Dr. Kyle Landry: Co-founder & President of Delavie Sciences

Episode 620

On this episode of The Kara Goldin Show, I’m joined by Dr. Kyle Landry, Co-Founder and President of Delavie Sciences, a brand on a mission to revolutionize skincare through cutting-edge science. Their first product, Aeonia, is terrific and uses Bacillus Lysate, a groundbreaking skincare ingredient that’s making waves in the beauty industry for its age-defying properties.
In our conversation, Dr. Landry shares his journey from academia to entrepreneurship, his partnership with renowned scientist Dr. David Sinclair, and the rigorous research and testing that went into developing Delavie’s signature ingredient. We discuss the future of skincare, the role of science in developing truly innovative products, and how Delavie Sciences is poised to disrupt the skincare market with its commitment to transparency and proven results. If you’re interested in the intersection of science, skincare, and innovation, this is an episode you won’t want to miss. Tune in now on The Kara Goldin Show!

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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be you. Just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and really, some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi everyone. It’s Kara Goldin. Welcome back to our show. I am so excited to have our next guest here today. We have Kyle Landry, who is the co founder and president of an incredible, incredible company. We’ll talk about his first brand that he has underneath that. It’s called Delavie Sciences and he’s an incredible innovator high tech skincare. And we’ll get into exactly what makes it high tech. He’s a scientist whose expertise in studying extremophiles Is that right, there we go. And if you don’t know what those are, we’ll we’ll get the definition in just a moment. But that’s led him to revolutionize the beauty industry with this first product called Aeonia, which is absolutely terrific. So without further ado, I want to get into his journey and give him time to really share a lot more about the product and what’s so cool about it. But more than anything, welcome

Dr. Kyle Landry 1:49
to the show Kyle so thank you so much for having me

Kara Goldin 1:53
absolutely. So first of all, let’s kick things off. For those who don’t know Delavie Sciences, what’s your elevator pitch for the brand?

Dr. Kyle Landry 2:03
So the elevator pitch is Delavie Sciences is innovative. Because not only do we have amazing products, but we have our own patented, exclusive ingredients you can’t get anywhere else. So we innovate on both sides and in cosmetics, you know, you tend to just have products with celebrities on them, or products with the same ingredients that are just marketed a different way. We are completely different. We are building our products from the ground up, from the basic ingredients to the final product you get. So it’s an experience you can’t get anywhere else.

Kara Goldin 2:37
And what is the kind of key piece of this, I guess, that you saw really missing and that you thought you could solve.

Dr. Kyle Landry 2:44
Yeah, so a little bit about myself, just to kind of dovetail it in, you know, I’m from the academic research in drug development side, and the mindset there is, you know, you’re looking to create products or create drugs that go after key indications here and in the cosmetic space, it’s a little different, because when you make products, you go to a formulator, or you look at an at a catalog, and you pick ingredients to, you know, make a product. But the actual innovation of making new ingredients was kind of missing, so we took a different approach here, where we said, you know, we’re going to look at the visible signs of aging. We’re going to look at the molecular drivers of aging, and create ingredients that are scientifically proven and clinically proven to impact those key indications, and then build a cosmetic product around that, instead of saying, we want to make a cosmetic product that does XYZ. So we’re looking at the fundamentals, first, at the sides, first, how can we make something effective and then go forward and decide to make a product or not? So it’s a little different than what you would see in traditional cosmetic product development.

Kara Goldin 3:59
So I bet you never thought that you would be in the skincare beauty industry. You went from food science to to skin care, a few stops in between, I think. But can you, can you explain a little bit about that, and how did you find yourself on this path? Yeah, so

Dr. Kyle Landry 4:21
that’s a great point. And I always tell people, you know, always keep your doors open. A lot of people try to say, I only want to do this, or I only want to study this, or I’m only interested in this, and then you end up closing a lot of doors or not even seeing the doors before they’re even presented to you. So I started out as a food scientist, and I was going to go into industry. And then I decided to stay on for graduate degrees, mostly because there were opportunities there that were presented. And I said, You know what, why not? Let me just go for it. And then at the end of my PhD, I was going to go directly into. In academia and teach. But then I received a phone call from David Sinclair from Harvard Medical School. And he goes, Hey, Dr Landry. I was like, oh, it’s Kyle. You know, what’s going on? Very casual. He’s like, you know, I’m researching some of your papers. You seem to be one of the only people in the world doing this. Do you want to, you know, do a postdoc in my lab. And I was like, hmm, because at the time, I was also filming a TV show. So this is something else that no one kind of knows about, but I was filming a TV show, and I filmed one and a half pilots, pilot episodes that were being pitched to focus groups. And I had to decide, do I want to go on reality TV in the space of, you know, collectibles area, or go do my postdoc at Harvard Medical School, or go be a professor in academia? So obviously, I picked the postdoc, and that was another example of the option. And David studies longevity. So as a food scientist, I’m not I was not in longevity space at all, but I figured, you know what, it’s good to be a little uncomfortable instead of staying in your comfortable space and just moving on. So I took the leap, and from there, it’s been a wild ride. David and I filed a patent around an extremophile, which, for the people who don’t know, extremophiles or organisms that live and thrive in extreme environments, so that could be high temperature, low temperature, high salt, low pH, all these extreme things where you would think life would not exist, they grow. So we filed a patent, and I was approached by a group and they said, Hey, would you be interested in, you know, being employee one of a quasi governmental company that focused on biological warfare, and again, being a food scientist who now goes into longevity is now going into a different area. I said, You know what? I might as well try it. I got nothing to lose. And that led to about six and a half, seven years of doing amazing research with multiple government agencies around the world. And then that led to another discovery that started my direction now down towards developing drugs for diabetes, specifically diabetic foot ulcers, which is a secondary condition of diabetes. And again, I’m like, You know what? I’m just going to go for and try. I learned and adapted. And then that led to trying to decontaminate the International Space Station, because the drug we were developing for diabetes to treat the wounds had amazing effect at cleaning bacteria in water systems, and that was plaguing the International Space Station. So we started working with NASA and the Jet Propulsion Labs, and that’s when we were introduced to this novel extremophile that was put outside the International Space Station for 18 months. It survived when it was brought back down. And while working with NASA, we saw a great opportunity to try to commercialize or make something out of this technology. And here we are today. It’s a wild ride. And how? And people, you know, say, How could you do you know, all this seems so different. Well, science is the second universal language. Math is one, and then science is there. And as long as you understand the fundamentals of science and what you can do with that, you can apply it to so many different problem sets, but it’s just taking the leap to do it gets you going. So

Kara Goldin 8:45
what was the biggest challenge then, in taking bacillus lysate from a research idea to an actual product? Yeah,

Dr. Kyle Landry 8:53
so that was a huge undertaking. So it’s one thing to do something and prove it scientifically for academic paper or a little project, but to go from a test tube to make it in 15,000 liter reactors, and for people, that’s like two and a half story tall reactors to produce it a scale for industry, it takes a lot of innovation, a lot of time, and honestly, it was unknown. And scale up is a part, whether you’re making ingredients or drugs, where you have to see if it can fit within the limitations of commercializing a product, both from the financial side, but also from the feasibility technology side. So we took it, we did one project at a time, and we had to tweak a lot of things along the way, but we had to also develop a novel piece of equipment or accessories to help us produce the product. So it took about two and a half years, two years to go from a test to to a medium sized reactor, and then it took maybe. Another six months or so to get to the big react, which we’re on today, which is allows us to produce 1000s of kilos at a time. And

Kara Goldin 10:07
so what changes does this really do to the skin? And it’s over time. But can you explain a little bit about what what it does actually to the skin? Ania, that is your first product. Yeah. Delabe sciences,

Dr. Kyle Landry 10:23
so the bacillus lysate is interesting because no one would ever think of a organism NASA was studying to decontaminate spacecraft with skincare. But this is where you have to look between the lines and and this is where in business you know you need to find the gray area or the space that you can fill and take advantage of. So the bacillus lysate, because it was put outside the space station, it was exposed to a whole host of radiation, including UV. Now on Earth, why do we care about UV? Well, UV light is what we try to block with sunscreen, because it can lead to skin cancer. Now in space, the amount of radiation is astronomical. No pun intended there for the amount you would get exposed to. But here on Earth, you know we care about UVA and UVB. So when NASA was researching the organism, they were able to show that it could survive under UVC radiation. UVC, we don’t really care about the ozone blocks it, but we were like, Let’s see if we can make it extend its protection into UVA and UVB, which is what we care about. UVA is what leads to fine lines and wrinkles. It leads to accelerated visible signs of aging in the skin, and UVB is what leads to skin cancer in terms of exposure. So we took a shot, and we took the organism and we worked on it during that two and a half year period, and were able to create an ingredient that could block those two wavelengths, UVA and UVB, which is important for sunscreen. Now, why do we care about that at all? There’s tons of sunscreens on the market. Well, if you look at the pressure that’s going on in the sunscreen industry, a lot of activists and consumers do not like certain UV filters that are in sunscreen because some are linked to health issues, some are linked to environmental issues. And in the United States, sunscreen is a drug, which means you have to go through the same extensive drug pathway as you would for a cholesterol medication. And people may see this is crazy, it’s sunscreen. Why do you have to do that? Well, that’s what it is in United States. So because you have this pressure to minimize the use of approved drugs, and you have the lack of innovation, because no one wants to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create an ingredient that the industry will only support. You know, paying dollars per kilo, right? The economy of scale is not there. Making the money back, the amount of investment you put in to make it is not there. So we decided to go in the SPF booster area, and this is where it’s an ingredient that enhances the efficacy of current UV filters. And this is an interesting space, because you don’t fall under the FDA drug requirements, because you are not the main active but you help with these environmental and health issues, because you do not have to use as much of those UV filters that people are concerned about. So this was a little niche area we decided to go after, and that was the first indication from bacillus lysate. But being in the longevity space, we decided to test what else this could do. Because if it can block and protect from UV, it has to be doing something in the longevity area. And this is where we started experimenting. David and I, with our backgrounds now on longevity in Harvard, we started looking at things like sirtuin activation and sirtuins are a key driver of longevity. If you upregulate them, you have a whole host of beneficial properties, both at the molecular level, the genetic level and at the physical level. We also noticed that the ingredients stimulated your body’s ability to make hyaluronic acid. Now, people love hyaluronic acid and cosmetics, but the question is, does it absorb through the skin, and how long does it stay there? Now, Bacillus lysate, because it tells your body to make its own it’s very effective. It’s more efficacious. Nothing is more effective than your own hyaluronic acid. And then we started looking at some of the protective factors, and we noticed that it stops the formation of radicals, which are high energy particles that cause destruction in your skin, that form from UVA exposure from the sun. So not only do you have you know the benefits. If it’s using sunscreens, but now you have these longevity benefits that improve and bio optimize your skin. So this is an example where we were like, Hey, we have this ingredient does all these things. Let’s try to make a product around it, because it’s so efficacious, let’s do it. So we had no intention of going into the skincare, beauty longevity space, but we discovered the tools to make a very effective product, and decided to move forward with that.

Kara Goldin 15:32
So really interesting explanation. We actually I had developed a product called hint, and I actually had a sunscreen as well. So I went through that entire process with the FDA, which was loads of fun, and finally did get our sunscreen approved, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t super easy. We were probably, if not, the first, first reef save sunscreen. We were one of the first, and really called attention to some of the stuff that wasn’t in sunscreens. But super, super interesting. So just so people understand too. So how often do you use aonia? What is sort of the suggestion, the suggestion. And, you know, what would people see? It sounds like not just the you’re you’re not going to see the the UV boost, but you’re going to see it helping wrinkles and etc. And, yeah, if you could just explain that a little bit. Yeah. So

Dr. Kyle Landry 16:38
the aonia line right now features three products we have. We have a serum. We actually have two types of serums. We have the original serum, the gentle serum, and we have an eye cream. We’re actually launching a Sculpting Cream this month in November, and we’re finishing out the line next year with the sunscreen. Now aonia. We want to make it super simple. One of the big tricks in cosmetics is to skew someone, which means to offer so many skews that they think they have to buy 10 products to get efficacy. We want to go the opposite route, right? We want to make the routine super simple, where you have your serum, you have your moisturizer, and you have your sunscreen, call it a day, and you have an eye cream. If you want to use an eye cream, some people do, some people don’t, but we have the option there. So with aionia, if you use the serum, use it morning and night. Our bottle has a pre primed pump so you know exactly how much to use every time. You don’t have to guess the eye cream. If you choose to use that, use it in the morning, and then the Sculpting Cream, when that comes out. Again, that’s morning and night application. The aonia line is just the first though of the innovations we have coming in de la V and I think it’s very important to highlight that, you know, as a business and moving forward, you don’t want to be a one trick pony, right? I mean, you can, you could do something really well, but you have to be able to scale and grow and and decide if you want to vertically integrate with someone or go through an exit and, and I’m not saying we’re planning all that, but we always have to have growth and buy as we move forward, definitely.

Kara Goldin 18:19
So another thing that that companies founders have to make decisions on, and especially if you have patents as as you do, are you an ingredient company, or are you a brand? And for people who haven’t thought about that, if you have a special sauce, so to speak, that maybe you have a patent on it. Maybe there’s other companies that are going to want to have some of this, purchase some of this, and put it in their products. What is your position on that? Yeah, that’s

Dr. Kyle Landry 18:50
a very delicate balance that we have to do here. So because we never intentionally decided to come out with consumer care products right away, we’re focused on the ingredient side. We have been selling our ingredient, but only to sunscreen manufacturers, so we’re very intentional. We sell bacillus lysate and allow other companies to use it. That’s outside of our playing field. So hair care is a great example. We are not making shampoos and conditioners, but there are companies that have found adding basil lysate to shampoos protects dyed hair from being bleached. It’s beneficial to the scalp microbiome, so it has great control there for scalp health, and is a great conditioner overall. So we’re happy to partner with companies that are outside of our playing field. But with longevity, you know, we’re in a sweet spot, because we understand longevity, both from a molecular level with our expertise, but also from ingredient development, so we know really what to tackle. Now, that’s also true with our other ingredients that we’re creating. Right? We have the option to. Go out and sell our ingredients to other companies and be a commodity, or we could build brands. So you know our position now is, we’re building the Daily V science brand, which is going to be the overarching technology brand that then has columns or pillars of sub brands underneath aonia being one, aonia is a longevity brand that focuses on bacillus lysate. It’s the key ingredient that trips in all these longevity check boxes, and we have the scientific proof and the clinical proof to back it, right? So that’s aonia. Our new ingredient that’s coming out, we’re actually announcing at the end of this year, is going to be focused on cleansing and toning. So we’re going to have an amazing face wash and toner come out that features Harvard Medical School patent to technology. This is my patent and David Sinclair’s patent from Harvard, and we have amazing clinical data around the efficacy. But again, we have the option. Do we want to sell this ingredient as well while also building our brand, or do we want to keep it embargoed and siloed to really add value to that brand? And I’m leaning more towards the latter. One for the face wash and toner group here,

Kara Goldin 21:18
that’s awesome. So what’s been the most challenging part of building a brand you’ve been on sort of the the back end of of building, and you obviously have done clinical trials and have a lot of the science behind it, which, sadly, that is not what exists, both in in food as well as as in, in beauty. So what has been kind of the most, maybe the most surprising, most challenging part of of developing and and scaling this brand. I mean, you’re brand new in terms of a on yeah and, but actually, what has been the most surprising and challenging.

Dr. Kyle Landry 22:02
So cutting through the noise has been really hard, and we had a great launch, and we cut through the noise perfectly, because we are certified space technology. Not only do we have patents, but we’re certified space technology. And NASA itself has released articles about us that is very rare for any CPG group to have backing by government agencies. Okay, the problem, though, is once you get through that noise, then it’s all about scale and exposure. So our customer repeat rate is very, very high, you know, over 50% even upper 60s for our products. The problem we’re having is getting it into as many people’s hands as possible, and that’s where the money comes into play for marketing. And so you can have the best product in the world, but if no one hears about it, it’s you’re in a little echo chamber. And I’ll tell you an example, though, where it’s a little different. So when we launched the serum, which was in October of 2022, did we launch a one product? And I remember at the time, I was talking to our chairman of the holding company. And he goes, just try to make a few products. See if people buy it, you know, see what it is. We go, okay. So we made, you know, I think 10,000 units, something like that. And then we launched with no advertising, no nothing. And I think we did just under half a million dollars in a month and a half from word of mouth, from word of mouth with one skew. And then we launched our eye cream in February of 23 and we sold out in four hours because, you know, people were spying the serum, spreading it from word of mouth, word of mouth, it’s going, it’s going, it’s going. And then when we watch another product, they have the trust and faith in the product. They go into it, and it’s been exploding like that, but competing, you know, on the SEO, on the ads, all those type of things. You know, you’re playing with big players who had very deep pockets, you could spend 150,000 $200,000 a month on a campaign. And then, you know, the targeted keyword searches may not be on everyone’s top search list when you do something, so you have to strike the balance. So it was basically understanding that the marketing machine, you can have a great product, but it’s understanding the marketing machine and how to really get it in front of people that I, you know, as a scientist, I had no exposure. I’ll be I’ll be honest. You know, I came from a lab research, creating things. I’ve had some business training, but for the marketing side, I was a. You know, it’ll just catch, you know, go, and it gets to a ceiling pretty quick. And then you have to dump more rain and do a different angle, to try different exposures. And it’s just being to see that and adapt to it was, has been the most difficult in my mind. You know, producing a product, producing an ingredient, doing hardcore science, you know, it’s to me, it’s whatever, but it’s a it’s kind of the softer thing there that is, is a little surprising for me,

Kara Goldin 25:28
but you’re learning a whole new industry, which is pretty, you know, can be super challenging doing that. I, prior to launching the beverage, hint I was, I was in tech and and so I had, you know, no real idea of how products got to market. I had, you know, knew what grocery stores were, and saw a Coke and Pepsi truck here and there, but I never really understood exactly how this came to be. And it wasn’t until later, when we launched our direct to consumer platform. That’s what my experience was in, where I was able to take a lot of that experience and bring it into an industry. But again, like it’s, you know, rolling up your sleeves and knowing that it’s probably not as hard as it might seem today, once you actually, once it clicks, right? Yeah. So you’re you’ve done a lot of amazing things so and currently you’re online only, right? You’re not doing offline.

Dr. Kyle Landry 26:30
No, we’re only online. But another surprising thing is, a lot of clinicians, both like cosmetic plastic surgeons, breast implant or explant surgeons have been using our product, and they actually sell it in their practices, because they’ve seen some other great results, right? I mean, the reduction in fine lines and wrinkles, hyperpigmentation, all these other things that people are concerned about after they go through a process of protocol, you know, the aonia line works great on it. So we have physicians emailing us saying, Hey, I’d like to carry this in my office. Can you do wholesale with us? So we started, we’ve started doing that. We’ve started to look at, you know, Omni channel distribution to really get it growing either other e commerce or even some brick and mortar, maybe mid to late next year, but right now, we’re purely D to C on our platform. That’s

Kara Goldin 27:33
great. So last question, what does success look like to you, both for gallery sciences, and I guess for you personally, is it about growth impact or something entirely different?

Dr. Kyle Landry 27:46
So daily sciences continue to launch great products and continue to scale, and eventually, you know, be in different places that people expect high quality products to be. This could be retail. It could be e com, retail, right? It could be on other platforms. That is the growth. And I want to get you know our growth through a certain number where we’re like, serious we become a serious contender. I mean, we’re doing great now. We’re doing great sales, record sales moving forward. But I want to go to the next level, right? I want to add an extra zero or two at the end of the revenue number for me, but personally, I just like seeing people use the product. And not because it’s like, oh, it’s something our team here created. It’s because I know how impactful it is. I know the benefits. You know, we see testimonies, we have people emailing us saying, you know, I’ve had this, I’ve had this scar. I had this for a long time, and this actually took care of it in, you know, a week or two, you know, I’ve had under eye bags my whole life now I can, you know, it’s so much better. And hyper pigmentation is a big one, and this is kind of where it settled in. So when we did our clinical trials, you know, we had great results for everything, but a bunch of subjects came to me and our team and said, Hey, can we talk to you about something? And at first I was like, Oh, my God, it’s bad. Like, what is this like? You know, we didn’t learn about hyperpigmentation in your product brief, but we started noticing, you know, our age spots are going our melasma type things are going away. You know, this is really helpful. This is impactful. And can we talk about this? Can we write about this? Can we and then, of course, like, yeah, yeah, of course, of course. But the scientist, to me, is like, what is going on? So we went back in the lab and we looked at all the pathways it was impacting, and we had great results. I mean, we were showing 46% reduction in melanin in tissue culture cells, and that was almost lighting up perfectly with what we were getting from the clinical trial on people. It was phenomenal. And just having that impact, where someone can use. A product, and they feel good about themselves, but they also see changes, and people around them come and see changes. That’s like, the ultimate success. It’s not someone using big, Oh, I feel amazing. It’s when people say, Hey, I was walking to work, and this is the first time people have said, well, what are you doing with your skin? Like, what’s changed? What? Why does it look so much better? And that makes me feel good, because we’re actually helping people with the product.

Kara Goldin 30:26
No, I love it. So Kyle, thanks so much for joining us, and we’ll have all the info in the show notes for de la vie sciences. And we’re excited not only about Ania, but also the new products that are coming out, and I can’t wait to watch your entire company grow. So thank you again. Thanks everyone for listening. Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit, and of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms. At Kara Goldin, I would love to hear from you too. So feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building hint, we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening and goodbye for now. You.

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