Nick Allen and Dave Skaff have given men something they didn’t even know they wanted—an enjoyable skincare regimen. In doing so, they are helping take the stigma out of men taking care of themselves. This is self-care for the frictionless era.
In Nick Allen’s previous life, he cofounded two ridesharing companies. One of them was sold to General Motors, the other had to be shut down. While figuring out what to do next, he signed on with General Motors, helping the company work toward the commercialization of autonomous vehicles. On a fateful trip to Korea to assess GM’s resources in the region, Allen decided to buy a gift for his girlfriend. Skincare is a big deal in Korea, and he decided to get her a bunch of products that she might not be able to find stateside. How could she not be thrilled?
She wasn’t. It’s not that she didn’t appreciate the sentiment; rather, none of the products were . . . for her. “She thanked me and told me she loved me, but that the products weren’t quite right for her,” he says. “But I wasn’t about to throw out four hundred dollars’ worth of high-end Korean skincare products, so I decided to try them myself.” Up to that point, Allen was like a lot of men in that he’d never considered himself “a skincare person”—he rarely even washed his face in the shower. But he was instantly hooked. “This doesn’t feel like a chore,” he told himself. “In fact, I really enjoy it. I kind of feel like I’m pampering myself. My skin looks better. It feels better. Wait . . . why don’t more guys do this?”
The next thing he knew, he was taking a bunch of fancy glass bottles with him on the kinds of adventures he and his male friends went on—backcountry skiing or motorcycling in the desert. At the end of the day, when everyone was sunburned or windburned, he’d pull the bottles out and say, “Hey, fellas, do you want to do a Korean facial?” At first, everyone laughed. The next thing he knew, he and five buddies were talking about the fact that while some of them had considered a skincare “regimen,” none of them had ever known where to start.
The entrepreneur in him took over: he decided to research the current state of men’s skincare. How does the average guy do that? While he did find a few brands, including Kiehl’s and Clinique for Men, he also found himself confused. “They tell you to buy this one for oily skin and that one for dry skin,” he says. “But I didn’t know if I had dry skin or oily skin. By the time I got to ‘combination skin,’ I was dead in the water. I don’t even know what that means.” He ended up buying a bunch anyway, for research purposes. “But I didn’t feel very confident in my buying decisions,” he says. “It felt like a shotgun blast.”
Next up: trips to the likes of Macy’s and Neiman Marcus. Set aside the fact that finding men’s skincare products presents a bit of a needle-in-a-haystack challenge in such establishments. It was the unfulfilling conversations that were worse. “I had some woman at a counter trying to sell me four-hundred-dollar-an-ounce La Mer,” he says. “So I asked her why it was four hundred dollars. I did not receive a satisfactory response.” So he walked down the street to Sephora, where he swears a woman in a headset was giving “a spin class for makeup.” He left within about three minutes, worried he was going to have a panic attack.
“I’d tried to buy products in the three most obvious ways one might try to do so,” he says. “And I failed. But it wasn’t just that—I felt stupid, awkward, and kind of embarrassed. No wonder guys didn’t want to do this.”
And so he did what any good entrepreneur does: he decided to figure out how to do it right. “Guys don’t know their skin type,” he says. “They don’t really know what to buy, and they don’t want to go to the store. Our needs are pretty simple: we want a great product, we don’t want to shop around for it, we want it to work, and we don’t want to feel silly about it.”
That’s where Dr. Steve Xu comes in. Allen stumbled on Xu’s name when he read an interesting paper on the efficacy of SPFs that the renowned dermatologist had written in 2016. He tracked down Xu’s number and left him a fairly long voice mail. Two days later, Dr. Xu was on board. “He said, ‘I love this. Guys come into my practice about a little mole on their arm and thirty seconds later, they’re talking about skincare and Botox,’” says Allen, who jumped on the next plane to Chicago and signed him up. (Another Dr. Xu paper, from 2018: “The ‘Dermatologist Recommended’ Label: Is It Meaningful?” In this case, we’re going to bet he says yes.)
Allen also reached out to an old friend, Dave Skaff. For the previous decade, Skaff had been running an e-commerce consulting agency in New York, where he’d seen firsthand the challenges of running direct-to-consumer health and beauty businesses. But he was ready for a change and the two dove right in—Allen took care of product and sourcing and supply chain, and Skaff took over the company’s marketing efforts. (Full disclosure: Skaff is married to Duff’s ex-wife. There may be no better example of a modern family than one in which the ex-husband buys his skincare products from the ex-wife’s new husband.)
They raised a little money—just north of $500,000 from friends and family—and started out on a mission to simplify skincare for men without sacrificing quality in the process. New customers answer a diagnostic questionnaire to determine their skin “profile” and are offered a thirty-day trial set of all four of the company’s products—a daily face wash, morning and night creams, and an eye cream—at a significant discount. When those samples run out, you have the option to sign up for a recurring subscription. At $148 every three months, it’s not the cheapest stuff you can buy. But that’s because it’s also some of the best product on the market. More than 70 percent of those who order the trial set have converted to full subscriptions.
“There’s a lot of crap out there,” says Allen. “And that’s because most brands treat men as an afterthought; they think we won’t even know the difference.” But it’s not just that—50 percent of Geologie’s customers (including one Duff McDonald) are newbies; they’ve never purchased these types of products in their lives. Most end up going through a very similar trajectory too: they start unsure about whether they’ll be able to incorporate a skincare regimen into their daily routine, but before long, they’re looking forward to it as much as any other part of their day. It’s not a chore but a gift to oneself.
How do you make sure that customers stick around in subscription businesses, especially when it comes to something that they might run out of before the next shipment arrives? All without becoming the kind of subscription business that feels oppressive and/or unresponsive? You build functionality that allows ordering-by-text and early requests for refills. And you stay laser-focused on customer service. “Subscription is important to the business,” says Skaff, “but it’s more important for our customers that they’re getting the right stuff when they need it. It’s crucial that we’re able to dial into the cadences that each person has and cater to them. The name of the game today is to be non-oppressive and totally focused on what the customer wants. So far, we’ve been able to achieve that.”
When we ask about the frictionless concept, Allen points to various tools available to start-up founders that simply didn’t exist when he was involved in his previous startups. “Starting a company is anything but frictionless,” he says. “It takes a lot to get going. But we’ve come a long way in five years. The way it used to be, if you wanted to have functionality that enabled your customers who were excited about the brand to tell other people in an easy, seamless way, you had to custom-build it yourself. Today, there are probably ten or fifteen referral programs that are literally plug-and-play, and they only cost about twenty-five dollars a month.”
For his part, Skaff worked with clients who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to do just that, and usually without the desired effect. “There’s a big ball and chain around the ankles of legacy brands that are tied to massive platforms that don’t have any of those benefits,” he says, “and they literally can’t switch them off. The result is that they end up lumbering around when newer businesses like ours can start from the ground up and do so much more so much faster than they will ever be able to do.”
Community is everything these days, and Allen and Skaff aren’t missing out on establishing deeper connections with their customers. In early 2019, they began rolling out a series of social media posts that cover fifty or so topics, including basic skincare regimens, the ingredients in their products, and some good old-fashioned myth busting. “A lot of it is just the stuff that Dave and I have learned going through this process,” says Allen. “There’s a lot of BS out there. Take the new fad of using charcoal face wash. That’s not good for your skin at all.” Everyone hears, at one time or another, about some new product claiming “clean beauty” credentials through the use of “natural” products, but how much of that is science-based versus clever marketing that’s capitalizing on insecurity? The guys at Geologie plan to be there to talk you through such things. Because who else is going to do it?
Allen recalls a meeting he attended in January 2019, during which someone pointed out that not a single man in the room had a clean-shaven face. So attitudes change. What’s more, he adds, some things are more fun to do than others. “Shaving is something no one likes to do,” he says. “It sucks. You’re literally scraping your face off, and sometimes cutting it. But this is different. People like to pamper themselves. So your Dad didn’t use eye cream? So what? A huge part of the message of our brand is that you don’t have to be the man you thought someone else wanted you to be; you have the freedom to be yourself, including doing things that are healthy and good for you.”