Epicutis Introduces: Arctigenin, The New Standard For Brightening Skincare Ft. Maxwell Stock

0:02Hey guys, welcome back to Skin Anarchy. I'm so excited about this episode because we're welcoming back a brand that I am probably one of the biggest fans of it's always right next to my bed. or on the shelf where I'm going to be using my skincare. It's always there, the products from this brand. And so I'm really excited to welcome them back and also talk about their new innovations, their new products, the amazing stuff that's up and coming. So without further ado, I want to introduce you guys again to Maxwell Stock, who's the founder and CEO of Epicutus Skincare. Welcome to the show, Max. I'm so honored to host you again.

0:36Hey, thank you. It's great to be back and I appreciate all the kind words around our brand, Epicutus. Yeah, no, I mean, they're truly, you know, from the heart. I love the brand. I've always loved it, you know, from the minute I tried it. And I think a lot of people can resonate with that because you guys make truly effective products. I mean, I don't know anybody that's tried the lipid serum and hasn't fallen in love. So, you know, like that really speaks for itself at the end of the day. That definitely is our hero go-to product for sure. Yeah, no, it's really great. I'd love for you to give us a background, Max, if you could, for all the people that might've missed the first episode when I had you on a few years ago.

1:11Yeah, no problem. I started Signum Biosciences, which is the company that created Epicutus. I founded that company with my father, who's a professor at Princeton, spun out his technology out of his lab, started up Signum Biosciences. And we started a classic biotech company where we developing drugs for topical disease, but also developing ingredients for different companies in the skincare industry. Men over the next, you know, 10, 15 years, you know, learned all of the ins and outs of the cosmetic industry. And so I actually happened to suffer from seborrheic dermatitis. So I was very reactive.

1:56I had this classic kind of very reactive skin. And so I was looking for, you know, I was looking for a skincare line that would meet my needs and it didn't exist. And my needs would be, you know, really, I'm not first, the first benefit I was looking for was not anti-aging. The first benefit I was looking for was to improve the health of my skin. And number one, to do it through lowering inflammation. And so that really didn't exist on the market. And that's when I started to form the ideas around Epicutus. And what I wanted was some skincare line that first and foremost, the number one benefit that the line is geared towards is reducing inflammation.

2:43Also, I wanted to create formulas that didn't cause any inflammation. I have a science background, so I was aware that a lot of the ingredients that are commonly used in cosmetic products these days are actually pro-inflammatory. If they penetrate through the stratum corneum in any way, they can actually elicit irritation and inflammation. And in an ideal world, you would have this perfectly intact stratum corneum barrier. But we all know as human beings, we don't have perfectly intact barriers. And so a lot of these irritating pro-inflammatory ingredients can actually make it into your skin and cause problems.

3:27So that didn't exist on the market. And so I just thought I'd create that myself. And so at Signum, we have a lot of technology and we're focused on our mechanisms that we focus on are mechanisms of inflammation. So it was very straightforward to do. And that's one of the reasons. And at that time, it was about 10 years ago, I kind of made that decision to create Epicutus. that's when I knew I needed, if you're going to have a very few ingredients in the formula, need to have somebody, a master formulator that can actually create formulations that still feel amazing. And that's when I brought, that's when I brought Masanori Tamora in, into the picture and started to, you know, recruited him to join us at Signum.

4:20He's amazing. I remember like picking his brain about science. Yeah. And he's one of the formulators to originally use hyaluronic acid way back in the day when it was just a very, very new ingredient. You know, hyaluronic acid's been around now for a while. But he created the Harulabo line, which is what attracted me to his skill set. Harulabo line is the number one selling skincare line in Japan. And that line actually inspired me to create Epicutus. It's a very simple line with these very, you know, formulations that are don't have a lot of ingredients. They're really just meant to moisturize the skin.

5:01So, so that was what really drew me to Tamora and was able to recruit him and hire him. And then another aspect of the brand, I always, you know, one of the things that I have seen in the skincare industry is the enormous number of skincare products or skincare brands that are in the direct-to-consumer space. and in the kind of Sephora, you know, the retail space, there's an enormous number of brands. And all of these brands, or at least a very, very large number of them, say they have amazing science, right? It's just like, immediately, our science is amazing. And because I have a scientific background, I knew that that actually wasn't the case.

5:48Yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah, I mean, science is amazing. Don't get me wrong. All science is amazing. But I mean, the application of it is also very important. So exactly, exactly. So, so I thought that I thought the future of skincare really was in the professional channel. And so that's one of the reasons why I wanted to launch and did launch Epicutus into the professional channel is because I thought that was the channel. That was the place that people were really going to get, you know, we're really going to learn about skincare. They're really working with a professional. I think skin is complicated.

6:28It's not the same for everybody. I think everybody's skin is different to a certain extent to another. And so the professional channel was really important to me. I thought that a brand that we wanted to create like Epicutus needed to be into that channel. You needed to have professionals, experts that were educating people on how to take care of their skin. And then also I wanted to kind of, not kind of, I wanted to change the way people thought about their skin, treated their skin. And that would be number one is they're thinking about skin health first and foremost, and then they're thinking about looking younger.

7:10So that's, that's, that's one of the reasons why we went into that professional channel. And it's also one of the reasons that I also recruited Lisa Johnson, And Lisa Johnson is our Senior Vice President of Global Sales. But more importantly, she's a physician's assistant and had been a clinician for 15 years. And so I thought it was really critical to have those opinions in the mix when we were creating Epicutus as a brand. So Tamora, the formulator, Lisa Johnson, the clinician, myself being the scientist and creative person behind it. So I think that's an important piece of the brand is that you have experts in different fields really converging in order to create these amazing products.

8:04So really different, I think. Very holistic. I feel like that really resonates with me as a consumer when it comes to Epicutus because, you know, well, I want to touch on one thing you mentioned was the ingredients. Because I feel like right now in the current landscape of the skincare industry, we talked about the science portion, but also the fear mongering that comes with like all these crazy ingredients, you know, like in the sense that like I feel like people are just, sometimes they're making up things, you know, in terms of like trying to explain like there's a lot more marketing than there is like scientific explanations of why certain ingredients work the way they work and why they aren't needed you know I really like your approach where you're saying you said you know I didn't want to include all that stuff that's you know pro-inflammatory which are very valid you know but also at the same time I think it raises the bigger question of like you know why are we accepting these other fluff ingredients.

9:03I mean, I want to call them fluff because I mean, that's really what they are. If you, at the end of the day, you think about what the skin actually needs, you know? So like, that's very important to me that you guys are really paying attention to your ingredients. And also like, do they actually do what the skin needs rather than just what can I put in here to make it really markety and really, you know, I guess you can, you know, send it out to the masses and get some sort of response. I think that really stands out about Epicutus. I think, you know, I've asked myself the same question being in the space and really being, you know, I've been out in the field a lot over the past four years since we launched the product.

9:41And I think the reason is, is people actually look at skincare as a hobby. And I think people, they're looking, you know, it reminds me, I'm really into mountain biking, for example. And so when a new mountain biking product comes out, a new technology comes out, I want to go use that technology. It's exciting, exciting to read about. And, you know, and that may or may not work well for me as a person. And that works well in a hobby. You know, if you're, you know, it's not directly affecting your health. But the problem with taking skincare and turning it into your hobby is that it directly affects your largest organ.

10:19It directly affects your health. So jumping from different technology to different technology to different technology can be very damaging. And then you're, you know, all these bells and whistles, like you say, they're really just hooks for marketing stories. And so marketers are really what's driving innovation in the skincare industry right now, as opposed to real science, you know, real hardcore science. I think a lot of companies, their idea of innovation is a new marketing campaign. It's not spending five, six years on the bench, paying scientists to actually develop new technology, making sure that it's actually safe and effective.

11:01I think that's a fundamental difference in Epicutus as opposed to other brands is that we really lead first with science. We're not thinking, oh, this has to make an amazing marketing story. We say this has to make an amazing ingredient first and foremost. And we put the back work into it so that it actually is. And I think that really you really see that in our ABT product, which is our Arctogenin brightening treatment. We've been working on that technology for about almost six years now. So we were working on that technology years before we even launched the product line itself. So we actually co-developed that with our Japanese pharma company called Roto Pharmaceuticals, which actually sits on our board and they own a piece of our company.

11:51We have very, a lot of our DNA is Japanese. Early on in the history of Signum, Roto invested in our company. They sit on our board. I very much appreciate all things Japanese. I think the Japanese culture has this way of distilling things down to their most simplest but elegant form. That's where Tamora comes from, Roto. So we actually developed arctogenin brightening treatment or specifically that arctogenin ingredient with Roto. And so we started on the bench. So we started saying, hey, there needs to be a new brightening technology. All this brightening technology is so old. I mean, vitamin C, which you could argue certainly is the most marketed brightening technology, has been around since the 80s.

12:47It's been around forever and it doesn't actually brighten your skin, right? Exactly. It doesn't really do all that much. I'm so glad you said that. It's like, also, it's like pro allergen, like it's an allergen. So like it, it makes it worse. It does. It does. It can cause a lot of irritation and all these brightening technologies like kojic acid, like hydroquinone, they all are very, very irritating. Like, for example, Kojic acid is another great example of a technology in all the literature and all the kind of marketing. They show that it really works, but it's at a high concentration. And you could never put that concentration into an actual product because it would so severely irritate the consumer that they would never buy it.

13:35So they put it in a very low concentration and then use a lot of this kind of hand waving to talk about how great a brightening technology it is. Vitamin C are resting on the laurels of for some, you know, vitamin C works to enhance collagen synthesis, but it does it systemically from inside out. Right. You can't put vitamin C on topically and it that it's not going to it doesn't work that way. right? The only thing that I see that's legitimate in terms of vitamin C is that its ability to scavenge free radicals, right? Which is similar to what vitamin E does. That's why you put vitamin E in these different products also as a stabilizer for things like things that get oxidized and aren't very stable.

14:22So what we did is we started out on the bench looking at using actual model systems, right? Doing cell culture work, looking for actives that actually were effective against melanocytes, reducing melanin. And that's how we started screening, you know, hundreds and hundreds of different actives and eventually finding arctogenin. And then arctogenin happens to be incredibly expensive to make synthetically. So we went and found a botanical that has really high levels of arctogenin. And it turns out botanical with the highest levels of arctogenin is burdock. Burdock is a very common traditional Chinese medicine supplement.

15:12It's also very common food that's consumed in Asia. So right away, boom, safety, you know, it's really safe. People have been consuming it for thousands of years. And so we developed a extraction process to enrich burdock seed for arctogenin. And so that process, you could imagine a lot of iterations, a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of resources. But eventually we landed with the final formulation, which is our ABT product. But we went through many, many, many steps, spent so much money, so much time to develop this. But it's an amazing technology. It works better than all those common brightening treatments.

15:58So that's a great example. If we're going to come out, we're not going to, you know, at Epicutus, we're not going to just reformulate vitamin C or try to come up with some vitamin C derivative. so that we can piggyback on all the marketing that has been created behind vitamin C because consumers know vitamin C. So what we are trying to do is buck all the dogmas that are in skincare. I guess that's really it. There's so much dogma in skincare that you're dealing with when you're creating new technology. So that AB products is a great example of what Epicutus really brings to the table. I love that.

16:38I love that you have created this because it's also, you know, just for the understanding, it's not a pro-inflammatory product either. I mean, I think vitamin C for me for a long time, everything you said absolutely resonates with me as a consumer, but also more so than anything else, it's that idea that it is pro-inflammatory for a lot of people. You know, for my skin, it is. Every time I use a vitamin C product, I get some sort of redness, or I noticed something is there that, you know, it doesn't feel right. You know, my skin feels just, especially at high concentrations, you know, it's very difficult to truly incorporate a vitamin C product every single day without noticing some level of skin sensitivity.

17:20I think that, you know, it's just, yeah. Absolutely. And it's not just vitamin C, right? Because vitamin C and its derivatives are very unstable, right? So that means you have to put stabilizers. They're also not very soluble. So you have to put solubilizers and those stabilizers and solubilizers, same thing that you have to do for the retinoids, all the retinol derivatives. Those aren't healthy for your skin, right? And I would say the one technology that actually works out of all the slew of things is the retinols will work, right? They will cancel cell turnover, but they take months. They take five, six, seven months to work.

18:01And so what happens is people tend to say, well, I'll just shorten that time by using more. And then they get irritated. They get redness. They get some side effects from it, which isn't good for the skin. And it does reduce some fine lines and wrinkles, but those are pretty modest effects that take a long time. So my feeling is that skin, I see the future of skincare is like, if you really want to look younger, skincare isn't the path towards that, towards that really, you know, skincare can help slow the aging process down because inflammation is really what drives aging. But if you really want to look younger, go see a clinician.

18:50The technologies are incredible. Over the past 15 years, the development of all these different technologies has been pretty incredible and pretty non-invasive, pretty benign treatments that are safe and one time, or maybe a lot of times. But I think that's the future is you see your clinician using these different devices to make you look younger, but then to maintain the health of your skin. That's what skincare should do. So that's what we've done with Epicutus is really create a new category in skincare. And that would be skin health. Kind of crazy that that's kind of a new idea. But, you know, I think that the time of anti-aging driving everything in skincare has has to end.

19:42And we have to be focused on health and that, you know, for example, where does the ingredients come from that go into these formulas? Like our hyaluronic acid, for example, is pharmaceutical grade hyaluronic acid. It's the same hyaluronic acid that goes in eye drops. And we like to be transparent about where does every single one of our ingredients come from, right? I think that's also where the industry needs to move in terms of complete transparency. transparency traceability is really important and then a new focus on skin health as opposed to anti-aging anti-aging anti-aging exactly no i love that you said that because i think that's where you know in medicine they teach you like manage expectations of your patients right and i feel like that needs to be applied to every otc space like you have to manage expectations of consumers as brands, you know, and I think a lot of brands miss the mark on that, because, you know, if you're marketing your product to literally rewind 20 years on someone's, you know, age in terms of what their appearance is, that's literally false, you know, false advertising.

20:55There's no way to do that. And more importantly, for consumers to then buy into that stuff, you know, that's what really worries me when I look at this space, because I'm like, Like, it's not just that some brands are, you know, kind of advertising false claims, but then it's also the fact that consumers trust them enough to then spend their money and then be upset when they don't get the results, you know? So it's a really, it's a vicious cycle. I 100 % agree. And I think it's like, are we going to create marketing campaigns that prey on people's insecurities? You know, it's kind of classic. It's like men and hair loss.

21:34Yeah, I can go probably make a lot of money by telling men who are absolutely so scared of losing their hair. You know, I could probably create all kinds. But ethically, that's wrong. Right. I think that's I think it's wrong and especially a market that they're really selling to women. Right. And here, you know, I think women are, you know, let's be a little bit more ethical about, you know, it's already kind of a minority group in a way. right? That's been exploited over time. And I think that's a great, that's a perfect representation of how marketers are really exploiting and preying on people's weaknesses.

22:19And so with Epicutus, we don't do that. So we really want to be ethical. First of all, we don't spend our money on marketing. We spend our money on developing new technology, as well as what actually goes into the formulas. So that's what I think a lot of what's going on in the skincare space is, I think, it's just dominated by marketing. And I think a lot of industries, that's the problem. No, I agree. I think marketing, I mean, at the end of the day, the best marketing ever is like, I love like, for example, before and afters, because if you can see the results, I mean, skincare at the end of the day is something that is supposed to just make your skin feel rejuvenated in that moment you know it's supposed to make you feel like you're on like you said skin health you know and if your skin is healthy like any organ it's going to look great you know in the sense of like you know with your liver we start you we measure certain enzymes and stuff you know that lets us know your liver is doing great with the skin it's a lot of different things you know and so if your skin's looking great you're you're keeping it healthy and i think that's the bottom line that should be the marketing i don't think there's any reason to sell like certain colors and whatever people are doing all these like like you said all the bells and whistles there's absolutely no you know reason for that but more importantly i think also from the scientific standpoint it bothers me as a scientist because i look at that and i say you're muddying the waters of science here you know you're really muddying the waters and not letting people have that transparency of true scientific literacy you know and understanding why do i need this for my skin health?

23:54Like what makes this product truly beneficial for me? And where will I see the impact of it in my life? You know, so that whole like, education part is also something that gets kind of buried when we're putting all these dollars into the marketing side, you know, it really bothers me to see that. But I'm really glad that you guys don't do that. Because I mean, your products just, they really speak for themselves. I mean, that's truly. And at least there's an option for people, right? There's certainly no shortage of brands that put all their resources into marketing. And I think skincare is not fashion, right?

24:28I think that's kind of what happened is the beauty and fashion world. Skincare really got caught up into that whole area, that whole side of things. And so I agree. I think the two should be not, fashion and skincare are two different things. And I think it's because makeup is so connected to cosmetics, but that side of things is starting to decouple. People are really looking at skincare as healthcare and that's why I created Epicutus. So people have an option, right? Hey, if your main concern is the health of your skin, then Epicutus is a brand that you can really put your trust in and you can know that the folks that are behind the brand, the number one thing they're thinking about is how to deliver real value Right.

25:21You're paying a lot of money for these skincare products. They need to actually provide healthy benefits and not, you know, not do the opposite, which is cause poor skin health. exactly no you know what's also phenomenal here is i'm glad you guys came out with a brightening product and i'll tell you why because i think that when it comes to like you know i'm a woman of color any skin of color person understands that the world of trying to like help dark spots and your hyperpigmentation out it's a it's a very tricky you know place to be because there's a lot of products out here and very few of them actually work you know because at the end of the day if you're trying to lighten hyperpigmentation on skin of color you have a lot of problems that you might run into even with aesthetic treatments i've had like doctors come on and explain that you know certain things you can't certain machines you can't use certain lasers you can't use so when you're using when you're coming out with solutions for that i think that market and that group of consumers really benefits because it's even hazier you know when you have darker skin types because you don't know what's going to work you don't know if it's going to actually exacerbate your situation or is it going to help it and i think the gentle effects of a product that's able to over time reduce hyperpigmentation and just slow that process down of like you know the inflammatory process behind what leads to excessive hyperpigmentation that's very much needed in our space even though it looks like we don't need more brightening products you know because there's so much vitamin c out here but we really do i feel like it's one of the most lacking spaces in the skincare industry.

26:57So to see you guys come out with this product, I mean, for me, it's very exciting. You know, that's absolutely right. I think all the products are really amazing for people of, you know, people of color. We have people, especially, you know, really, really darker complexions, African skin, you know, our products just work beautifully for, and they're, like you're saying, really prone to that pigmentation. And, you know, most of the products that are developed are developed for, you know, white Caucasian skin. I mean, that's the, that's the focus. And I think Epicutus has really broken that down and people, you know, it's funny, you know, when we have reps that are, that are, have darker skin, people come over and say, Hey, does that work on my kind of skin?

27:41And I think that says it all is that we really need to have solutions. You know, if you have a skin health product, it's going to be amendable to many, many different, different skin types. So I appreciate you, you saw that and appreciate what we've done with the ABT product, but also with all of our products are great for any skin color. Yeah. Yeah. They really are. They're phenomenal products. And I mean, I literally, there's not a single thing. I've said this before, not a single product I've tried that I haven't fallen in love with. And I think that speaks more than anything else. And I have to ask you, Max, you probably can't tell me, but is there anything else new on the horizon that you guys are working on or in the lab with or anything.

28:23Yeah, we do. We have some amazing technology that we'll be coming out with next year that I think everybody will be excited about. I can't say what it is. Can't let the cat out of the bag. Lisa will kill me. Yeah. But tomorrow will kill me. But those guys, you know, and we have that's one of the nice things when we develop products, we have this convergence of it's not just a marketer working with a contract manufacturer, we have Tamora, our formulator, working directly with Lisa, who's running the sales team, has all that clinical experience. And then the scientific team, who's actually developing the technology on the bench.

29:02They're all talking to each other and thinking about how best to create these products and these technologies so that they're actually meeting a need that's out there. So when we come out with a new technology, it's not going to be an eye serum just so we can pad our revenue. It'll really be that we want to make a transformational product for people that need that benefit. So yeah, next year we have some great technology. And then we put a lot of our resources. There's like a team of scientists in a laboratory, which costs me a lot of money, right? Yeah, yeah. Science is not cheap. Yeah. Science, real science is incredibly expensive.

29:46It is. So that's one of the things that folks get that use Epicutus. They get the confidence that that money that they're paying for that product is actually going towards building that new technology. And that's one of the things that Signum and Epicutus is we have this really deep, rich vein of incredible technology and that we'll be bringing to folks that are real believers of the brand. So super exciting. Absolutely. No, I'm very excited. And I cannot say it enough. I love the new Brightening Serum. It's wonderful. It's a great product. And for anyone listening, if you guys are on the lookout for a really, really great efficacious Brightening product, this is the one for you.

30:32You got to check it out. But Max, I mean, thank you so much for coming back on the show and telling us all about what the brand's been up to, what you've been up to. It's really exciting to hear from you guys because I know you're always working on something exciting and new. And I'm just such a fan of everything you're creating. And the same here. I really appreciate your voice in the industry. I think it's a really important one. I think it's unique and what you're doing is so important. I think that's so important, educating consumers, is the first thing that has to happen so people can be much more aware of what they're putting on their skin and what's going, you know, what's going to eventually make it inside their body.

31:12And, you know, you saw it in the food industry. It happened. And I think the same thing has happened happening in the skincare industry. And just great to work with you, people like yourself who are pioneering that change. It's important to have people like you out there. So thank you. Thank you so much, Max. That means the world to me coming from you. That really does. I hope that everyone listening gets something out of these podcasts, but I love learning from, you know, people like you. And so I really encourage everybody, you know, follow our show if you can and learn more. I mean, that's what I'm trying to create as a library.