Our Story
Two cousins. One kitchen bench. A brand built on a challenge.
Jake & Liam — Parramatta, NSW, 2024
It started the way most things in Australia do — outside, in the heat, with someone saying "mate, there has to be a better way."
Jake Hartley and Liam Voss grew up forty minutes apart in Western Sydney, but they spent every summer together at their grandparents' place in the Blue Mountains. Two kids who shared everything — cricket bats, surfboards, bad ideas — and one grandmother who made them drink a glass of water before they were allowed to do anything else.
"Before you go anywhere," she'd say, "drink first."
They thought it was annoying then. They understand it now.
The cousins took different roads into their twenties. Jake went into exercise physiology, working with elite athletes and weekend warriors trying to recover faster and perform better. Liam went into product design, spending years building brands for companies that made things people genuinely loved.
Two different worlds. One shared frustration.
Every time Jake recommended hydration to his clients, they came back with the same complaint. The tablets tasted like a chemistry lab. The sachets were fiddly and wasteful. The drinks were full of artificial colours that turned the water neon. Nothing felt premium. Nothing felt like something you'd actually want to be seen using.
"They all taste like a swimming pool," one client told him.
Jake laughed and called Liam that night.
"So make something better," Liam said.
Jake thought he was joking.
He wasn't.
Jake's kitchen bench, Parramatta — 11:30pm, February 2024
For eight months, they worked on it at Jake's kitchen bench in Parramatta. After his clients left. After Liam finished his day job. Evenings and weekends and early mornings before the Australian summer heat made the apartment unbearable.
They tested formulations. They argued about flavours. They sent tablets to friends across Sydney, Melbourne, and Auckland and asked them to be brutally honest. Most of the feedback was brutal. Some of it was useful. All of it made the product better.
The name came at 11:30pm on a Thursday in February 2024, during their fourth attempt at getting the Peach Glow formula right. Jake was staring at the ceiling, exhausted. Liam was sketching logo ideas on a notepad — trying different combinations of words. Wellness. Zen. Pure. Restore. He stopped at zen and zest and wrote the two together.
Zenyste.
Neither of them knew exactly what it meant. But it felt right. Premium without being pretentious. Calm without being boring. Australian in spirit even if the syllables didn't give it away.
"That's it," Jake said, without even looking up from the ceiling.
"Yeah," said Liam. "That's it."
The first 200 tubes were produced in early 2024. They sent them to friends, to Jake's clients, to a few wellness voices in Sydney, Melbourne, and Auckland who had small but genuinely engaged followings. They didn't pay anyone. They just sent the product and said be honest.
The response surprised them. Not because people liked it — they'd hoped people would like it. What surprised them was the language people used.
"It tastes clean."
"It doesn't feel like a supplement."
"It feels like something I'd actually buy at a pharmacy in Tokyo or a wellness store in Copenhagen."
That last one, from a Melbourne yoga teacher named Asha, became the unofficial brief for everything that followed.
The packaging came next. Liam spent three months on it. He wanted something minimal enough to sit on a bathroom shelf next to skincare. Something that felt considered rather than designed. The matte cream tube. The gradient colour bands. The Zenyste wordmark running vertically in warm terracotta. Nothing aggressive. Nothing shouting. Just clean and confident and honest.
Jake handled the formula with the same obsession. Real electrolytes. No artificial dyes. No fillers. Ingredients you could read without a chemistry degree. He wanted every tablet to taste like something made with care — not manufactured at scale by people who had never stopped to ask whether a hydration tablet could genuinely be premium.
The answer, it turned out, was yes.
Seven flavours. One standard. Ships to Australia & New Zealand.
ZENYSTE launched in mid-2024 with seven flavours and a simple proposition: daily hydration without compromise.
No PR agency. No marketing budget worth mentioning. Just a product they genuinely believed in, a brand that looked like nothing else in the hydration category, and two decades of being each other's most honest critics.
ZENYSTE ships to Australia and New Zealand. The warehouse is fifteen minutes from where Jake grew up in Western Sydney. Their grandmother still tells them to drink water before they go anywhere.
They still think it's slightly annoying.
They understand it now more than ever.
— Jake Hartley & Liam Voss
Co-founders, ZENYSTE
Parramatta, NSW, Australia