Experiment’s Lisa Guerrera and Emmy Ketcham on creating a brand for the ‘nerdy, smart girl who ends up being cool in adulthood’

Together, they soft-launched their skin-care brand in 2020 with a lime-green silicone sheet mask. Since then, the brand has grown to include products including a glycerin-based hydrating serum, a “micro-slugging” oil gel and a lip balm. Its first cleanser will launch in a few weeks.

In April, Experiment announced a $3.3 million seed round, led by Greycroft.

On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, the duo discusses how they launched the company with $8,500, why theirs is a brand for the “nerdy, smart girl” and why science ultimately beat out “clean” beauty.

Below are highlights from the episode, which have been lightly edited for clarity.

The aesthetics of the brand

Guerrera: “We wanted it to be a brand for … not the cool Glossier girl, but for … the really nerdy or smart girl who ends up being really cool in adulthood. She’s actually the cooler person than the person who’s popular in high school. … We were thinking about millennial pink and the evolution of that to what’s now considered Gen-Z green. … We were actually one of the first brands, I think, to utilize [Gen-Z green] as its brand color. … We decided to make the mask that color because there wasn’t really a color that would make it pretty, regardless. … Why not lean into the ugly and humor and the meme of it all? Why can’t we be a brand that doesn’t take itself too seriously? A lot of clinical brands and a lot of aesthetic, chic brands take themselves very seriously. … We wanted to lean into that, and I felt really strongly that humor was a way to grow online, and it was. And so, when we launched the mask, so many of our customers were like, ‘It’s giving Shrek,’ ‘It’s giving Jim Carrey ‘The Mask.” It was a meme in and of itself to wear it, and it still is today.”

A chemistry-first approach to innovation

Ketcham: “When I formulate a product, I think of innovation as making something that’s better than what’s already on the market. And I don’t care how that happens, aside from quality and safety, of course. I want to make the best product, and I want to use the ingredients that are going to give me the best product, marketing story be damned. At Experiment, the marketing story really does come after the science, the product is made in in the best way possible and then marketing is brought in to figure out how to convey that to the consumer.”

Science wins over ‘clean’ beauty

Guerrera: “We’d seen the trend unfold in real time when we were concepting the brand in 2020 — ‘clean’ still had a really strong foothold. I remember in our first fundraise, I was told by an investor, ‘You know, ‘clean’ beauty is table stakes.’ And I said, ‘I will bet you $100 million that it’s not.’ … We didn’t take their investment. … I felt confident clean beauty was gonna decline. … The pendulum eventually will swing back the other way because science, at the end of the day, is true, whether you believe it or not. [‘Clean’] doesn’t really mean much. So at the end of the day, it will eventually be a trend, right? And I think we’ve seen that evolution in real-time. … In our second fundraise, [I saw] multiple vc firms that I had talked to previously switch their thesis to ‘clinically-backed beauty,’ when they used to focus on ‘clean’ — and we became a hot little commodity because we actually had clinical backing for all of our products. We were two chemists. We actually really cared about science and the clinical story of our products.”