Product Creation

I spent my first day in Australia in search of a home worthy of uprooting my new family. A beautiful, crisp fall day in April, as I walked the streets of Paddington and Woollahra I thought, "This is what London would be like if it were in California." I found the perfect house.

Because they were twelve time zones away, I didn't meet with a single Jurlique employee before accepting the job of CEO. The business had been struggling ever since the founder put his shares to the richest man in Australia and ran off abruptly with the Swiss distributor. There had been five or six CEOs in as many years, and I had been hired by a new private equity firm to turn the business around.

The next day, after introducing myself to the Sydney-based team, the head of R&D asked to speak with me privately. "Before you accept this job, you should know something. There are several ingredients in our hero product that are not listed on the packaging because they are not aligned with our ingredient policy and brand promise."

I had already signed the house lease.

When I asked one of the board members over dinner that evening if there were ingredients in the products that were not listed on the packaging, he immediately answered, "No." This was the first of many lessons regarding the trustworthiness of this man and, after a moment of silence, he continued: "When I say 'no,' what I mean is 'yes.'"

I spent the next three years making the ingredients in Jurlique's products match their brand promise. It was not easy.

The Jurlique experience taught me something I've never forgotten: in beauty, the product has to be the promise. Branding can get you in the door, but authentic, differentiated efficacy is the only thing that keeps customers coming back. With that conviction firmly in place, Erica and I started the search for a partner to help us formulate our new soapless products. We didn't have to look far.

We had met Marc Demarais on a trip to Montreal a few years prior. He had been working on some very interesting, cutting-edge, long-range products for Hairstory, some of which worked and many of which did not. Creative and passionate about the intersection of wellness, environmental stewardship and molecular innovation, Marc had been scouring the world as many small-batch, hand-craft chemists had emerged to meet the demand for "clean" beauty products. "The landscape has exploded in just the past few years," he explained when we reconnected. "The technology is advancing at an incredible rate, particularly in the area of cleansing. I love the idea of Soapless — we can definitely develop some exciting formulations for you!"

Right from the first submissions, we realized these new formulations would be compelling. When creating new beauty products, the evaluation process focuses first on results and efficacy. The initial Hand Wash submission was incredibly effective at cleansing (olive oil gone in one go) with a silky finish that left your skin soft and a bit shiny, like after applying moisturizer. Importantly, the residual product absorbed into the skin quickly. The Body Wash seemed to clean equally well — it washed away sweat and body odor completely after a serious run through the woods — but left a bit too much residue on the skin and felt tacky. It needed more work, but we could sense it was close. The Body Bar also did a nice job cleaning, but it was far too hard and did not deposit enough of itself on your skin to a) notice it was there and b) impart the moisturizing properties we sought. Ultimately, we were able to finalize the Hand Wash formula quickly, but the Body Wash took a few months of iteration and the Body Bar required close to 40 submissions. We were able to get the right finish for the Body Wash pretty easily, but we had wanted to make it more viscous and that proved very challenging — particularly while adhering to our strict ingredient philosophy.

While many "clean" product companies boast about what's NOT in their products, we find that table-stakes and uncompelling. When you get married, your vows don't include a list of all the horrible things you won't do to each other; they set positive goals aimed at making your joint life better. Our ambitions included: 1) supporting small, innovative, local ingredient providers who are aligned with our values, 2) focusing on naturally derived ingredients vs. synthetic and 3) bringing sustainability into our formulation philosophy by using upcycled ingredients wherever possible. We also were very focused on avoiding any added fragrance — synthetic or naturally derived — in our products, instead relying on essential oils to deliver both efficacy and scent.

Scent is foundational to the experience of any hand or body product, and choosing the right direction would have been next to impossible without our breakthrough inspiration on branding. The working name for this business started as Soapless. While I liked its simplicity and descriptiveness, it felt a bit bland and too down-market for how we would need to position the products, given how expensive they would be to produce.

One day inspiration struck: what if we give the brand provenance — an origin story — that celebrates a beautiful, pristine part of the world and connects all the brand elements to telling the story of this special place? The color palette, the imagery and (especially) the scent. Clearly it would make sense to start with our new home, Charlevoix, and therefore we should name the brand Sans Savon — French for "without soap." Even before the idea was fully formed, it felt right, and we knew we had anchored the brand in a way that felt tangible, unique and at the same time scalable. Immediately I bought the URLs for "without soap" in Italian, German, Spanish and Portuguese as well as French. Over time, we could explore remote regions where these languages are local and expand our scent profiles accordingly. Senza Sapone, Seifenfrei, Sin Jabon and Sem Sabao.

After that breakthrough, finalizing the scent was quite easy. We created a base "Boreal Blend" of essential oils from northern forest trees and then added a few extra oils to differentiate each product. When you first arrive at our house in Charlevoix, there is a forest-y sweetness to the air that strikes you immediately. By including local essential oils, we captured that experience in a bottle.

Armed with unique formulations and a compelling brand story, we were ready to take the plunge and actually start investing in bringing Sans Savon to life. Up to this point, we had only invested a few thousand dollars to incorporate and register our IP. The product development had been free, on the assumption Marc and his partner would earn back their investment through our inventory orders. We opened a bank account and transferred our first tranche of investment.

Now it felt real.