From The Founder Of Susteau, New Platform Syndeo Connects Brands With Behind-The-Scenes Biotechnology Innovators

When Kailey Bradt created Susteau, an eco-minded brand that pioneered powder-to-lather shampoo, she learned a few hard lessons about the difficulties of translating a beauty entrepreneur’s envelope-pushing vision into a reality.

In approaching contract manufacturers, Bradt, who graduated Rochester Institute of Technology with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and a master’s degree in product development, recalls, “They would be really excited in the beginning and then they realized, oh, maybe the margin’s not as high or maybe it’s more work than they intended, and that caused disruption.”

On the other hand, she discovered manufacturers and ingredient houses couldn’t convey their most compelling breakthroughs to her. “If you walk into a meeting with a pitch deck that isn’t cohesive and isn’t relevant to the brand from the side of science, then there’s a ton of misalignment and miscommunication,” she says. “They don’t really understand what your technology does or the opportunity.”

Now, Bradt is winding down Susteau, which launched in Sephora in 2021 and raised roughly $3.3 million in funding, and turning her energies toward Syndeo, a new consultancy and bridge between brands, investors, ingredient houses, manufacturers, marketers, packaging firms, sustainability specialists and product developers, particularly those in the burgeoning biotechnology field, that addresses the disconnects she’s struggled with in the beauty industry to facilitate brands’ adoption of biotech advancements. She expects to keep its supplier pool tight—Syndeo is teaming up with five formulation partners at the outset—while opening it up to as many brands as possible.

“We’re reconfiguring beauty behind the scenes to accelerate innovation,” says Bradt, adding, “I’ve built up a group of [formulators and manufacturers] who want to try something new and who are open to using new ingredients and who want to formulate with new ingredients, and some of them already actually only literally developing their own IP and are like, oh, well, I’m going to launch a brand if no one else takes this because they believe in it.”

Bradt’s business partners at Syndeo are May Sofia Boutaleb, a clinical nutritionist, and Alessia Becker, an expert in luxury goods corporate social responsibility. Currently, Syndeo is manually matching brands with behind-the-scenes companies, but anticipates bringing automation to the process. It levies fees on those companies of 3% to 10%, depending on project cost, making its services affordable for emerging beauty brands, according to Bradt.

“We’re reconfiguring beauty behind the scenes to accelerate innovation.”

“It’s easy to spend a lot of money on fractional support, and then you pile on the $10,000 invoices coming in each month,” says Bradt. “Starting a brand doesn’t have to be so hard, but it also shouldn’t be white label and remarketing. Where can we truly move this forward, and why isn’t it moving forward today? That’s the question that I’m trying to answer.”

She emphasizes that small brands shouldn’t shy away from taking big innovation swings—and Syndeo can assist them in sourcing ingredients and packaging materials that can allow them to take those swings on a constrained budget. For example, Bradt says, “It’s a false narrative to think that you cannot start with a fully biodegradable, hard plastic alternative. I can order you 12 of those units if you want. That’s where these relationships are really important that I’ve built.”

Brands can team up to spread the costs of innovative, sustainable and ingredients materials, and Syndeo can pair brands together. In another example, Bradt says, “If there were 10 brands that were like, oh, I want to do a squeeze tube for a body lotion, and I want to make it in biodegradable packaging. If that material exists, they can split the cost of doing that, and those are the things we are trying to make happen.”

Below, Bradt spells out five additional things beauty brands should know about biotech partnerships.

1. Consider concentration when evaluating ingredient costs. “If you’re using an alternative to an ingredient that’s more efficacious, you need less of it. You need to look at the formula cost, not at the cost on one kilogram of a product,” says Bradt. “So, if you’re used to using 2% of something and you only need 0.05% to hit all the functionality with the synthetic alternative because it’s more effective, then you can get those same results, and if you increase it, you get even better results. You need to look at the cost per use versus the cost of the product alone sitting in a bottle.”

2. Brands don’t have to be huge to engage with biotech. “Usually, there’s a minimum pack size, so it could be 250 grams, which is pretty low, but it depends on the use of the ingredient,” says Bradt. “If that’s going to go into translating to going into 5,000 units, then it translates into 5,000. If it translates into a thousand, that’s where it goes…It’s a negotiation with all of these parties.” She continues, “There are scientists out there with technology that’s sitting on the shelf that they just want to put it into a brand, and they’re willing to work with you to do really small runs just to get it out there.”

3. Peering ahead is advisable to get a beat on new biotech ingredients. “They’re already working on their ingredient launches for next year and the year after,” says Bradt. “So, you can plan your product pipeline around new ingredient launches and have market differentiation.”

4. Brands can benefit from identifying ingredients with potentially long-term supply chain issues that they can swap out for more consistent biotech alternatives. “If you don’t have people behind the scenes who are focused on future-proofing your formulas as I call it, then you are going to be constantly changing and constantly reinvesting in your product,” says Bradt. “I think that’s really important.”

5. Be proactive about exploring biotech possibilities because contract manufacturers may not offer them up. “The reason why we’re not seeing more biotech ingredients in the market because, on the contract manufacturer side, a lot of them want to work with what they already have in-house, buying it in bulk,” says Bradt. “And if they’re buying the raw materials specific to the brand, then you have them buying the minimum quantity that they need.”