Gloss Boss: Bon Charge’s Katie Mant on her secrets to success — and coming back from burnout
Meet the entrepreneur who founded the best-selling at-home light therapy wellness brand with her husband. She tells us what it really takes to stay well while running a global business
You can’t scroll through Instagram without seeing yet another famous face radiating red light from an LED therapy mask. But when Katie and Andy Mant, both 40, founded their home wellness tech business Bon Charge back in 2017, red light therapy was far from the beauty and wellness phenomenon it is now.
The British couple were working in recruitment and living Perth, Australia. Prepping for their wedding that June, they went on a joint health kick. “We weren’t exactly poster people for balance,” says Katie, “unless you count balancing long commutes to the city with takeaways and wine! Think corporate city office, long hours sitting at a desk, back-to-back calls, targets and lots of coffees.”
“We were both definitely in glow-up mode — I took ‘bridal bootcamp’ very seriously,” she remembers. Andy had experienced weight gain and chronic fatigue and was on his own health journey. After overhauling their diet and exercise routine, they still felt like something was missing, especially when it came to sleep, which was a challenge given their intense work schedules. This led them to research biohacking and to the discovery that sleep could be optimised, and the body’s sleep-wake ‘circadian’ rhythm supported, with blue light-blocking glasses that reduced evening exposure to artificial blue light from smartphones and TVs.
