Your Business is a Portland skincare lab making one face cream, in small batches, with fully disclosed ingredients. Founded in 2021 by Marin Kessler, who spent nine years formulating skincare for somebody else, then decided she wanted to make a single product she'd actually use.
We are eight people. We make one thing. We promise we'll never make a serum.
I'm Marin Kessler. I worked in formulation at a heritage skincare house in New York for nine years. I had access to every ingredient I could imagine, a bench of scientists I respected, and a calendar of seasonal launches that asked me to ship a new face oil every fall whether the world needed one or not.
By 2018 my own skin was a mess. Twelve products in the morning. A different twelve at night. Three medicine cabinets, two of them full of half-used jars I'd kept "for the data," and a barrier so over-exfoliated I couldn't put on sunscreen without it stinging. I had become exactly the customer my industry was built to create.
So in 2019 I quit. I moved to Portland with my partner and my dog, rented a studio above a bike shop, and spent three years collapsing the routine that had ruined my skin into a single jar. The Daily Balm is what I built. It's the only cream I use. It's the only one I'd want to bring on a long trip.
I had a lot of arguments along the way with people who wanted me to launch with three SKUs. The case for one product is: you can spend ten times the R&D budget on it. You can be sure of every ingredient. You can stand behind every decision. You can write the label honestly. And when something goes wrong — a customer's skin reacts, a batch comes back inconsistent — you fix it on one formula, not five.
We get asked, weekly, when we're going to add a serum. The answer is "we won't." We get asked when we're going to add a cleanser. We won't. A toner, a body lotion, a sleep mask. No. We will, eventually, sell something else — but only if we can answer the question "is this a better version of something we'd otherwise have to use?" and only if we can sell it without making The Daily Balm worse.
If we ever do, we'll write a long letter explaining why. And if we never do, we'll keep selling this one jar, in small batches, for as long as people want it.
After nine years at a heritage skincare house in New York, Marin moves to Portland and starts working on a single product instead of a seasonal calendar.
Working out of a 400-square-foot studio above a Portland bike shop. Most of the early formulas were bad. The notebooks from this year are now Field Notes, Vol. 01.
$42, one SKU, 600 jars sold to a list of 800 friends in the first week. We hand-packed every order in the studio kitchen.
The first refill pod ships. By the end of the year, 41% of customers are on the refill subscription, and we've shipped 12,000 fewer plastic jars than we would have otherwise.
We commission Princeton Consumer Research to run an independent, no-retouching study. 92% of participants see measurable barrier improvement.
Eight people. One product. 60,000 active customers. Still based in Portland. Still no serum. Still saying no, on purpose, every week.
If we break any of these, we expect you to write to us about it. So far, every quarter, we've held the line.
We will print the concentration of every active on the box. If we ever can't, we won't put the active in the formula. No proprietary blends, no hand-waving language, no "complex" hiding a percentage you can't see.
We will make one cream, and only that cream, until and unless we can answer "why this, also?" with a paragraph we'd be proud to publish. We've turned down two acquisition offers and one investor over this.
If your skin doesn't look measurably better in 30 days of consistent use, we'll refund you without asking for the jar back. We'd rather you give it to a friend than have it sit half-empty on your shelf.
Small, on purpose. We hire when there's a job we can't do anymore, and not before. Everyone here has touched the cream — packing, formulating, shipping, replying.
Marin KesslerCosmetic chemist, ex-heritage house. Designs the formula and writes most of these long sentences. Lives in NE Portland with two cats.
Dr. Aniya PatelPhD in dermatology from UPenn. Reviews every claim before it goes on the box and edits the journal. Joined us in 2023.
Tomas QuirogaRuns the small-batch facility and the refill program. Knows the airless pump tooling better than anyone in the building.
Jenna LiuReplies to every email personally. If you've written in to us, you've heard from Jenna. Probably about ceramides.
We work out of a 4,200-square-foot facility in northwest Portland. Every batch is mixed there, filled into the pumps there, and shipped from there on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Nothing is co-packed.
The lab is open by appointment for press, retailers, and customers visiting Portland. We'd ask you to keep visits short — Tomas runs a tight schedule — but we love showing the place. Email us if you'd like to drop by.
The building is solar-paneled, the freight is offset via Pachama, and the warehouse runs on rainwater for cleaning. None of that is a marketing line; it's just the cheapest way to run a small facility honestly.
Either is fine with us. The 30-day glow guarantee means you can buy a jar and decide later. The journal means you can decide first.
Shop The Daily Balm Read the journal