IN a few weeks’ time, Eric Delapenha, a genetics biologist, and his team of 14 employees, hope to launch, in Walmart stores across the United States, his newest innovation, a range of personalised skincare products under the brand, the Body Lab by Strands, after first making the products available on the company’s e-commerce site in late July.

It is the third brand launched by Strands Hair Care, a company founded by Delapenha in 2018, though no products were launched until 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But for Delapenha, who was born in Kingston, Jamaica and migrated to the United States at the age of 14 to attend boarding school “in the cold of Connecticut”, things could have turned out differently, had he followed the traditional career path — doctor or lawyer — that most Jamaican parents carve out in the minds of their children.

“I was originally down that path of becoming a doctor and I realised I didn’t want to go to school for ‘50 years’ and then be in debt,” Delapenha acknowledged, citing that US medical school is “incredibly expensive”.

“Ultimately, I decided that, ‘hey, I want to get into biotech’, and I started in biotech out of University of Southern California.”

Still he admits that the entrepreneurial bug that led him to start Strands Hair Care in 2018 was instilled in him from he was a child. Delapenha said while in school in the United States, his summers spent in Jamaica around people who were running their own businesses drove his own interest in doing the same.

“I’ve always wanted to try and do my own thing and prove myself and I could do it also in the US and so I started Strands back in 2018,” he told the Jamaica Observer in a recent interview. But he said the itch grew even more when he was in college.

“And when I went home, everyone was supportive, family and friends who run their own business. They constantly tell me that if you are not going to be a doctor or lawyer, you should try and work for yourself in some way, even if you fail and they constantly reinforce that I should not come out and work for anyone,” he continued.

He said then, he was making business pitches every two weeks, some which he said looking back were “stupid”, but showed his hunger.

But getting into actual business would have to wait.

Delapenha said when he left college he first went to work for Fulgent Genetics, a biotech company for which he was employed in business development and tasked with selling genetic tests to doctors.

“I hated it because I wasn’t good at it,” he said. “Everyone at the company basically had a PhD in genomics. They were brilliant people and in order to sell something new like that to doctors, you have to have a PhD, because they are asking you in-depth questions that are very technical.”

Still, he said the experience gained there would be valuable for him in his own company, especially with helping him to develop a hard skin “from constantly getting no’s” when he tried to sell the products he was assigned.

But finding it hard to sell genetic tests to doctors, Delapenha and a group of colleagues approached the executives at Fulgent and made a proposal to start a consumer division within the company. He was there for a year after that, helping to put the concept together, before he left to start his own entity.

About that time, 23andMe, the US-based biotechnology firm that does DNA genetic testing for ancestry and health purposes, was just about taking off, helping consumers to understand what a gene was and why it was important to understand genomics.

“It’s really the foundation of the idea for Strands, where I became obssessed with this model where you can analyse a biological substrate, in this case, your genome, get accurate quantitative data and then leverage that data to drive a personalise treatment,” he said.

But he said when he looked at consumer products, he saw most being designed through guesswork, and that left him frustrated.

“I saw this really happening in haircare, where I saw companies coming out and saying, ‘Hey, we can create a personalised formula for you, you can just take this quiz’, and when you go on and take these quizzes, it’s just you guessing. Like, for example, for haircare, I don’t know what my hair texture is and the thickness down to the micro metre. I don’t know what my scalp oil level is and in reference to what? So all of these different quizzes only create guesswork and break the promise of customisation that should be designing products to fit the consumer directly,” he stated.

He said, having seen that issue, he set out to take genetics to create better haircare products with a new company. Delapenha said with that desire, he started Strands Hair Care and spent two years fund-raising for the company, which he describes as the 23andMe for haircare.

Products were developed for consumers who were sent a kit that they use to test for scalp oil levels and resend it to the company along with hair samples for testing in the lab where scientists analyse the strands, and then create thousands of iterations of haircare products based on data for biological factors such as hair texture, protein analysis, and cuticle integrity.

“So it is the most accurate haircare product based on data, all of which is individualised.”

Yet he pointed out, “We don’t need to create an individual product for all eight billion people on the planet to solve everybody’s hair need,” and have instead created about 6,000 shampoos and conditioners for specific hair profile categories.

And the customisation means the products are not cheap — at US$25 for 8 ounces of shampoo or conditioner — and which were launched in 2020. He said at the start, the company offered the products through e-commerce and “saw a lot of really good traction from that, because a lot of people were stuck at home, people were investing in their beauty, skincare, their wellness routines, and of course, hair.”

But things were about to change. Delapenha said after being on the market for only a couple of months, he got a direct message from Walmart, the US retail giant, who wanted to offer the product through its stores, but he said he thought the message was fake, so he and his colleague ignored it, but then started to get emails asking for a response.

“And so we ended up setting up a call and they initially wanted to put our Strands test kits actually next to 23andMe, which is just kind of a weird, full-circle moment, because I was working in genetics and now they want to put our test kits next to 23andMe, but I’ll tell you, I told them no.”

He said he didn’t think Strands would work in a retail store like Walmart because of the price of the product and also because of the customers that Walmart caters to. And so, he offered to develop a new brand for Walmart called the Hair Lab by Strands.

“We started these conversations with Walmart in early 2021 when they first reached out to us. We ultimately spent a year developing the Hair Lab, and we launched it only in retail in 2,500 stores.”

The products were launched on August 15, 2022, almost two years ago to the day.

Altogether he said 16 products — three base shampoos, three conditioners and 10 precision doses.

“The concept is still customisation. The whole concept is, we all have varying different hair types, so we need to be able to customise it with different things that address our specific needs.”

He said the 16 products can be used to create 1,000 possible combinations, which, while not as personalised as the more expensive Strands brand that has 6,000 possible combinations, still offers “a step change in what the consumer is used to in mass retail that is way, way, way in the future compared to anything that sits there on shelves today”.

Delapenha said the launch of the products was an expensive endeavour. From 2018 to the end of 2023, the company raised US$10 million to support its development with the original capital, about US$3 million, coming from family, friends, and investors in Jamaica. Now it has a venture capital backing the company with the main investor being KarpReilly LLC, based in Connecticut. He said eventually, he may see one of the ‘Big Five’ consumer beauty care companies making an offer for the company as they usually do, sometime in the future.

Now, he looks to the Body Lab by Strands, the latest innovation from the company aiming to bring the same customised solutions for skincare that he has brought to haircare to drive the next phase of growth for Strands after seeing sales of the haircare products in Walmart hitting US$10million in 2023.

“We see an extremely bright future for our ability to scale this beyond Walmart into new retailers, both in the US and internationally,” he said, though he told the Business Observer that he could not yet share which retailers he is having discussions with to carry the products on their shelves. But he said Canada and the UK are two strong markets that are being targeted.

Retail represents over 60 per cent of the company’s sales and it has also shifted to using brand ambassadors — people with a few hundred or a few thousand followers on social media who are actual users of the products — to drive more sales on the retail side.

He said he is now moving back to Jamaica and will do so this month, with plans to invest in local ventures as his own brands mature and take on lives of their own. Delapenha also said he would like to leverage his connections with Walmart to help get authentic Jamaican products into the mass market in the US.

“There is still not a lot of awareness around Jamaican-owned products throughout the US, and so I want to see if I can bridge that opportunity,” he said.