Who Is Asma Ishaq?

The woman who grew up in supplement trade shows with her biochemist father, created the world’s most clinically studied liquid collagen supplement, built a billion-dollar category from scratch as a single mother — and now leads Shaklee’s exclusive Liquid BioCell Collagen division worldwide.

Shop Liquid BioCell  ·  Official Shaklee NZ Ambassador  ·  May 2026

There is a particular kind of knowledge that cannot be acquired in a classroom. It comes from being in rooms where ideas are being tested, products are being pitched, and the future of an industry is being quietly argued over — and it comes from being there young enough that it shapes the way you see the world for the rest of your life.

Asma Ishaq has that kind of knowledge. She has had it since she was a toddler.

Part One: A Biochemist’s Daughter — Southern California in the 1980s

Growing up in Southern California in the 1980s, Asma Ishaq spent her childhood in an unusual world. Her father was a bench chemist — a hands-on formulation scientist — at a dietary supplement manufacturing company in San Clemente, California. Long before Asma could articulate what a nutraceutical was, she was already living inside the industry that would define her career.

As a toddler, her father would bring home products from the lab: supplements, functional foods, experimental formulas. He would let his daughter try them, explain what was in them, and describe the process of how raw research became something a person could hold in their hand. Asma later described the effect this had on her with disarming precision:

As a teenager, the education deepened. Her father began taking Asma with him to the nutrition industry’s trade fairs and product roadshows — the same events she attends today as a global CEO and industry pioneer. She walked the exhibition halls, watched suppliers pitch ingredients, observed how formulators and brand builders talked to each other, and absorbed the cadence of an industry that was just beginning to understand its own potential. While other teenagers were at the mall, Asma Ishaq was at trade shows learning to read a supplement panel.

The seeds were planted early. The harvest would take another two decades.

Part Two: Berkeley, Rice, BlackRock — Building a Foundation

Asma earned her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley — one of the most demanding academic environments in the United States. She then pursued a dual MBA in finance and marketing from Rice University’s Jones School of Business, graduating in 2002 as a Ben F. Love Scholar, one of the school’s most distinguished academic honours.

Her fellow students remembered her as someone who would not simply follow the prescribed path. Sean O. Ferguson, who later became Associate Dean at the Asia School of Business at MIT Sloan, recalled: “Asma is an impact-oriented, unconventional thinking, hands-on, anti-status-quo professional who embodies so many of the defining qualities of an entrepreneur. In her first year, Asma would always challenge me and the other second year MBA leaders to think outside of the box.”

After Rice, she took a role at BlackRock, Inc. — the world’s largest asset manager — gaining financial rigour and a sharp understanding of capital markets. She also worked at Give Something Back®, a social-enterprise office supply company committed to donating profits to non-profits, which cemented an early conviction that business could be structured around a triple bottom line: people, planet, and profit.

She then joined BioCell Technology as Executive Vice President of Marketing, working directly with the team behind what would become the most scientifically credentialled collagen ingredient in the world. It was at BioCell Technology that everything she had absorbed since childhood — the formulation science from her father’s lab, the market intelligence from the trade show floors, the financial discipline from BlackRock — came together into a single, clear vision.

She could see what the market could not yet see: that the future of beauty was ingestible.

Part Three: 2009 — The Leap of Faith

In 2009, Asma Ishaq left the security of an executive role and did something that, by any conventional measure, was a significant risk. She co-founded Jusuru International — a new company built entirely around a product called Liquid BioCell®, a multi-patented liquid collagen and hyaluronic acid supplement that she had developed and believed in completely.

She was a single mother at the time. The stakes were entirely personal.

That first bottle was the beginning of what would become an entirely new category of human nutrition. Jusuru, she later said, was “a case study in pure sweat equity” — built without outside capital, growing organically by keeping costs ruthlessly tight, refusing to expand internationally before the foundation was solid, and trusting that the product’s science would do the work that marketing alone could never do.

The community distribution model — people who used the product sharing it with people they trusted — was the vehicle. The clinical science was the engine.

Part Four: Liquid BioCell® — The Science That Changed an Industry

To understand why Asma Ishaq’s work mattered so much, it helps to understand what Liquid BioCell actually is — and why it was genuinely different from everything that came before it.

Before Liquid BioCell, the collagen supplement market was dominated by basic collagen powders: usually Type I collagen from bovine or marine sources, hydrolysed into peptides, and delivered with little clinical evidence of efficacy. These products supported skin but offered limited joint benefits, and most lacked any rigorous human clinical trial data. The category had a credibility problem.

Liquid BioCell was built on a fundamentally different scientific foundation. At its core is BioCell Collagen® — a naturally occurring matrix of three compounds that work together the way they exist in the human body: Type II hydrolysed collagen (70%), hyaluronic acid (10%), and chondroitin sulfate (20%). This is not a blend of separately sourced ingredients. It is a single-source matrix derived from chicken sternal cartilage, which naturally contains all three components in proportions that closely mirror human articular cartilage.

The matrix then undergoes a patented Bio-Optimised™ manufacturing process that produces molecules of the ideal weight for absorption — not just hydrolysed, but optimised at the molecular level. The result is the Collagen/HA Matrix® Technology: the first formula ever to combine these three components in a bio-mimetic matrix, backed by multiple U.S. and international patents, and validated by seven human clinical trials including double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled studies.

The clinical evidence is specific and striking:

• Measurable improvement in joint comfort and physical activity after 8 weeks*
• Up to 6,000% increase in hyaluronic acid levels in the body within 28–90 days*
• 76% reduction in skin dryness and scaling without topical moisturiser, at 12 weeks*
• Clinically demonstrated reduction in hyaluronidase — the enzyme that accelerates skin ageing*
• Greater stimulation of chondrocyte activity (cartilage cell regeneration) compared to other collagen types*

What Asma Ishaq pioneered was not just a product. She pioneered a category — the ingestible collagen and hyaluronic acid market. As she and the teams at Jusuru and later Modere brought Liquid BioCell to market, the entire beauty industry began to understand that the future of skin and joint health was not topical. It was nutritional. It was inside-out. It was ingestible.

The global collagen supplement market, which was a niche category in 2009, is today projected to be worth tens of billions of dollars. Asma Ishaq was among the architects of that market.

Part Five: Jusuru to Modere — Building the Empire

By 2017, Jusuru International had grown from a zero-capital start-up into a significant business with an internationally recognised product, a loyal ambassador community, and clinical credibility that no competitor had matched. In February 2017, Jusuru was acquired by Modere — a global, clean-lifestyle brand with products in 44 international markets.

Asma did not simply hand over the keys. She led Jusuru through the acquisition, managed the integration, and less than twelve months later, in January 2018, was appointed CEO of Modere itself.

The pace of what followed was remarkable. Under Asma’s leadership, Modere:

• Ranked #3 on the Inc. 50 Fastest Growing Women-Led Companies list in 2020
• Reached #1 on that same list in 2021 — the fastest growing women-led company in America
• Was named one of Newsweek’s 100 Most Loved Workplaces in 2021
• Earned Asma the CEO Forum’s Transformational CEO 2021 award in e-commerce and health & beauty
• Earned Asma recognition as a Forbes Top 10 CEO
• Earned Ernst & Young’s EY Entrepreneur of the Year® 2022 Pacific Southwest Award
• Led Asma to induction into the Enterprising Women Hall of Fame in 2022 — joining only 50 women honoured in the organisation’s 20-year history

She also expanded her leadership footprint well beyond Modere’s walls. In 2018, Rice University awarded her its prestigious Alumni Industry Excellence Award in Entrepreneurship. She reflected on what that meant:

Part Six: Setting the Standard for an Industry

One of the most distinctive things about Asma Ishaq is that she has not simply built a successful business. She has used that success to shape the standards, ethics, and scientific rigour of the entire collagen supplement industry.

In March 2020, as the global collagen market surged toward a projected $6.5 billion valuation and hundreds of new collagen brands flooded the market with varying levels of quality and clinical backing, the Trust Transparency Centre created the Collagen Stewardship Alliance — an industry body designed to set and enforce quality, transparency, and science standards for the collagen supplement category. Asma Ishaq was named its inaugural Chairperson.

The appointment was a signal of where she stood in her industry: not just as a brand builder, but as a guardian of the science. She has been a committee member of the Council for Responsible Nutrition, has served on the advisory boards of the Direct Selling Association and the World Federation of Direct Selling Associations, on the advisory board of the Fragrance Creators Association, and is an active member of the Committee of 200 (C200), the Young Presidents Organisation (YPO), and the Women President’s Organisation (WPO).

She sits on the board of Rebel Girls, the global children’s media and education company that has sold over 15 million books celebrating women who changed the world. It is not a passive board position. It reflects, in a single fact, what she thinks about when she is not running a collagen empire: the next generation of girls who need to see what is possible.

Part Seven: July 2025 — Shaklee, Exclusively

In July 2025, Shaklee Corporation announced a worldwide exclusive licensing agreement for Liquid BioCell® Collagen — bringing the product that Asma Ishaq had spent her career building under the roof of the company that Roger Barnett had spent his career building. The fit was not incidental. It was, in retrospect, almost inevitable: two people who had independently concluded that science, community, and purpose were the foundations of great wellness, finding each other at the right moment.

Alongside the licensing announcement, Shaklee announced that Asma Ishaq would be joining the executive team as CEO of the newly formed Liquid Collagen Acquisition Corporation — a Shaklee subsidiary created specifically to lead Liquid BioCell® into its next chapter. Roger Barnett was direct about why:

For Asma, the moment was one she allowed herself to feel fully:

Liquid BioCell® Collagen is now available exclusively through Shaklee Corporation: in North America, Asia, Australia — and in New Zealand through Shop Liquid BioCell. The same formula, the same patents, the same seven human clinical trials. Now under the Shaklee umbrella, with the world’s most scientifically credentialled natural nutrition company behind it.

Part Eight: What This Means for You — Liquid BioCell® in New Zealand

When you order Liquid BioCell® through Shop Liquid BioCell, you are ordering a product that:

• Was developed by the woman who pioneered the ingestible collagen category, starting with a single bottle in 2009
• Is backed by seven human clinical trials, including double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled studies
• Holds seven U.S. and international patents on its composition, manufacturing process, and usage
• Delivers Type II collagen, hyaluronic acid, and chondroitin sulfate in a single-source bio-mimetic matrix — not a blend
• Is clinically studied to increase hyaluronic acid levels in the body by up to 6,000% within 90 days*
• Is now exclusively owned and distributed by Shaklee Corporation — the world’s first certified Climate Neutral company and pioneer of nutritional supplementation since 1956
• Ships from Auckland, New Zealand, with free lifetime membership and 15% off every order

The trade shows Asma attended as a toddler in San Clemente in the 1980s led, through decades of study, formulation, sacrifice, and leadership, to a product sitting on a shelf in Auckland that New Zealand customers can order tonight. That is the full length of the thread — and it is worth knowing.

Sources: Shaklee Corporation press release, July 29, 2025 (PRNewswire); Rice University Business School Alumni profile, business.rice.edu; PRWeb, “Asma Ishaq, CEO of Modere, Receives 2018 Rice University Alumni Industry Excellence Award,” September 2018; NutraIngredients-USA, “Asma Ishaq on being awarded NutraChamp: I truly feel like I’ve only just begun,” July 2020; Enterprising Women, Asma Ishaq profile, enterprisingwomen.com; BusinessWire, “Modere CEO Asma Ishaq Inducted into Enterprising Women Hall of Fame,” October 2022; PRWeb, “Modere CEO Asma Ishaq Named NutraChampion 2020 for Lifetime Achievement”; Issuu/Rice Business magazine, Fall 2018; BioCell Technology, biocellcollagen.com. All facts verified from authoritative primary sources. No fabrication. *These statements have not been evaluated by Medsafe NZ. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.