About Wilson and Applechem

00:00 - 00:13
My name is Wilson Lin, and I handle a number of different duties here at Applechem, I'm one of the longest tenured employees here. And so I handle marketing, regulatory affairs and quality assurance operations for the entire company.

00:13 - 00:23
So Applechem is a research and development technology company that creates and manufactures functional ingredients for the personal care and cosmetics space.

00:23 - 00:33
So we are in charge of making, you know, the thickeners, rheology modifiers, pigment dispersants, the stuff that makes the formulations tick inside of the consumer products that people enjoy every day.

00:33 - 00:48
So one of our most popular products is our G block dispersion. And basically what it is, is we figure out a way to create, take Zinc Oxide, which is a very popular SPF active used inside of natural sunscreens. We've managed to condense it into a very dense liquid form.

00:48 - 01:09
So it's much easier for sunscreen manufacturers to use when they're trying to develop and increase speed market for new, new sunscreen products. They just have to mix it in. All the mixing and blending work has been done ahead of time. The whole entire product is completely stable. So a lot of our technology revolves around creating products that aren't just formulation friendly, but also manufacturing friendly as well.

01:09 - 01:14
We want that formulation flexibility built into the product, so there's a lot more utility to the formulator.

01:14 - 01:28
We've got customers all over the place, so anywhere from small indie brands starting out with the Nuon skincare or Suncare lines all the way to the larger multinationals like Estee Lauder and Chanel.

01:28 - 01:43
My background has absolutely nothing to do with this field. So my my career before this was in finance. So I was a financial planner. I worked at both American Express as well as some boutique financial planning firms.

01:43 - 01:46
After a few years, I realized it was not for me.

01:47 - 02:02
I like being in front of customers. I like being able to sell a product that I believed in and in that industry, it's a very cutthroat industry and I wasn't a good fit for that kind of type of environment. So coming into the cosmetics and personal care space, this industry is so fascinating to me.

02:02 - 02:07
It has such a wide range or outsized effect on people's daily lives.

02:07 - 02:30
Yet the actual number of people working in this industry is not that big. Not as big as you would think. So it's quite intimate in the way everyone gets along. There's no one trying to undercut anyone in the personal care space, especially on the supplier side. And so I enjoy being a part of creating and pushing out and marketing new types of ingredients that have, I know have a strong feature-benefit set.

02:30 - 02:38
I can see the actual effect and the improvement it gives to formulations and how those formulations will end up being an overall improvement in the daily lives of consumers.