The founding story · Columbia, Missouri · 2015
How Ben Frederick, MD co-founded
Dr. Frederick’s Original
Two physicians started a company around the complaints medicine tends to treat as too small to bother with.
Begin the storyMedical training gives you a sharp sense of what is serious. It also gives you an unusually clear view of everything that is not — the long tail of ordinary physical complaints that never justify an appointment and never quite go away. Cracked heels. Blisters that ruin a trip. A trigger finger that catches every morning. Hands too stiff with arthritis to open a jar.
These conditions rarely reach a specialist. They are not dangerous, they are not interesting, and there is no clean reimbursement pathway for them. What existed to treat them was largely designed by people who had never had to explain the problem to a patient.
Benjamin Keith Frederick, MD finished his diagnostic radiology residency at the University of Missouri–Columbia in 2017, having earned his medical degree from Saint Louis University School of Medicine in 2012. But the company started before the residency ended.
From a clinical observation to a product company.
Two physicians, one company
Frederick co-founded Dr. Frederick’s Original with Peter Anaradian, MD, an emergency medicine physician. Frederick took the CEO role. The company was built in Columbia, Missouri, and remains there.
Clinical judgment as a filter
The physician background was most useful not for designing products but for choosing which problems were real, which existing solutions were failing, and — just as importantly — which claims the company would never make.
Built on the marketplaces
Rather than chase retail distribution first, the company grew where people already search for relief: Amazon, then Walmart.com, TikTok Shop, and its own store, plus health practices and boutiques.
Inc. Regionals: Midwest
Dr. Frederick’s Original was named to Inc.’s 2023 Regionals: Midwest list of the fastest-growing private companies in the region.
More than $65 million, cumulatively
The company reports more than $65 million in cumulative sales since 2015 and more than four million customers served to date.
Beyond the U.S.
The brand is live in the United Kingdom, with Germany in progress. It is an FDA-registered Class I medical device company.
The company is still the same argument.
That a physician’s most transferable skill is not treatment but triage — knowing which problem is worth attention, and being disciplined about what you claim you can do for it. Dr. Frederick’s Original operates under B&P Trading Company LLC, which Frederick also founded.