How to launch a beauty ingredient

Who should read this

Over the past several years with Macro Oceans, I found myself in a position I never thought I’d be in: using kelp to launch novel ingredients into the beauty industry (see here and here). Prior to this, I was a Big Tech product manager, totally comfortable in API docs, but totally lost in Sephora.

Suddenly I found myself neck deep in a world I had no experience in: using biotechnology to create beauty ingredients. I started looking around for people who had gone through launching ingredients like this… and it was rarer than I expected! So I write this post as a gift to past me and (hopefully) current you: what I wish I had known before I began about turning beauty science into beauty products.

If you find yourself with a particular ingredient technology that you think could be the next big thing within beauty, but don’t know how to turn technology into a product, then this post is for you. [0]

Bringing novel ingredient technology to market

There are four primary challenges that have to be overcome to bring a new beauty ingredient technology to market:

1. Craft your competitive edge: Figuring out what the value proposition is going to be for your product.

2. Benchmarking: Showing that your ingredient is better than the alternatives

3. Capturing value: Figuring out how to bring this product to market; how to decide whether or not you should build a consumer brand or go business-to-business?

4. Safety and regulatory: Navigating the safety and regulatory hurdles in order to bring this novel ingredient to market

Most of my examples below are bioactives, but the same basic principles apply to functional ingredients or colors.

Craft your competitive edge

What will make someone choose you?

The first and most important question you need to be able to answer is this: why is your ingredient better than what’s available on the market today? This is probably obvious; it’s the place where all great products begin.

I like to start with the end consumer. I imagine a shopper at a Sephora walking through an aisle and picking up a product powered by my ingredient. What is that product? Why did they pick it up? What was next to it? What made mine stand out?

To be viable, your ingredient needs to be good enough to stop this person — a busy person, with a job and a grocery list — and get her to pick up a box and decide to buy it. If your ingredient consistently passes this bar, it’s a winner. If it doesn’t, then it isn’t.

Picturing this scene helps me articulate the benefit of my product. What does it do? If I were standing next to our imaginary shopper, how would I explain the value of this ingredient to her? This is my key benefit.

Now right now, you might be saying “actually, my ingredient isn’t for consumers, it’s for formulators.” That might be true! I’ve launched ingredients like this. But even in this case, I like to imagine this scene because it’s the one your brand customer is going to be thinking about when they assess your ingredient. Do you bring them closer to being selected or not?

I try to pick a single benefit to focus on at the beginning. While many ingredients do several useful things, every extra promise increases the proof you need and muddies the message.

Sustainability is secondary

Sustainability and a more regenerative supply chain was a major inspiration for our work at Macro Oceans and a big part of our story. However, my experience within the beauty industry was that sustainability is a great complimentary message, but doesn’t drive sales on its own.

This makes sense when you consider it. People are hiring an ingredient to do a job: soothe their skin, strengthen their hair. They’ll happily choose a more sustainable alternative if it works as well as the existing options, but most won’t pay a performance penalty to switch except in extreme circumstances.

For this reason, I like to lead with performance and then use sustainability to drive interest and create a brand halo.

Benchmarking: does it work or does it win

Go for the gold

At the beginning, my key benefit is a hypothesis: what I think my ingredient could do better than anything else. As I go through benchmarking I’m looking to prove (or disprove) its value by comparing it to the “gold standard” ingredient currently in the market.

Here's what this means in practice, while I was at Macro Oceans, we launched an ingredient with hydrating properties. The dominant ingredient for this use case is hyaluronic acid. To be a viable hydrating ingredient, we had to at least be in the vicinity of hyaluronic acid’s performance — and ideally noticeably better.

I can’t stress this enough: it’s not enough to simply measure the benefits of your ingredient. You need to benchmark it against the thing that people are using to solve this problem today. Doing this gives you a relevant comparison point for your ingredient’s performance. Speaking from personal experience, having this data available makes a night and day difference in terms of driving demand.

In practice, benchmarking and defining your value proposition are iterative. You start with an initial hypothesis of value, do some measurement, and then your hypothesis may shift. This is normal.

How do I figure out what the gold standard ingredient is? Is there a list?

There is a list, but it isn’t written down. As an outsider to the beauty industry and someone not trained in cosmetic science, I would start by asking ChatGPT: “What are some of the best ingredients for [my use case]? How is their effectiveness measured?”

Then I would take the list it gave me and compare it with the ingredient lists of products in the real world. As I went, I’d add or remove ingredients based on what I was seeing.

Finally, I would take this list and review it with cosmetic chemists I respect. By the end of this, I would have an idea of the most relevant ingredients to compare to.

Creating a product vetting process

Once you have a comparison point, you need to figure out how you’re going to measure your ingredient versus what’s in the market.

For me, this was often the most difficult part of the process, requiring a mix of vendor outreach, working with the more technical members of our team or external experts, and reading about different test methods in academic papers.

I wanted someone to have a series of product stage gates they could take me through that would help me derisk our ingredient iteratively, but never really found the person or organization I was looking for.

In the end, we created it for ourselves with a fair amount of external input: first, a series of lab tests that were (relatively speaking) faster and cheaper, followed by secondary tests that were longer and more expensive, followed by a 30+ person clinical trial. The goal here is to derisk quickly and avoid costly mistakes.

Make sure it’s a fair fight

It’s critical to do benchmarking at realistic use rates for the respective ingredients — both your ingredient and your competition. This gives you a “pound for pound” comparison between the ingredients, the way they would be used in an actual product. It also helps you speak to cost (more on this in a moment).

Extending the hyaluronic acid example, there are hyaluronic acids with suggested usages as low as 0.1%. Meanwhile, our ingredient had a suggested use rate of 2-4%. So a fair test between the ingredients is the hydrating performance of hyaluronic acid at 0.1% vs. the hydration performance of our ingredient at 2%. If we are outperforming hyaluronic acid at our suggested use rate, then we are on to something interesting and if we’re underperforming it, we aren’t.

If you’re starting from scratch, you may not know your use rate. In this case, I think it makes sense to test a handful of different candidate use rates, see how they perform, and use that to guide your thinking.

With the use rate, you can now bring cost into the equation. Even if you’re going to be selling this ingredient to contract manufacturers by the kilogram, you should assess your ingredient in terms of cost-in-use. Doing this shows how much expense it adds to the final product and takes your “pound-for-pound” comparison and makes it a “dollar-for-dollar” comparison. Ideally you’re showing more performance per dollar than your competition.

Here’s an example that shows why this matters:

• Product A: $1,000 per kg at a 0.1% use rate \= $1 cost in use

• Product B: $250 per kg at a 2% use rate \= $5 cost in use

All else being equal, Product A adds less cost to the product in the bottle than Product B despite being more expensive on a per kg basis.

Commercialization: how to capture the value

With a proven ingredient, you need to decide how to best capture the value created by the new ingredient: selling to consumers or selling business-to-business.

The great thing about selling directly to consumers is that you own your own destiny. You’re not waiting on another business to adopt your ingredient and integrate it into their product roadmap. You also get the opportunity to educate consumers directly about the unique benefits that your product provides and why they should choose your product. If this goes well, it can go incredibly quickly and be quite lucrative. K18 is a testament to this.

The downside to selling directly to consumers is that it’s competitive. New brands pop up frequently and many consumers like to experiment with new products. It can be difficult to stand out in the first place and even more difficult to sustain this over time. Additionally, you’re going to have to build out a consumer brand with a consumer friendly website and marketing capabilities, a task that can be daunting if you’re most comfortable in the lab.

The great thing about selling business-to-business is that you have a broader set of value propositions to choose from. A five cent improvement in cost-in-use for equivalent performance isn’t a big deal to the end consumer, but could be a meaningful improvement to a business buyer. It’s also sticky revenue; once a brand puts an ingredient into a product, they tend to stick with it for the life of the product. Reformulating is a pain!

The downside of selling business-to-business is that it takes a long time to scale up. Most customers are going to take at least 12 months to adopt a new ingredient and even longer to ramp up their purchasing. The business side of the beauty industry is complex and can be difficult to navigate. This makes for a long waiting game and this additional time creates risk for your product: your sale could get delayed because your point of contact changes jobs, has a baby, or loses their funding — all real things that happened to me.

Ultimately, I think the test is this: if a typical consumer can see or feel the difference between a product using your ingredient and the other products on the market right away, then it makes sense to go directly to consumers; if not, then you’ll want to go business-to-business, no matter how much better your benchmarks are.

At Macro Oceans, we ended up deciding to go business-to-business. For our company, strategy, and ingredient profile, I think this was the right decision — we never had breakout performance in a consumer facing category — but we really felt the pain of convincing brands and contract manufacturers to adopt our ingredients.

Safety and regulatory work

Start by building your list

Let me say upfront: I can’t give safety or regulatory advice for your specific product. But I can share what helped me stay sane through this part of the process.

Safety and regulatory work caused me more anxiety than any other part of the work — not because it was technically harder, but because I worried about missing something critical. Another thing that made it challenging is that there is a mixture of hard and soft requirements. Some things were obviously required, while others were requested by specific customers as a part of their policy, but not legally mandated.

I build my working list in a way that was really similar to creating my list of “gold standard” ingredients:

• Asking ChatGPT and searching online

• Reviewing competitor SDS and sell sheets

• Validating with a regulatory consultant

• Talking with potential customers

Map work by risk, timeline, and stage

With the set of requirements and timelines in hand, I did my best to align the required work with different stages of the product development lifecycle. Things like toxicology data or HRIPT testing came early, because they were required for benchmark testing on humans, but INCI registration came later because I knew I could sample my ingredient with potential customers while I was waiting for the committee to approve my application. Still other things — like China registration — could be put off indefinitely because we knew that market wasn’t our focus early on.

This helped me avoid two potential pitfalls: wasting money on non-viable ingredients, and delaying launch because I started critical tests too late.

What to do about irrelevant asks

Especially as we began engaging larger customers, it was pretty common for us to get asked for safety data that wasn’t relevant for our ingredient. The most absurd example of this was when I was asked for the bovine content of my all natural / vegan kelp extract.

Eventually I learned that the person asking me for this stuff was working off of a procurement checklist and needed a paper trail to show that their organization had done its due diligence and that all I needed was an attestation from the company that this was not relevant in our case.

Always more to say

If you’ve made it this far, this is obviously a topic you care a lot about! Hopefully this walk through my experience helps you on your journey.

While I’ve covered a lot of ground, in some ways I’ve just scratched the surface, skipping things like finding first customers, aligning sales and production, and how and where to tell your story. There’s always more to say!

If you’re working on a project like this right now and could use a sounding board, don’t hesitate to reach out: hello@jdilla.xyz.

[0]: Based on my early forays into other industries like materials and food, a lot of these same lessons carry over.

Thank you to Aaron Nesser and Jesse Adler for providing feedback on this post. All its remaining flaws are my fault, not theirs.

2025-06-24