To say Eighth Day, a skin care line created by cosmetic dermatologist and micrographic reconstructive surgeon Dr. Tony Nakhla, has been on the fast-track is an understatement. Launched at Indie Beauty Expo just six months ago, this luxury range—fueled by a proprietary blend of more than 600 bio-identical human stem cell proteins—is not only selling out on NeimanMarcus.com, but the luxury retailer is adding it to brick and mortar doors from New York City to Dallas to San Francisco. Dr. Nakhla shares his story of product development, the need for qualified personnel, and more that comes when creating a brand in demand.

I started this company because: I wanted to give my patients, friends, and family the best chance possible to feel and look their best without having to rush to cosmetic procedures, which can often make you lose your own individuality. My advice to patients has always been to use the highest potency skin care products combined with the least aggressive cosmetic procedures. This results in the most natural and classically beautiful/timeless result. Eighth Day became the most important tool in my arsenal within my own practice and on an international scale.

The hero product in our line is: Regenerating Serum is our highest potency product with more than 600 unique human stem cell proteins and our patent-pending bio-identical technology. Human skin is an organ with unique properties and it responds best to its own native proteins. In our Regenerating Serum, these human proteins are combined with manuka honey, copper peptides and other human growth factors to help rejuvenate aging skin cells.

What is the aspect of your daily work with your company that you love the most? R&D and innovation. I love dreaming up a concoction of ingredients with a scientific basis, mixing them altogether, and testing them on my patients, family and friends. Measuring those results and the ensuing excitement from those test subjects is really exciting and as a scientist, it is all the more interesting.

What do you like the least? Navigating the professional landscape to find the right strategic partners, agencies and in-house team members has been the biggest challenge. You can go through a lot of people, contractors, and agencies before you find the right ones. It is the costliest and time consuming aspect and a bit of a roll of the dice.

As an indie brand what is the biggest issue facing for your company right now? Again, recruitment is the biggest challenge. Someone may have a great resume or an agency may be very expensive, but you don’t always get what you pay for and prior experience in the space doesn’t always mean quality. In fact, prior experience with other skin care brands can sometimes lead to a “boiler plate” approach as opposed to a bespoke one. It is more about aligning on the vision for the brand and you either get it or you don’t. Finding those gems is tough.

Brian Guadagno, founder of Raw Elements (our March 2019 Indie Inc profile), wants to know “what was the moment you knew you were all in on this venture?” The day I got the first batch of our Signature Collection and had a handful of my patients test the products over the course of two weeks.  We followed up with pictures and the excitement was off the charts. I knew I had to create this on a bigger scale and go all in on this venture.

What has you most excited about for the coming year? We were curated right away by the exact retailer we were after, specifically Neiman Marcus. Not only are they the industry trend setters in luxury, they also recognized that their clients wanted more high-powered products to align with their higher price points. The consumers in that category who are more willing to spend are looking for real results that “botanical” extract alone cannot deliver. Eighth Day was the perfect fit and checked all the boxes for “clean” high performance, clinical luxury.