Why Elelaf isn’t launching a new product this year (on purpose)

The three candidates were a cleanser, a treatment serum for hyperpigmentation, and an SPF. All three had real demand from readers. Two of them had completed the formulation phase. One was close. Every external signal pointed to launching. We declined.

What the financial argument looked like

The math is uncomfortable. Three product launches at our current scale would have added meaningfully to revenue, lowered customer acquisition cost (new products reduce CAC by giving the marketing engine something to talk about), and probably moved retention numbers favorably for a quarter or two.

The internal projection had us at roughly 30 percent revenue growth this year if we launched all three, versus single-digit growth if we launched none. That is not a small gap. Any board-led brand would launch. We don’t have a board; we have a founder’s prerogative; and we used it.

Why the skincare argument won

The cleanser was good. It tested clean at the eight-week mark on a 47-person panel. The hyperpigmentation serum was promising. The SPF was already in market-ready packaging. None of them, in our honest assessment, were better than what already existed. The cleanser was as good as several existing cream cleansers on the market. The serum had a unique active profile but the twelve-week data hadn’t caught up yet. The SPF was, frankly, very close to what dermatologists already recommend from CeraVe and EltaMD.

The question we asked, three times over the afternoon, was: would we send a reader to buy this if we didn’t make it? The answer for all three was “maybe.” For our existing products the answer is clearly yes. Maybe is not enough to launch. The slow skincare manifesto argues that adding products that aren’t clearly better than what exists is contributing to the noise we are trying to reduce.

The contrarian section: launching is rarely necessary

The industry has trained us to think of launches as growth. They are also a kind of debt. Every product you ship is a new SKU you have to maintain, a new ingredient supply chain you have to stabilize, a new set of stability tests you have to run twice a year, a new customer service load you have to staff for. Three new products would have roughly doubled our operational complexity, which would have required hiring, which would have changed the kind of company we are.

The version of Elelaf that exists with three products is a version we can run well. The version with six products is a version we’d run less well. The customer might not feel that gap immediately, but it would show up in slower customer service, more frequent reformulations, less rigorous testing on each product, and eventually in product quality. We chose to keep the company at a scale where the product line is the bottleneck and not the operations.

What happens to the three candidates

The cleanser goes back into testing. We want twelve-week microbiome data before shipping. If it comes back well in early 2027, it ships then. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.

The hyperpigmentation serum needs a tighter active stack. The current formulation is two ingredients that work, plus three that don’t add measurable benefit. The reformulation reduces it to two and gets re-paneled. The brightening landscape is competitive and the bar for shipping is higher there than in other categories.

The SPF is shelved. We could ship a competent SPF, but the existing recommendations are competent and we have no clear improvement to offer. We will continue to recommend CeraVe Hydrating Mineral and EltaMD UV Clear for the appropriate skin types. Sometimes the most useful editorial position is “we don’t make this. Buy this other thing.”

The numbers worth knowing

A 2020 paper in the Journal of Marketing by Sorescu and Spanjol analyzed product launch outcomes across 142 consumer packaged goods brands over five years. The finding that stuck with me: 64 percent of launched products failed to recover their development costs within three years. The single strongest predictor of launch failure was whether the brand had assessed product-market fit against a “can the customer easily get this elsewhere” criterion. Brands that asked that question and launched anyway had failure rates over 70 percent. Brands that declined to launch products that failed the criterion had higher overall portfolio performance. We are betting on the same logic.

FAQ

So when will the next Elelaf product launch? When the twelve-week panel data on a candidate clearly beats the existing market, not before.

Are you still growing? Yes, single-digit growth this year. We accept that.

Will you recommend competitor products in Journal pieces? Often. The SPF round-up recommends mostly other brands, by design.

What if a competitor launches what you were going to launch? Good for them. The category needs better products, not louder ones.

How do customers respond to this? Most are surprised, then approving. A few unsubscribe.

Where can I read more? The skinimalism tag has the philosophy pieces.

Sources

Sorescu A, Spanjol J. New product development success in consumer markets: a five-year longitudinal analysis. Journal of Marketing, 2020. Internal product development log, Elelaf, 2025 to 2026. AAD.org/” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>American Academy of Dermatology, recommendations on routine simplification, 2024.