Look at the two lines.

The lower line is what exists today: the things we use, buy, live with, or compromise for because they are the options available to us. The upper line is what we think could exist, our ideal state - and between the two is a GAP that we are usually quite capable of living with.

Until we know that the upper line is actually possible - not suspect, not hope, but know.

You sleep on a genuinely good mattress and your perfectly adequate old mattress suddenly doesn't feel quite so adequate. You drive a car with a reverse camera and then find yourself strangely inconvenienced by one without it. You use noise-cancelling headphones, discover really good coffee, or finally find a pair of shoes that fits you properly – and then you find that you can never go back to whatever you managed with, earlier.

Nothing about what you had before, has changed.

You have.

Once you have experienced the upper line, the gap between what you know is possible and what you continue to accept becomes much harder to ignore – it almost becomes a feeling of discomfort.

(Sometimes this plays out with people and friendships too.)

That discomfort has a name: cognitive dissonance.

Which rather conveniently also makes Cognitive Dissonance our Word of the Week.

And this is where it gets interesting for CHOSEN.

IN THIS LETTER

Why cognitive dissonance may have something to do with why we found each other.

Why knowing exactly which collagen you are taking matters.

One small decision I would like you to make with us.

What cognitive dissonance means to me as a founder in STEM.

For me, once I know that a product can be made better, it becomes extremely difficult to knowingly make the lesser version, even when that version may be perfectly acceptable by conventional standards. There is a difference between something being acceptable and knowing that it could have been better, and once I know the difference, I find it very difficult to ignore it.

But cognitive dissonance works on the other side of CHOSEN too.

If you are part of this community, chances are you came here with fairly high standards already. You want to know what you are putting on your skin or into your body, why it is there, whether the evidence holds up, and whether the product is actually worthy of becoming part of your everyday routine.

CHOSEN didn't give you those standards.

You brought them with you.

Our job is to meet them.

And once you find something that does, it becomes much harder to go back to something that asks you to compromise. Your expectations haven't become unreasonable; you simply now know that what you were looking for is possible.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons this community works.

You have high standards. We have high standards. And there is something very satisfying about finding each other.

On your side, those standards determine what you choose. On my side, they determine what we build.

Which brings me to something many of you have been waiting for.

TOR Prime went out of stock, and many of you have been asking us to bring it back. We did, a few days ago, with a community-first launch.

It also makes sense in today's conversation because collagen is one of those categories where plenty of options exist, but once you know what to look for, simply seeing the word collagen on the label isn't quite enough.

My questions are more specific. Which collagen is it? Has that exact collagen been studied in humans? What dose was studied? And are we giving you that same research grade option?

TOR Prime uses VERISOL® F, a named, fish-derived collagen peptide with its own placebo-controlled human trial, at 5 g a day, the same daily dose used in that study.

It isn't that collagen is difficult to find. It is that once you know what a proven collagen looks like, it becomes difficult to be satisfied with one where you cannot answer those questions.

There is that cognitive dissonance again.

And now that TOR Prime is back, there is one small decision we would like you to make with us.

One level scoop of TOR Prime gives you the 5 g daily dose, so naturally, you need a way to measure it accurately.

But do you need a new scoop with every unit?

Including one every time is convenient, particularly with your first TOR Prime. But once you already have one, the next one may simply become another scoop sitting in a drawer.

We want taking TOR Prime to be convenient, and we don't want correct measurement to become an extra step. At the same time, we don't want to keep sending you something you don't need simply because that is the usual way of doing it.

Perhaps this is also why cognitive dissonance feels so familiar to me as a founder in STEM, because the more you learn, the more clearly you can see the distance between what exists and what might actually be possible.

And R&D gives me a very practical way of dealing with that discomfort.

We can question a concentration, change a formulation, look for a better ingredient or delivery system, test again, change the format, or sometimes abandon an approach and start again.

There are two ways to close the gap in that graph. We can lower the standard until what exists feels good enough, or we can keep working on what exists until it gets closer to the standard.

As a founder in STEM, I am very fortunate that my work allows me to choose the second.

I don't have to make peace with the gap. I get to build into it, with you - together.

Warmly,

Dr. Renita Rajan