Every brand wants a product that’s effective and that sells — but nuances matter. KKT, founded in 2020 by biochemist Krupa Koestline, helps brands define their nuance and pinpoint who they’re going after.

KKT Labs is not a contract manufacturer. It’s an independent lab that works with brands — including Kopari, Goop, and Rhode — across the cosmetic and skin care spectrum to formulate clean, biotech-based products. KKT’s business model challenges the industry’s traditional approach, where contract manufacturers create formulas for free but retain ownership of their intellectual property. Koestline wanted to change that.

“When I would talk to my mentors about developing products where brands own the formula and pay for the formula, so many people said, ‘No, it’s a really bad idea — nobody’s going to want to pay for it if they get it for free.’ That was the hard part — to make people understand this is a viable business.”

In the end, Koestline was proven correct. Shortly after she unveiled her business, she was introduced through a friend to Amy Liu, who was preparing to launch her clean beauty brand Tower 28.

“Amy didn’t have a chemist or anyone technical on her team. She needed someone from the clean beauty side to tell her what to be okay and not okay with. Early development was just Amy and I.”

The two women worked together to create Tower 28’s first products — the ShineOn Lip Jelly and the SOS Daily Rescue Facial Spray — and things grew from there.

“The biggest reason I started KKT was because the clean beauty movement was just starting, but founders didn’t know what to do,” Koestline said. “There wasn’t one place where you could find a clear guide. Our idea was that a founder could call us and we’d help with any question they had.”

Today, Koestline and her co-founder, Katie Harris, have broken ground on the construction of a new, company-owned 16,000-square-foot facility, located across the street from their current 2,500-square-foot leased lab space in Orlando, Florida. It’s a giant step forward for a self-funded company that is charting a new course in cosmetic formulation.

Born in Gujarat, India, Koestline’s expertise in both science and nature runs deep. After earning her degree in biotechnology from the Rochester Institute of Technology, she completed her master’s in biotechnology and biology at Adelphi University in Long Island. Growing up in India exposed her to Ayurveda and the healing powers of herbs.

Out of college, she worked as a scientist at The Estée Lauder Cos. and Neutrogena, where she began questioning the necessity and safety of every ingredient.

“There’s no fixed list of good and bad ingredients — it’s not that straightforward,” Koestline said. “Clean beauty can mean safety for users, environmental safety, aquatic safety, biodegradability, carbon footprint, or being 100% natural. At KKT, we make sure each client defines what their clean is. Every brand is different, and ‘clean’ has sub-categories depending on what’s most important to them.

Koestline and her team of six in-house scientists work one-on-one with companies—from start-ups to long-established brands—on product development and delivery systems, as well as on understanding positioning and commercial viability.

“A brand will come to us and say, ‘I want to make something.’ Sometimes they don’t know what, which can make it hard to visualize. But we embody their personality, figure out what’s authentic to them, and create a product around that. Authenticity is everything. Anytime a brand launches something that isn’t authentic, it doesn’t work.”

Recognizing the growing consumer demand for science-driven brands that develop their own proprietary technology, Koestline now wants to focus on niche or emerging brands that lack those resources.

She also resists the temptation to chase trendy ingredients. “Brands come asking for them, and if I feel it’s a mistake, I won’t create it,” she said. “We usually know what’s going to be a trend two years ahead. For example, right now everyone’s talking about ectoin (an amino acid derivative) because Rhode launched a product with it. We were formulating with ectoin two years ago.”

Ultimately, Koestline says she wants KKT to be a place where “brands can innovate outside all the noise.

“The conversation now is more than just clean beauty,” she said. “Brands lean on us to innovate, to think outside the box, to do something that doesn’t exist.”