Skincare Brand Reome Marries High Design And Biotechnology

With a little luck and liquidity, Reome, a premium British skincare brand using biotechnology-derived ingredients for stressed skin, should be ready to travel the world soon.

Founded in January 2023 by Joanna Ellner, a beauty journalist and acupuncturist with a degree in traditional Chinese medicine, Reome has two skincare products—serum Active Recovery Broth and cleanser Three Suns Balm—priced at 110 and 75 pounds, respectively, or $140 and $95 for full sizes. A third product, Aerate Face Towel, is 25 pounds or $35. The brand is in the middle of raising a seed funding round for an undisclosed amount to bolster its biotech positioning and drive global expansion.

Reome is sold at Space NK, Liberty and Moda Operandi. While online sales account for a large part of its early business, Ellner emphasizes the brand is far from being a prototypical direct-to-consumer player. “I think we’ve moved beyond that,” she says. “We’ve all seen that the pure DTC approach does not necessarily bear the fruits that it once did. I also have a passion for the shopping experience, for bricks-and-mortar, for the element of discovery. I think Reome is a real discovery brand and for that to happen we need to be placed in the best stores all over the world.”

Over the next decade, Ellner shares her goal for Reome is to open branded stores globally to offer shoppers engaging sensorial experiences along with building its wholesale network. In the meantime, existing retailers will be crucial for growth. North America and Europe, in particular Scandinavia, are expected to be key expansion markets for the brand, which has seen demand coming from those markets.  

“Already, 60% of web traffic online is from the U.S. We have a lot of interest from that region, but we haven’t yet penetrated that market in a meaningful way,” says Ellner, reasoning that interest from the Scandinavian markets is due to the brand’s “minimal aesthetic,” though she insists Reome “is not just a pretty brand.”

“Reome is a real discovery brand and for that to happen we need to be placed in the best stores all over the world.”

Ellner highlights that its marriage of aesthetics and science has created plenty of “intrigue around the brand,” largely because the blurring of the two remains a “really underserved” space in luxury skincare. “It’s really important people don’t assume that, because Reome is a pretty product, it’s a lifestyle brand. It’s very much not. It’s a science-first skin care brand,” she says. “We’ve got the science-led formulations of a derma brand, but with the timeless appeal of a classic beauty house, and for me, those two don’t need to be mutually exclusive.”

Over the next three years, Reome is slated to release 21 stockkeeping units, all firmly within skincare and centered around biotech innovation, starting with a daily moisturizer scheduled to drop in May this year. Some of the future formulas will be codeveloped with Debut, the biotech company backed by L’Oréal’s venture capital arm that Reome recently signed an exclusive partnership with.

“You see brands come and go. Part of that can be from being too slow and part of that can be from being too fast,” says Ellner. “We’re very well supported by veterans of the industry, so it’s now about expanding operations and also growing our NPD.”

For Reome’s seed funding, Ellner underscores it’s important that Reome partners with investors who understand and are enthusiastic about the biotech opportunity. “We’re hoping to bolster our commercial resource internally and so hopefully through this raise we’ll be bringing some more talent into the fold,” she says. “My passions are formulation and brand. So, this next phase is to bring in additional expertise to power the other avenues that make a brand a global success.”

““Biotech will ultimately become skincare.” 

Asked about the brand’s mission to stay rooted in biotech, Ellner likens it to “the AI of skincare ingredients” and lauds it for presenting “infinite” possibilities for the future of beauty. “Thanks to tech innovation, we can biologically replicate trace molecule and minerals from nature and even synthetics. We are able to turn up and down certain levers that may link to irritation and we’re able to do so increasingly at quite an accessible rate,” she says. “Biotech will ultimately become skincare, it will become beauty, there is no hiding from that.”

She explains that the promise of biotech-derived skincare ingredients lies in their “potency, but also skin tolerance” of the actives devised in biotech labs. Tapping biotech processes, she says formulators are able to adjust the molecular structure of ingredients to mimic the skin, making them more easily absorbed at “greater depth” and with “greater efficacy.” For stressed skin, Reome’s preoccupation, absorption without irritation is critical.

“Stressed skin was and I still believe is the No. 1 skin agitator and has taken over ageing,” says Ellner, adding that biotech enables formulators to “dial up visible improvements and efficacy” through blends that target signs of stressed skin, including chronic dehydration, redness, dullness and excessive fine lines.

Ellner pronounces, “The intention for Reome is to stay at the forefront of this technology and that means we will always ensure that we have that proprietary, pioneering active at the heart of our formulations.”