From 2004 to 2017 I ran my own skincare brand. I was the customer: the person who placed the order, waited for the run and hoped it would arrive on time.

Among brand owners there was a joke we all told. Once you have placed your order with a manufacturer, the only way to reach them is by fax. And underneath the fax machine, they keep a shredder.

Everyone laughed, because everyone had lived it. The quote came fast and the attention came fast, right up until the purchase order was signed. After that, questions went unanswered, dates moved without a call, and a small brand learned exactly how small it was.

The one thing we decided to be first at

When I started Formology Lab in 2017, I knew we would not be the biggest manufacturer in Los Angeles, or the oldest. So we picked one thing to be number one at: customer service. Not as a slogan on the website, but as the test for every decision about how the plant is built and run.

It turns out that one decision makes a lot of the others for you.

What it led to

A regulatory team in the building. If you take customer service seriously, you cannot answer “can I sell this in Canada?” or “what can my label claim?” with “ask a consultant”. So we built a full regulatory team on site, down the hall from the floor, to help our brands go to whichever country they want to go to.

Ordering by price or by minimum. A brand at the start and a brand at scale want different things. Some need to know what a unit will cost; others need to know the smallest run they can make. We were the first to let customers order a formula either way: with a price, or with a minimum order quantity, and choose the one that fits where the brand is today.

OTC for brands that are not giants. Until we opened that door, most OTC factories only made very large quantities, and setting up an OTC formula, a sunscreen for example, was extremely expensive. That kept a whole category out of reach for the brands that needed it most. We became an FDA-registered OTC manufacturer so that a growing brand could make a drug product without betting the company on the first run.

None of these were in a business plan. Each one came from asking what the customer on the other end of the fax machine would have wanted.

From the fax machine to the factory floor

The question brands ask us most is not about chemistry. It is “where is my order?” On most factory floors, answering it means walking out to the line, finding the one person who knows, and calling back tomorrow. That is the fax machine again, only slower.

So over the last two years we rebuilt the plant around software we wrote ourselves. One system holds every order, formula, batch, lot and quality check. In-line cameras watch the three filling lines around the clock, and AI counts the units as they are filled. A fill weight, a cap or a label that drifts is flagged while the batch is still running, not found in a carton a week later.

Every unit that ships can be traced back to its lot, its formula version and the tests it passed. When a brand asks where its run stands, the answer comes from the system the same day, and our team can ask it in plain English what was filled today and what is waiting in QC.

AI does the counting, the checking and the remembering. People still make the product and make the decisions. The hours nobody spends chasing paperwork now go to the customer, which was the point from the start.

What comes next

We are still asking that question, and lately the answer keeps coming back to peptides. Brands want them, and the demand is real. The hard part is the science: peptide manufacturing is a very complicated process, and very few scientists do this kind of work well, so finding them takes time.

We have started. I will write more about it here soon.

And for the record: there is no fax machine at Formology Lab. If you want to reach us, we pick up.

— Oren Ezra