Why we don't do before-and-after photos

Every supplement brand in our category runs before-and-after photographs. We don't, and we're not going to. Here's the reasoning, because it isn't squeamishness.

They aren't a measurement

A before-and-after is two photographs taken twelve weeks apart, and almost everything that changes between them has nothing to do with the product.

Lighting from above versus lighting from the front. Standing a step closer. A different top. Tensing. Time of day. A slightly different angle at the hips. Any one of those changes the picture more than three months of consistent training does, and all of them are free.

Which means the format can't distinguish between a product that worked and a photographer who improved. If a measurement can't tell those apart, it isn't a measurement.

They shift what the product is for

The moment you put two bodies side by side, you've told the reader the point of the product is to stop being the first one.

That's a different pitch from the one we want to make. We're not selling a way out of your body. We're selling five grams of creatine to a woman who is already training and wants her working sets to move.

Those two propositions attract different customers. The first attracts people who'll buy once, feel bad, and not come back. The second attracts people who reorder for two years.

The honest commercial reason

We'd be lying if we said this was purely principle. Before-and-afters are also the most heavily restricted creative format in health advertising, they generate the most complaints, and they're the fastest route to an ad account restriction. Not using them is good business as well as good manners.

But the ordering matters. If they worked brilliantly and were merely risky, we'd still not run them, because of the second point above.

What we do instead

We ask for a number. Pick a lift, log it at week zero, log it every fortnight, look at the line at week twelve.

A number can't be lit differently. It can't be posed. If your hip thrust went from 60kg to 90kg then it went from 60kg to 90kg, and no amount of arguing about camera angles touches that.

It also doesn't require you to feel anything about your body to take part. You don't have to stand in front of a mirror in your underwear to write down what you lifted. For a lot of women that's the difference between joining in and quietly not.

That's the Strength Log, and it's the only transformation format we'll ever publish.

Strong, not skinny.