As he prepares for his Leaving Cert, Dundalk teen entrepreneur and Tavo Labs founder Tomi Olagbemiro has already cut his teeth in business with his LiquidCalm drink mix that hit No 1 in its category on Amazon.
Launched from his bedroom, Olagbemiro’s business Tavo Labs has developed a functional calming drink mix called LiquidCalm that he developed, manufactured, branded and brought to market all by himself.
Within weeks of launch the product went to number one in its category on Amazon Ireland with more than 300 five-star reviews and consistent weekly revenues. He plans to expand the business to Amazon UK, ushering in a market that is 15-times the size of Ireland’s.
“I believe if you care about something enough, you find a way to learn what you need to learn. That’s really how Tavo started.”
Olagbemiro’s achievement has landed him national media coverage and recognition online. Not bad going for a young person balancing exams, GAA and all the other pressures of being an 18 year-old.
That calming effect
Like all good entrepreneurs, Olagbemiro’s journey began with a problem.
“My friends were coming to me with crippling anxiety, crippling stress. They were going through these really hard days. And it’s like; what do you say to your friend when they’re in that place? I never knew what to say. You just have to comfort them. But I kept thinking, what if I actually could help further?”
This is where the idea for LiquidCalm arrived. “The functional wellness drink market is worth over €280 billion globally and it’s one of the fastest growing consumer categories in the world. In Ireland and the UK specifically, there are very few homegrown brands competing at a serious level. I think that’s a real opportunity and I think Irish consumers deserve better than importing everything from the US or UK.”
Olagbemiro began researching how products get manufactured, how supply chains work, how Amazon advertising functions. He built a Shopify store, he contacted manufacturers and went down a rabbit hole but kept going.
A strong response from customers spurred Olagbemiro to make a point of contacting every customer personally through TikTok and Amazon.
LiquidCalm is a functional calming drink mix. You add one sachet to water, mix it and drink it. Within about thirty minutes, most people feel the difference.
“But I think describing it as just a drink mix undersells what it actually does. I feel like the best way I can explain it is this; most people by the time evening comes around are still running. Still processing everything from the day. The emails, the arguments, the mental load of just existing in 2026. Their nervous system never got the signal to stand down. And they end up lying in bed scrolling, or waking up tired, or snapping at people they love for no reason they can explain.”
Olagbemiro says that LiquidCalm addresses this physiologically. “The formula contains Ashwagadha, Vitamin D, L-Theanine at 400mg (double what most competitors use) Magnesium Glycinate. Every ingredient at a proper clinical dose. Not token amounts on a label. Actual doses that do what they’re supposed to do.
The product is not a sleeping aid in the conventional sense. “It is not melatonin. It doesn’t knock you out. It doesn’t sedate you. You can drink it at 9pm and fall asleep better. You can drink it at 4pm and nothing sedating happens, just the noise reducing, the cortisol dropping, the feeling of coming back to yourself.
“That last part is what our customers actually describe. Not that they slept better – though they do. One customer told us she laughed properly for the first time in months about two weeks in. Her kids noticed before she did. That’s what LiquidCalm does. It gives people enough space in their own nervous system that the real version of themselves can surface again.”
Portrait of an entrepreneur
What began as a search for answers for people close to him who were struggling with anxiety and stress, manifested in a business opportunity and a product that is already attracting rave reviews.
Olagbemiro says that two more products are also in development: Klarity, a daytime hydration and cognitive clarity drink; and Koffee by Tavo, a nootropic coffee. “The idea is that together they cover how you feel across the day.”
He says that observing his mother run her business inspired him to want to be an entrepreneur from the age of eight.
“My brother was building businesses in tech. So the idea of creating something yourself never really seemed impossible in our house. It just felt like something possible.
“When my friends started coming to me with their anxiety and their stress, I knew I wanted to do something real about it. Not just words. I started researching how products actually get manufactured – it became this rabbit hole. And I just kept going deeper. I contacted manufacturers, I figured out the supply chain, I taught myself Amazon advertising, I built the Shopify store. I did everything myself. As best as I could.
“I believe if you care about something enough, you find a way to learn what you need to learn. That’s really how Tavo started.”
The next generation of entrepreneurs
If there are more young people like Olagbemiro who are emboldened to start businesses, this bodes well for Ireland. He agrees and believes there’s no reason why businesses should not start, scale and grow globally from these shores.
“I feel like Ireland has real entrepreneurial energy that doesn’t always get the credit it deserves. People here build things. People here take risks. But I think there’s still this quiet assumption, especially among young people, that if you want to build something serious, you go somewhere else. London. New York. Sydney.
“I’m asking my friends where they want to go in the future and maybe three people in my whole year will say they want to stay in Ireland. That actually worries me. And I understand it, the housing, the costs, the feeling that the opportunities are elsewhere. I get it.
“But I believe that’s changing. And I think the internet removed geography as a barrier for e-commerce businesses a long time ago. I built Tavo from Dundalk. Our customers are across every county in Ireland. We’re expanding to the UK and then across Europe. None of that required me to be anywhere else.
“I want Tavo to be Ireland-first – not because I’m being sentimental about it, but because this is where my whole life has been. This is where my whole life is. Why would I take it elsewhere when I can build it here and show others they can too?”
Olagbemiro says that Tavo Labs is fully bootstrapped and is generating consistent weekly revenues on Amazon Ireland.
“I think there’s something really important about proving the model works first before you bring in outside investment. It forces discipline. Every decision.
“I’m not ruling out the right relationship in the future – but right now the priority is Amazon UK, which is 15 times the size of the Irish market. That’s the next step and it doesn’t require external funding to get there.”
Some of the hardest lessons in business that Olagbemiro has had to learn are the basics.
“Inventory. I learned that one the hard way. When a product is selling well, the instinct is to focus on sales. But running out of stock on Amazon is one of the most damaging things that can happen, you lose your ranking, you lose momentum and you basically hand customers to competitors. It cost real revenue and it was entirely avoidable. I won’t make that mistake again.
“The other thing, and I feel like this is less obvious, is that the brand matters as much as the product. A great formula that nobody actually wants to be seen with won’t grow. I spent a lot of time this year rebuilding the packaging, the brand story, the whole mythology behind Tavo. Not because the product wasn’t working. Because I want to build something that lasts longer than one product cycle.
“I think the biggest lesson overall is just to write everything down. Every decision you make early about what your brand stands for, what it will never compromise on, who your customer really is – those things compound. If they only exist in your head, they get lost.”
Olagbemiro’s advice for fellow founders is to believe in yourself. “I know everyone says that but I genuinely mean it in a specific way. You are capped by what you believe. You’ll never build a billion-euro business if you think it’s only going to be a million. You’ll never help a billion people if you think you can only help a million. The belief has to come first.
Second – don’t care what people think. Six months ago I was nervous about going to press. What if my teachers saw it? What if my friends thought it was weird? But I have a story. I’m 17, I’m building a business, I’m helping people. Why wouldn’t I want to share that and maybe inspire someone else? The moment I stopped caring about that, everything moved faster.
Third — use what you have. Use your story. We all have social media and it’s easier than ever to build something visible from nothing. You don’t need investment, you don’t need a team, you don’t need to be in Dublin or London. You need a product you believe in and the conviction to keep going when it’s hard.
“And stay in Ireland. Build here. Give back to your culture and your country. The market is smaller but the story is better, the community is real and the opportunity to be genuinely first is higher than almost anywhere else.”
Key tools that Olagbemiro employed to get to market included Amazon Seller Central and the Advertising Console for sales and campaign management, Shopify for direct-to-consumer sales, Klaviyo for email marketing and Google Sheets for tracking outreach and team workflows.
AI, he says, comes in handy for document creation, finance and data analysis.
“As a solo founder managing multiple workstreams while doing the Leaving Cert, the tools that remove friction are the ones that matter. Anything that lets me move faster without losing quality stays. Everything else goes.
“I think those tools are important but I think the tool that matters the most is my mind. Especially in the world of AI, we like to think that AI can replace everything and we’re all at risk. But I genuinely think there’s one thing that AI cannot replace; human connection. And that’s what I want Tavo to pioneer in; we build a real connection with all our customers.”
Olagbemiro’s instinct to help people by making something has reaped unexpected insights.
“The first time a customer reached out to me – someone I didn’t know, someone from somewhere in Ireland who had found the product and tried it – she sent me what I can only describe as a 400 word essay. About how her anxiety had stopped her going outside. About her cortisol levels. About how she’d laughed for the first time in months. Real, specific, human things that I couldn’t have imagined when I was sitting in my room in Dundalk trying to figure out how to help my friends.
“I was over the moon. I was out of this world honestly.
“Because I built this for people I love. And suddenly here were people I’d never met telling me it had changed their lives.”
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