Before Corpa Flora, I spent close to twenty years in university research labs — molecular biology at McGill, a stretch at Toronto's Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute during the early years of stem-cell research, and time at the McGill Breast Cancer Centre. None of it was skincare. All of it shaped how I think about formulating it.
What a lab background actually changes
The habit that transferred most directly is discipline about what goes into a formula, and why. In research, you don't add a variable you can't account for — every reagent earns its place because you'll need to explain its effect later. I formulate the same way. Every ingredient in an Antidote serum or a Beauté Divine oil is there because it does something specific for the lipid complex we're building, not because it tested well with a focus group or because a trend called for it.
It's also why everything is developed, manufactured, and packaged under one roof, in our own Montreal lab, rather than through a contract manufacturer. Outsourcing production is normal in this industry and there's nothing wrong with it, but it puts a layer between the person who designed the formula and the person who made the batch. I'd rather not have that layer.
Fewer, better products
The other thing the lab habit changed is my patience for the ten-step routine. Corpa Flora is a small line on purpose — a handful of serums and oils, not forty variations of the same base formula in different scents. Our position is that two or three well-designed products, layered correctly, do more than a shelf of mediocre ones — a case CertClean's editorial team has made from the other direction, arguing more steps isn't automatically a better routine.
That's a harder story to market than a twelve-step ritual, and I'm fine with that. A smaller line is also just easier to actually stand behind — I know what's in all twenty of our products well enough to explain any of them from memory, which stops being true for a brand once it's shipping two hundred SKUs.
