about weight loss,” she says. “It wasn’t just about having a tummy tuck. It was about having a healthy life, right?”

Gore had already taken steps after her surgery to ensure she could keep the weight off. “I was using weight-loss supplements my doctor had prescribed for me. It helped me lose weight because it was really strong and basically just took away my appetite — but not in a healthy way, because I just wasn’t eating.”

Health Wealth - Body Complete RX recently debuted its weight management product line at The Vitamin Shoppe, which has 700-plus locations. // Courtesy of Nathan Bolster
Health Wealth – Body Complete RX recently debuted its weight management product line at The Vitamin Shoppe, which has 700-plus locations. // Courtesy of Nathan Bolster

Gore consulted a friend of hers, a nutritionist.

“I was telling her, I’m using these capsules my doctor gave to me, but I haven’t eaten all day,” she says, “and so what will that look like for me when I stop taking these capsules? I knew I was going to go crazy on food, and I thought, there has to be a better way to help me control my appetite with a product that’s not as harsh. And so we started talking about different plant-based ingredients that help with weight loss.”

Plant-based products comprise not only fruits and vegetables, but also nuts, seeds, oils, whole grains, legumes, and beans.

“These plant-based ingredients have been proven to help with weight management,” Gore says. “From there, I found a laboratory to create the first products, and that’s how Body Complete RX was born in 2017.”

It’s also how Gore’s career as a full-time government employee came to a screeching halt. “I retired from the VA to further pursue my own entrepreneurial goals,” she says, then drolly adds the key reason why that decision was a no-brainer: “At that time I was making my yearly salary on a monthly basis in my business.”

In the past five years, Gore’s wellness and lifestyle brand has grossed more than $10 million in sales. Last spring, Body Complete RX debuted its weight management products in The Vitamin Shoppe, the nationwide nutritional supplements retailer, and its 700-plus locations. With that announcement, Gore’s company became the first ever in the weight management category to be owned by a Black female.

“It’s a very big deal,” Gore says, proudly. “Currently, 99 percent of the founders and CEOs of supplement companies on the shelf are white men. So I always felt a little bit like an outsider in this industry, and still do.”

Gore, unsurprisingly, is undaunted by her circumstances, and she’s forging ahead with a unique marketing spin for her brand.

“It’s for everyone, with women of color in mind,” she says. “Heart disease and diabetes highly impact people of color. When we were making our protein formula, our nutritionist said we should put sweet potato and beet root in our protein formula. Why? Because beet root and sweet potato are plant-based ingredients that fight heart disease and also diabetes. So why not put them in a particular product that’s targeted to everyone, but with people of color in mind?

“And women of color notoriously have an iron deficiency,” Gore continues, “so when creating our multivitamin, we made sure to offer the right amount of iron to help not just myself, because I have an iron deficiency, but anyone who’s looking to improve their supplement intake and their iron. So we’re looking at everybody from an overall health aspect, not just one particular demographic.”

These days, the 41-year-old Gore lives in Virginia, near her company’s headquarters in Reston, but she still has strong connections to her home city.

“Oh, absolutely,” she says. “My grandmother still lives on Sussex, the street I lived on in my early years, and I’ll always credit Michigan and Detroit for my ability to hustle. Being a Detroiter, I know there’s a little string of hustler spirit running through all of us from there.  And I definitely attribute that to the grit I have and where I am now, pioneering this space for Black women.”

Gore says her hometown is very much in the plans she has for continuing to spread the word about her company and brand. “One of our goals is to go to different cities and states, and have people come out and experience a wellness day with Body Complete RX. Detroit is one of those cities, and we’re working on coordinating that.”

Gore also wants to personally connect with her home city in a more profound and enduring way.

“I want to give back in a lot of different ways, not just doing a pop-up, but also from an entrepreneurial standpoint,” she says. “I have my degrees from Eastern Michigan and Central Michigan, and I have dreams of being able to offer scholarships to young women who are looking to get into the entrepreneurial space. I know what it looks like to want to do something and maybe just not just have the funds to do it. These are things I hopefully can look to do in the future, and give back.”