The Core Idea
Charlotte Dormon O'Sullivan spent seven years in pain with no answers. A doctor told her she would simply have to learn to live with it. She walked out, quit her job, and built a 20-year career helping the world's most purpose-driven health brands find their voice and reach the people who need them most — from Pukka Tea, which she helped grow until its acquisition by Unilever, to Ombar Chocolate, Marilyn Glenville, and Patrick Holford.
The conviction that drove that decision has never left. And it is exactly why she is so good at what she does.
One Moment in a Doctor's Surgery
It's 25 years ago. Charlotte is sitting in a doctor's surgery after seven years of undiagnosed pain. The doctor looks at her and says: you are going to have to just learn how to deal with pain.
She walked out.
Not in anger. In clarity. Because in that moment, she knew two things. First, that the system was broken — not because of bad people, but because of a system that had never been designed to actually solve the problem. And second, that she was going to do something about it.
"I walked out of there and I thought: this is so bad. I want to stop this happening to women. I just quit my job that day. I had no job to go to. I just knew what I wanted to do."
— Charlotte Dormon O'Sullivan
She had been working in above-the-line advertising in Covent Garden — cigarettes, alcohol, the full champagne-and-Rolex world she wanted nothing to do with. She'd been reading Marilyn Glenville and Patrick Holford, taking out stacks of health books from the library, going to the health food shop every lunch break to ask what each product did. The pull had been building for years. The doctor's surgery was just the moment it became a decision.
She did not have a plan. She had a conviction. And that conviction has driven everything since.
The Wall of Babies
When Charlotte eventually got to work with Marilyn Glenville — one of the UK's leading women's health experts, whose books had changed Charlotte's life — she walked into Marilyn's reception and saw something she has never forgotten.
A wall. About three metres long. Covered entirely in baby pictures.
She asked what they were.
"These are all the babies that weren't meant to happen," Marilyn told her.
Women who had had IVF seven times. Who had miscarried up to nine times. Who had remortgaged their houses trying everything the conventional system had to offer. And who had eventually found their way to Marilyn — and through nutrition, supplementation, and lifestyle, had gone on to have the healthy children they had been told they would never have.
Charlotte knew what she wanted to do with her career from that moment. Get this information out. Get it into newspapers. Get it in front of the women who were sitting in doctor's surgeries right now, being told the same thing she had been told. Because there was another way — and they deserved to know it existed.
A close friend of hers had a sister-in-law who had miscarried seven times. Early thirties. Young and healthy by every conventional measure. Charlotte sent her to Marilyn. She had a healthy baby. He's six or seven now. Happy, thriving, exactly where he should be.
That is what a PR campaign is, when you strip it down to its foundation. A story that reaches the right person at the right moment and changes what they do next. Charlotte has spent 20 years building those moments at scale.
What She Built
After seven years at Solgar — one of the most respected supplement brands in the UK — learning everything about nutrition, sales, marketing and PR, Charlotte built a career that reads like a map of the natural health industry's most important moments.
She helped Pukka Tea — founded by Sebastian Pole, an ayurvedic practitioner, and Tim Westwell — grow from a niche herbal tea company into a brand that Unilever eventually acquired. When Charlotte started working with them, herbal teas had a bad reputation. People thought they were revolting. Her job was to make them exciting — to get journalists to consider swapping a coffee for a herbal tea, and then to educate them on why it mattered. One story at a time.
She worked with Patrick Holford on books that changed how people understood the relationship between nutrition and mental health — omega-3, B vitamins, the basics that no GP was trained to recommend and that were making a quiet, profound difference in people's lives.
She helped bring Ombar Chocolate — dairy-free chocolate that actually tasted extraordinary — to people who had resigned themselves to missing out. She helped normalise gluten-free food when finding it at a train station was nearly impossible. She worked with brands building functional mushroom products, collagen supplements, and children's nutrition ranges — all of them founded by people who had experienced a problem, found a solution, and wanted the world to know about it.
And in every case, the reason it worked was the same. Charlotte could feel the difference between a founder who genuinely cared and one who didn't. She describes it like this:
"I get a feeling when I meet a founder of a brand. My whole heart starts to almost open. I can feel this coming from my chest — almost a slight high. It's like my soul knows this person is good. Their stories — they genuinely care."
— Charlotte Dormon O'Sullivan
That discernment — earned over two decades and thousands of conversations — is not something you can fake or fast-track. It is what makes Charlotte exceptional at what she does. And it is what makes the brands she works with exceptional too.
What Every Founder Can Take From This
Charlotte spent a significant part of our conversation walking through exactly what it takes to communicate a brand to the world. Not in theory — in practice, with specific examples drawn from 20 years in the field. Here is what stood out.
Your story is your most powerful asset. Journalists do not want products. They want stories. If you are the founder who experienced the problem your product solves, that is your lead. It is not background — it is the headline. Share it. Often. Unapologetically.
Build relationships with journalists before you need them. PR is gardening, not harvesting. You plant a seed in a journalist's mind — you share something interesting, you send a product, you introduce yourself — and that relationship grows slowly. When you have news, you want journalists who already know you, trust you, and want to write about you. You cannot build that overnight.
Case studies convert where press releases do not. The most powerful thing you can put in front of a journalist is a real person with a real story. A woman who was too tired to leave the house. A child who couldn't focus in school. A founder who couldn't find a single gluten-free meal at a train station. Find those people. Record their stories. That is the currency of earned media.
The biggest mistake is spending too much too soon. Charlotte has watched brands come in with investors, hire celebrities, do massive launches, go everywhere at once — and then disappear within two years because the money ran out and the results never came. Build patiently. The brands that last are the ones that take the time to get the foundations right.
Stay close to your customer. The brands Charlotte has seen fail after early success almost always share one thing in common: they got too big and lost touch with the people they were serving. Your customers are not a marketing segment. They are the reason the business exists. Stay in contact with them. Read their feedback. Let what they share keep shaping what you build.
Find the Thing That Lights You Up
Towards the end of our conversation, Charlotte said something that I think every person watching or listening to this show needs to hear.
She was working in advertising. She had a mortgage. She couldn't afford to walk away. So she worked weekends at a health food shop — for £5 an hour — just to be in the environment that excited her. Just to be around the products and the conversations and the ideas that made her feel alive. She wasn't doing it for the money. She was doing it to learn, and to follow the thing that wouldn't leave her alone.
"Find that thing that lights you up because that's going to be your moat. That passion — you just can't manufacture it."
— Charlotte Dormon O'Sullivan
She couldn't have known then that those Saturday shifts in a health food shop would lead to seven years at Solgar, to Marilyn Glenville, to Pukka Tea, to Ombar, to a 20-year career at the centre of one of the most important industries on earth. But she followed what excited her, even when she couldn't see where it was going. And it led her exactly where she needed to be.
That is not a motivational line. It is a strategic observation. The founders who build the most durable, most impactful businesses are almost always the ones who couldn't have done anything else. Their passion is not a nice-to-have. It is the competitive advantage no one can copy, the fuel that carries them through the years when nothing is working, and the authenticity that journalists and customers and partners can feel from across the room.
Charlotte felt it in a health food shop in London, asking a stranger what each bottle did.
The question for anyone building something right now is: where do you feel it?
Listen to the Full Conversation
Charlotte Dormon O'Sullivan is Episode 2 of Build For Good — a podcast for founders building businesses that matter. This conversation covers the doctor's surgery moment that changed everything, what 20 years of natural health PR actually looks like on the ground, how to tell a brand story that connects, and why the passion behind what you build is the one thing no competitor can ever copy.
🎧 Listen now at aaronosullivan.co
Visit Good Health PR: goodhealthpr.com