What Jade found on the other side of burnout wasn’t a prescription or a caffeine fix. It was fungi.

Jade N. Williams was burned out. Not the kind of tired that a good night’s sleep fixes, but the deeper kind where she was mentally drained, emotionally depleted, and running on fumes in a world that kept asking for more. As a graphic designer with eight years of experience and a parallel life as a signed model in New York City, she was no stranger to high performance. But, sometimes, high performance has a cost.

Then she discovered functional mushrooms, a category of adaptogenic superfoods that have been used for vitality and healing for thousands of years. For Jade, they were lifechanging. And so she did what entrepreneurs do and she started building.

What came of it was Medula, a functional mushroom supplement brand anchored by its flagship product, Focus + Energy Gummies, formulated with Lion’s Mane, Reishi, and Cordyceps. Vegan, gluten-free, caffeine-free, and made with USDA Certified Organic, USA-grown mushrooms. Clean on the outside and backed by science on the inside.

“Medula was born out of chaos,” Williams writes on the brand’s website. “A journey to find balance in an overstimulated world.”

Jade is, by her own description, a self-proclaimed nerd. Someone who loves science as much as she loves aesthetics. With a background in branding and a career in fashion modeling, she was uniquely positioned to build something that sits at the intersection of elegance and evidence. Medula’s identity reflects exactly that. Clean design, purposeful formulation, and a visual language borrowed from the fashion and beauty worlds she knows intimately.

Her faith is also woven into the brand’s DNA. Jade describes her path to mental clarity as deeply personal and spiritually grounded, a belief that nature’s intelligence and intentional living go hand in hand. Medula’s tagline says it simply: “It starts in the mind.”

She sources with intention, too. Medula’s mushroom powders are full-spectrum, featuring both mycelium and fruiting bodies, and are steam-activated to ensure optimal absorption. The brand partners with growers who have over 30 years of experience in the space. No fillers. No shortcuts.

The global functional mushroom market is projected to grow from roughly $35 billion in 2025 to over $76 billion by 2033 (Yahoo! Finance), driven by rising consumer demand for natural, adaptogenic, and science-backed wellness solutions. In North America specifically, the supplements segment is expanding at a compound annual growth rate of over 15%, fueled by a generation of health-conscious consumers who are increasingly skeptical of synthetic alternatives and drawn to clean-label products.

Lion’s Mane, one of Medula’s three core mushrooms, has emerged as one of the most studied nootropics of the decade, with research pointing to its potential role in supporting nerve growth factor production, cognitive function, and mental clarity.

Cordyceps, long associated with endurance and energy in traditional Chinese medicine, is increasingly showing up in pre-workout formulations and productivity supplements. Reishi, the most widely recognized of the three, is associated with stress modulation and immune support.

These aren’t fringe wellness ingredients anymore. They are moving into the mainstream, and gummies are one of the fastest growing delivery formats leading that shift. Jade saw this coming. Or, perhaps more accurately, she lived it before the market caught up.

What distinguishes Medula in the wellness space is its positioning. Many functional mushroom brands lean hard into the clinical, sterile packaging, scientific jargon, and supplements that feel like medicine. Others lean so far into lifestyle branding that the product becomes secondary. Medula lives somewhere in the middle, bridging science and aesthetics in one.

Jade brings a visual sophistication to the brand that reflects her modeling career and design background. It’s the kind of aesthetic sensibility that makes Medula feel at home on a nightstand or a vanity, not just a medicine cabinet. At the same time, she grounds every product decision in sourcing integrity and formulation science. It’s truly the brand she needed and couldn’t find.

There is a quiet but important story embedded in what Jade is building.

Functional wellness, and the broader adaptogens market, has been a space where the knowledge, the products, and the profits flowed away from the communities who often needed them most. Black women, in particular, carry disproportionate burdens of stress, burnout, and the physical tolls of overextension. And yet the wellness industry has historically catered to a narrow demographic.

Founders like Jade are changing that. By building brands that center intentional living, and doing so with the cultural fluency and aesthetic intelligence that speaks directly to women who look like her. And for a founder who built her brand out of her own season of chaos, that message lands with earned authority.