I do not do the company vs company thing. I worry about what we do, not what other companies do. I've gone out of my way to interact and ask people what ingredients and products that they want to see from us and already addressed very nicely in this thread - are we supposed to not use ingredients just because other companies do, even if they are ingredients that we were considering years before someone else used them?
In 2015, there was a product draft that that we were working on that had Eriobotrya Japonica and Rehmannaie Raddix in it. I had discussed it with several people at the time and a couple of contract manufacturers knew about it as well. We didn't move forward with the project at that time because a couple of the other ingredients that we wanted to use in it we couldn't source an extract that we were happy with at a reasonable price at that time. This was long before anyone was even thinking about KME. When we didn't move forward with it, did any of the people that knew about it say anything to BLR about them? No idea. Do I care? No, not at all. Why? Because they are great ingredients and I was glad that they offered them to people to use. Does that mean that we were never going to use them just because they did? Of course not. The industry would never evolve if that were the case; plus we put a lot of time back then into these ingredients; we were just looking for the perfect formulas to use them in. Note: I seriously doubt that anyone did tell BLR that we were looking into these back then, I think he just realized like we did that they are great ingredients. BUT even if they did, he was well within his rights to use them and I never said a word. (And I told one of the people that was upset about it that I had collaborated with on it to never publicly mention it bc it didn't matter, they were well within their rights to use them).