Founded | 2004
Headquarters | Draper, UT
Top Executive | David Schmidt, Founder & CEO
Product Category | Health and Wellness
Twenty years after launching a business based on his inventions, LifeWave Founder and CEO David Schmidt is still guided by an inventor’s heart. With 139 patents and counting, David has grown LifeWave from a patch company to a health technology company to its newest evolution—a life technology company with solutions for both people and planet. From its first products to last year’s record growth, LifeWave continues to be propelled by David’s passion for innovation, research and creativity.
An Inventor is Born
Standing in Thomas Edison’s lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey, young David Schmidt had his very own lightbulb moment. It could have been the spirit of invention in the air or being surrounded by Edison’s personal belongings and artifacts, but David knew that day that he would be an inventor.
“My parents and I went on this tour, and there was a fellow that worked there who had worked with Thomas Edison,” David recalled. “He picked me as a volunteer to press a button on this machine to make it run. When we left, I told my dad I wanted to be an inventor. I was so blown away by this laboratory—I could see my future. I started taking my father’s tools and my mother’s kitchen appliances apart to see how they worked. I invented for fun for most of my life. Then in my twenties, I joined an inventors’ club and won a few awards. That’s when I had the opportunity to start inventing professionally, I took it, and ended up where I am today.”
After college, David spent years developing inventions and building businesses, eventually attracting the attention and business of the US Navy. Tasked with improving energy and stamina for Navy SEALS who are often awake for days at a time on missions, David discovered a potential solution—an invention that would ultimately serve as the foundation for his LifeWave technology.
“I was asked to see what kind of technology I could create to improve the survivability of the crew for a mini sub,” he explained. “The SEALS were going on missions that were 30 hours, 60 hours long. What if we had a way of communicating with the body to tell the body to make more energy? The approach that I settled on was a new method of phototherapy; a new method of stimulating the skin with light where we could use light to communicate with the body and ask the body to create more energy. And, in this case, increase fat burning since we get more calories from burning fat than carbohydrates.”
David had invented a way to put light to work to maximize health, stimulating the body with low levels of light to trigger biochemical reactions at the cellular level. This new phototherapy technology—worn as a patch powered by the body’s heat—uses light to communicate to the cell, supporting certain biological responses specific to each patch, including the flow of cellular energy and the increased production of antioxidants and copper peptides that are critical for a host of wellness benefits.
“The benefit of elevating this peptide is pretty extraordinary,” he explained. “One of the things this peptide will do is reset 4,000 genes in the body to a younger, healthier state, and one of those genes is called P 63. This gene mobilizes stem cells. In other words, we put the patch on using only light; it causes an increase in this peptide; and, as a result, your body mobilizes stem cells.”
An Invention Evolves
While David had no previous direct selling experience, after sharing his new technology through traditional networking and seeing its power, his perspective changed. “I thought all of this happened because of networking. If we had a network marketing company that we could run properly, then I thought there was a huge opportunity.”
And he never looked back. LifeWave was launched with three products—one for improving energy, another for relieving discomfort and a third for improving sleep—all harnessing the power of light to stimulate the body’s healing power. But an inventor never sleeps, and a few years later, David was ready to evolve his company into something more. In 2006, he discovered a way to cause light to synthesize different peptides in the body, launching new products focused on anti-aging and performance. Then in the late two thousands, another evolution of LifeWave was introduced to the world.
“Over 10 years, we invested over $4 million into stem cells and regenerative medicine,” he shared. “That effort produced over 70 patents globally and one of the pieces of intellectual property was a new method of using light to activate stem cells. In 2018, when we went to market, that innovation completely changed the business profile for LifeWave. When we released that product, we began to see these incredibly dramatic testimonials and incredible results from our lab testing and clinical studies. As a result, we started to see growth year-over-year. So, in 2018, we did roughly about $23 million in sales. In 2019 we reached $63 million in sales, and, of course, last year we hit over $400 million in sales.”
Today, LifeWave is available in 80 countries, shared by the company’s 700,000 brand partners.
A Vision Expands
David’s dreams for LifeWave are bigger than ever before—and his dreams for the industry are just as powerful. He’s seen the impact direct sales can have for both customers and brand partners and is eager to share what lies ahead for LifeWave, as the company celebrates 20 years in the industry.
“There’s an opportunity for the network marketing industry to evolve into something much better than what it is today,” he said. “It’s taken us a long time to get here, but the formula that we’ve used is first to innovate, to create new technology that has an enormous amount of value for everyone and then to patent those innovations to protect them. When a brand partner gets involved with LifeWave, they know we have a technology that a competitor does not have.”
LifeWave’s technology offerings are set to change in a big way later this year, representing another evolution for the company. David shared that LifeWave is transitioning from a health technology company to a life technology company, with products in the pipeline that address agriculture, power generation and more. This major shift will allow LifeWave to provide light-based technology designed to improve quality of life with products that are good for the environment, sustainable and empowering to customers and brand partners.
“We’re going to dramatically expand beyond where we are today in the coming years. This vision covers about a ten year period, but because this year is our 20th anniversary, we are releasing a new technology that will pave the way for expanding the vision of the business. This new product offers a new way to provide light therapy for the body that doesn’t exist today.”
Whether he’s pioneering new technology or shifting the industry by leading LifeWave forward, David is excited about this new chapter.
“My life is amazing because of the brand partners that built the company. I get to invent for a living, which is what I wanted to do since I was eight years old. I owe our brand partners such an enormous debt of gratitude for taking this product out to market where it can help people. I’m incredibly excited about this new technology that we’re releasing later this year, and what that’s going to mean for the ability to transform lives for the better.”
From the July/August 2024 issue of Direct Selling News magazine.
