When Passion Leads To Purpose:: Alitura Naturals Founder Andy Hnilo

Sam, man. So I have to thank you all for showing up. I need all the practice I can get for doing this. I just. One of my mentors is Dave Asprey. He's also a business partner of mine, which I'll get to, but he's one of the best public speakers I've ever seen. And it's something that I love to do and got to work on it and get better at it. But for now, how you doing? I really just want to say thank you for showing up. And here's my story. So. March 20, 2011. I was hit by a westbound heading Land Rover just crossing the street as a pedestrian on Melrose in Los Angeles, California. I got hit into the eastbound lane and run over consecutively by a Toyota Tundra. I lost consciousness after the first point of impact. I had my clothes cut off me in the middle of the street. I kept the whole outfit just as a reminder to keep perspective. I'm smiling about it now, but I definitely wasn't smiling. When I woke up in an ICU bed with my chin protruding through the bottom of my mouth. I started talking. I was on a morphine drip. I had a friend of mine in the room who I thought everything was a joke, and I quickly found out that it wasn't. You know, it's just to look at yourself in the mirror for the first time in a traumatic accident like that. We had a. Not we. I say we. Everything's like my family, and it's just friends. And all the support I had is unbelievable. I still keep the notes. It's very, you know, just his perspective, that's what drives me. But waking up in an ICU bed and just realizing that your world is rocked is. It's a feeling I had never experienced before. I had a compound fracture where the resident maxillofacial surgeon at Cedars Sinai Hospital, he couldn't do the surgery. It was the worst compound fracture he said he'd ever seen. So we had to hire a private surgeon out of Beverly Hills. Luckily, we're right there where we had our selection and we finally got someone, I think, on Tuesday. This was a Saturday night. And then Tuesday we did the surgery. I had a titanium plate inserted up top and then one on bottom. I broke seven ribs. I had a collapsed lung. Very lucky to be alive. People don't survive accidents like that. So I had that perspective walking out of the hospital. One of my nurses was an ex Marine. He's like, hey, any day you can walk out of the hospital, that's a good day. So true. I didn't realize. I took that. I was kind of excited because clearly I'm here for something, some type of purpose. And so it was really weird. Even though I couldn't talk and my teeth were nubs, those were broken. These are all bonded in. My jaw was wired shut. And I was very insecure and uncomfortable with what I looked like. And I severed a nerve right here that communicates all function from the brain to this side of my face. And so I had to cheat. My smile just. I mean, everything from chewing to running to smiling to being insecure in a moment where you're supposed to be happy and laughing and to worry about, like, what people were thinking about why this face side of your face wasn't moving. It was unbelievable. I'm getting goosebumps right now thinking about it. But what it did is just. I was like, all right, how do I beat this thing? And so I just, you know, went to work. There's so much information out there available to us. And I just. I started studying spa treatments. And just one by one, it became my own little creative outlet. I didn't want to go out. You know, you go to the same grocery stores, like Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, and people see you and your jaws wired shut, your teeth are gone, and you have the same conversation over and over again about what happened. And I kind of. You know, I respect that. I mean, obviously, I understand that as well. I just kind of. I didn't. You know, made me feel uncomfortable. And so I just. What I did is I went to work, and at my house, I had my own little laptop, and I just started going, oh, rasul clay. Okay? I was already taking bentonite clay internally. And your skin being your largest organ, that's the whole idea. Alliter is Latin for feeding and nourishing. What you put on top of your body, on top of your skin, it's gonna be absorbed in your bloodstream within 26 seconds. So I bless my surgeon's heart. So I just didn't want to use the synthetic ingredients and products and things were counterproductive to regenerating cell turnover in the skin in the first place. It was full of fillers, full of toxins, parabens, steroids, and fragrance. I'm like, where's the active ingredients in there? So what I did was like, all right. Well, I just didn't trust the fact that possibly that was a paid clinical study. I know. I just. And also, I couldn't afford the products in the first place. So what I did is I Just found things like Manuka, honey, colostrum, pearl powder, chaga eye light, bentonite, clay, pearl powder. I mean, I just went to work and. And I became my own biggest science experiment. I lived in a small, single apartment in North Hollywood, California. And I just moved everything out of my bedroom into my living room. And in my little bedroom, my lab, I bought a mud mixer from Home Depot. And the same people who saw me in the ICU were blown away two weeks later because my jaw was still wired shut, obviously, and the scar end is still there, but the abrasions were gone. If I didn't start talking, you wouldn't really notice. And this is two weeks after a very traumatic accident where there was, you know, very big swelling, but you couldn't really tell if you didn't know me. I definitely could. Obviously, that's the only thing I was looking at the whole time. But it just. I was like, all right, well, I have something here. And the people were like, wait, what? Blown away. Like, what are you doing? I'm like, well, as hard as it was at the time to admit that I was, you know, making this mask and, like, this mask, I'm like, well, it's. You know, it was hard to explain, but it was just purely out of necessity to regenerate my skin and create as much circulation to the surface of my skin as possible. You know, that's the whole idea. Bringing blood flow to those stagnant capillaries, lightly exfoliating it with. Really. I mean, I was just. I became obsessed. You know, I mean, it's just. It's. When you're using things purely for yourself, you cut absolutely no corners. So I was. It came down to the particle size of eye light, pearl powder, little things you can just put in your hand. I mean, the sourcing was the fun part. I would go around. I mean, for my bentonite clay, I probably sourced four or five different companies. I would test them out. I would single them out and test them with water. I would isolate them and then. See. All right, well, this is one, I'm telling you. It was just like little granular, almost like a little grain of salt. But then you find one that's like silk. That's what we went with. And it went like that, from our kelp powder to our colostrum, our ascorbic acid, our pearl powder, ginseng, rasul clay, kaolin, and iolite. I mean, these are. It's like the final song that, like, makes a U2 album list, right? There were plenty of those that didn't make it. I mean, this is just my all star dream team. I mean, that's. We had a lot of ingredients that didn't make the cut, but that was the fun part of, you know, testing on myself and just seeing what worked and what didn't. And all I wanted was some type of activity, you know, all I wanted was some type of minimum, you know, minimizing my, my abrasions and swelling. But that's what that circulation did. It created over time and staying consistent with it. I was, I just, I didn't miss a day. I didn't miss a day with that. And then. So then that led to just like the moisturizing little potion that I was making, which is now my night cream. I would buy chunks of beeswax and cacao butter in a cast iron pan, add a little sea buckthorn chaga. You know, I just would experiment. I still have that. You know, bee products have an amazing antimicrobial property to them where they're their own preservative, basically. And so it's just. I still have that and I use that. We didn't bring it at the booth, but I'll bring it tomorrow. But it's just. It was never an intention to start a business. It was purely out of necessity to heal myself. And then I started. My beta testing was going and so my friends who saw me in the hospital and they fell in love with it and then they started telling their friends and word began to spread. I was going around LA with my little backpack. I was still working nighttime jobs, so I didn't have much time. Like, well, I had time during the day, but all I wanted before I went off to that is I would drop off a little. I'd mix it up my little bamboo bowl, lavender oil, apple cider vinegar, clary sage, lemongrass. And just all I wanted was some type of feedback because I knew I had something. But who? I mean, I didn't have a chemistry degree. All I had was just my own biggest example of like, recovery. And they knew those. So all it took was just that one little flicker of momentum to pour gas on that little ember that just turned into an inferno. So I just, yeah, I took that same detail and that I gave it away for about, I don't know, a year, year and a half, two years. It was just. It was a creation. You know, it's like making a meal. Like I said, it's just, you know, you never really ask for anything when you. It's purely for impact, purely out of love and I had something. It was a creative outlet for me, and I never thought of myself as a creative person at all. But it was just so fun to hear, like, people fall in love with something that you made out of your apartment. And I didn't. Sure, I researched it, but I just kind of made my own, like, colostrum I'd never seen used topically. Pearl powder. I'd never seen used topically. It was a gamble, too, because I was taking it internally to cleanse my kidney and my liver. And it's so expensive by the capsule, but I'm like, oh, pearl powder. It just sounded good, but then I found out how well it bonded with the other clays, the other extracts and things that I was using. I mean, I would isolate it and put it on little areas, and it was an undeniable, undeniable level of smoothness at the end. Pearl powder, water. So that's part of the isolation, seeing how it worked with ascorbic acid. And I just keep. Yeah, it's just just to see and feel some type of victory and result after that. I needed that. I was down and out and just to see my recovery speed up. And ultimately, I was in the entertainment industry at the time, and I booked a job for Macy's in Northern California. I didn't tell my agent. I made it my little goal to make that job, and I did. I was back on the Runway seven weeks later. And I got my wires out, they bonded my teeth white and cleaned my teeth that Thursday, and the job was on Saturday. So that was my little victory. You know, I needed anything at that point because everybody told me I'd never work again, do this. And I just kind of let that be my motivation. So I took that and just started to go with it. I was back in the industry, but I knew I had this thing, this product. It didn't have a name at all, but I had one person. What we would do is we would post on Facebook, like, hey, you know, just doing my thing here in my apartment, mixing it up, handshaking. My first sale didn't come about two years later because I couldn't charge anybody. I just felt bad. It was just purely for the love. So Mary Halls, bless her heart, from Alvarado Skin Institute in San Diego, was like, honey, what are you doing? What's this mask? I'm like, well, it's. And I just, you know, told her. She's like, no, I love it. Well, how about you come down here? She owned a med spa, and that was great. Complete. I was so nervous, I walked in there with one of those little clear containers from Whole Foods, Those little snapshot. I didn't know packaging, so wait till you hear this. So went in there and blended it, and it was way. It was very earthy. So we had to tone down the kelp powder. But she took it on as a. As a treatment. Still didn't have a name. That was a big victory because that's a pretty professional med spa that. That is using my product that I was still making out of my apartment. And so word, Word began to spread, and Dave Asprey reached out and had me on his podcast, Bulletproof Radio. And I was just going to talk about it. I'm such a fan. I troubleshoot his email address. Actually, I knew the info at Bulletproof, so I'm like, well, his name's Dave. So Dave. I went d. Asprey, David. Asprey, David. Like 10 different combinations. I copy pasted the same email, but I gave a before and after picture. I went, hey, man, love your products. Because I wanted to work for Bulletproof. I just love his ingredient, his attention to detail, and I wanted to work for Bulletproof. I'm like, hey, man, you changed my life. It really did. He gave me motivation. His products really helped me get up in the morning and feel better about myself. And that was all I was planning on doing. And then. So we had a killer podcast. It's episode 90 if you want to check it out. But the last five minutes, he's like, well, you said it was a video podcast. You said you had scars. I'm like, well, yeah, I did. He's like, what'd you do? And then, boom. It wasn't planned anything. I'm like, well, I made this. Made this mask. He's like, oh, you didn't tell me that. And didn't. I was like. He asked me. He's like, do you have a website? I'm sure my audience would like to know. I said it was under construction. Definitely wasn't under construction. Didn't have a name, nothing. But I knew I had to do something quickly because I gave out my personal email address to millions of people. So, I mean, every time I refresh my Yahoo browser, it was like a new 24. Like, hey, saying really nice things, but also wanting to know where they could buy the mask. And so I had to come up with a price, sign up for a PayPal account. Dave was getting the feedback too. So he reached out to me. He's like, hey, we gotta meet. Here we go. About a month And a half later we partnered up. I had a product on a bulletproof site. It's surreal, man. I mean I just have, you know, it's like a life goal accomplished. Now I have something. I've just wanted to have a job. You know, I want to have a. Didn't want to wait for the phone to ring. With modeling and acting and this is my absolute purpose. I'm helping people. There's like some type of impact to help people feel better about what they see in the mirror. I mean, that's it. I'm good, you know, and so I just, with every. So to the product side of things, it's just, I have a responsibility, just ingredient, just ultimate transparency. Everything in there is food. Everything has a purpose. I don't have the big corporate overhead so I can make my dream product every single time. Our night cream with two different plant derived stem cells. Colostrum K Factor 60, Manuka Honey in a double strain tea of camu Camu and schizandra. Then we add organic helichrysum hydrosol. You know many. You could spread those out into like 10 products and make oh for dry skin, normal skin, oily skin combination. I just, I. That's not how I do things. And we've. Here we are, we're about three. It'll be four years. June 26th. We're in 76 countries and we have 14 products. And I'm doing what I love and there's no more rewarding feeling than helping others. And I live for the feedback. I'm serious. I just live for the impact and the feedback. Thank you. I love what I do and I just, I wouldn't change a thing, you know, that accident rocked me right into my purpose and to be able to help people just feel better about what they see. I've had acne battled that in high school, so I get that. I had, you know, that unrecognizable feeling again after the accident. It's crippling. You don't want to leave that house. I mean, I know exactly how it is, so. And I just, it, you know, that's what drives me to help others, you know, feel better about themselves. And we work with Smile Train. That's something I really love. Smile Train out of New York. They have a sustainable method to repair cleft surgery or like the cleft lip right here. And so like when I wasn't able to smile and it was so insecure, like I'm not leaving them. I love working with them. They're beautiful people and it's a beautiful cause. And now I love what I do.