While many Americans were enjoying Independence Day barbecues and fireworks, Ryan Gresh ’09 (ENG) was hunkered down in a conference room at UConn Farmington’s Technology Incubation Program (TIP) building. A day earlier, the Natural Pain Cream and Sports Recovery Lotion produced by his holistic health start-up, The Feel Good Lab, had been featured on a segment of Good Morning America.
Orders were pouring in, leaving Gresh and his small team scrambling to get merchandise packed up and ready to ship out on Monday.
“We were getting 20 calls an hour and hundreds of emails,” says Gresh, founder and CEO of The Feel Good Lab. “We almost sold out.”
The path to producing over-the-counter pain relief products, and recent rush of success, was neither straight nor easy for Gresh. The 37-year-old grew up in Ellington and seemed destined to become a pharmacist like his grandfather, father, and uncles.
But Gresh decided to take a different route. After watching his father’s disillusionment over the proliferation of opioids for the treatment of pain, he broke with tradition – and out of the family business – to study mechanical engineering at UConn.
Gresh’s first taste of entrepreneurship was through a senior design project he did at UConn. The program offered engineering students the opportunity to take MBA courses in the School of Business and create their own product. The all-terrain wheelchair developed by Gresh and his partners won funding, a patent, and a competition at Yale, but the second they hit obstacles, his partners gave up.
Gresh spent the next decade in the aerospace industry, working jobs at Sikorsky, Pratt & Whitney, and later consulting, but still yearned for an entrepreneurial endeavor. A fateful conversation at dinner one night with his father and younger brother helped crystalize an idea for one.
After selling his pharmacy business in 1999, his father, Gene Gresh, opened a compounding pharmacy and functional medical practice. Partnering with doctors and other healthcare providers, he worked to diagnose the source of a patient’s pain and makes custom compounds tailored for their individual needs. Listening to his dad talk about developing a remedy for one such patient, suddenly changed the way he saw the pharmacy profession.
“If you can have that much of an impact on a person’s life, it made me think it was a worthy pursuit,” Gresh said. “I always wanted to be an entrepreneur and work with my family on things I could create. I realized it was all right in front of me my whole life.”
After dabbling in it as a side business for two years, Ryan Gresh launched The Feel Good Lab in 2016 and quit his work in engineering to run it full-time. His team currently consists of two pharmacists, his dad and younger brother Michael, and four summer interns. The company is part of TIP, the state’s largest tech incubator, offered through Technology Commercialization Services.
In the early years, Gresh and his partner at the time sold their plant-based products mostly on Amazon, a decision that taught them some painful lessons. Shortly after quitting their jobs, and raising a glass to their new venture, Amazon accidentally banned the product.
Six weeks later they got back on the site, shaken but more aware of the importance of a diverse sales strategy. More setbacks followed, but unlike the all-terrain wheelchair venture in college, Gresh dug in and kept pushing this time. When QVC told them the network was getting out of OTC product marketing, Gresh persisted for over a year until QVC relented.
“We fought and they gave us a shot,” he says. “We didn’t just succeed: we reinvigorated the category. Now I’ve been on QVC almost 30 times.”
The Feel Good Lab is one of the few soft science ventures based at TIP. Being in the same building as start-ups bringing cancer drugs, home diagnostic technology, and veterinary medications to market, has been good thing for his company, Gresh says.
“When you walk people through here, they can see into the different labs and companies working toward different goals”, he says. “Some of them are developing lifesaving treatments. Some of my fellow entrepreneurs here have even become investors.”
Being based at UConn has also provided networking opportunities that have fueled the company’s growth. One such connection was with UConn basketball player Cam Spencer. The fan-favorite Husky liked the product so much that, after being drafted into the NBA, he invested in The Feel Good Lab.
But for Gresh, helping people doesn’t stop at customers. He serves on the advisory board for UConn’s Connecticut Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and volunteers as a mentor for NetWerx, a signature program offered by the Peter J. Werth Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
Gresh is still pinching himself at being featured on GMA. The exposure, he says, will help the company rely less on investors. This time, however, he knows better than to start popping champagne corks. Not making a big deal about the wins makes it easier to endure the losses, he says.
“Being an entrepreneur is hard,” says Gresh. “But when you do something that you are really passionate about, nothing deters you. Building up that resilience and perseverance is so important.”
Gresh is always interested in connecting with the UConn community and others looking to network. You can find him on LinkedIn or email him at ryan@thefeelgoodlab.com.
