A young couple who launched their own skincare brand were given the shock of their lives after realising the name they used had already been taken by a porn website.
Talia Jackson and Salvatori Agostino invested $80,000 they had saved for their house deposit on buying stock and setting up their online store and had even registered the business name ‘Mr Skin’ with the n Securities and Investments Commission.
‘One mistake choosing our brand nearly got us cancelled,’ Ms Jackson said in a recently shared post on Instagram.
The couple began the business in 2022 and had double-checked the name was available and scoured social media to make sure they could use the handles.
What they neglected to do was a basic Google search.
It was only a few days before they went live with their business that Ms Jackson typed the name into a search engine to see if they had been picked up on SEO.
That’s when the couple received the rude shock.
‘Nothing could have prepared us for what we saw next,’ Ms Jackson said.
‘It’s every business owner’s worst nightmare. It was a famous ”corn” site in America.’
Corn is an online euphemism to get around censoring of references to porn.
All their products had already been branded with their own ‘Mr Skin’ logo and they were told it would cost $15,000 to get the name changed to ‘Mr Skincare’ on their future orders.
The couple in the end had to fork over the cash to update their product labels and had to go through the tedious process of lodging paperwork to change the name of their business and then scramble to get the new social media handles.
Mr Agostino also had to pay $1,000 to change his personalised Mr Skin number plate on his beloved Audi, so people wouldn’t get the wrong idea.
Their business is now known as Mr Skincare.
The couple believe that despite the highly competitive landscape of the cosmetics industry and going up against international giants in the sector with mammoth budgets, they have found a gap in the market.
The couple spent a full year testing and formulating their products with a professional chemist to find their own simple and effective formula for male skin to treat multiple concerns, such as acne, scarring, and dehydration.
Mr Agostino suffered from acne throughout childhood and found many products already out there either did not help or made the condition worse.
Ms Jackson meanwhile previously worked at makeup retailer Mecca for a number of years and grew to know the ins-and-outs of not only cosmetic ingredients, but how the industry worked.
She said many wives, girlfriends, mothers and sisters would come in looking for products for the men in their lives but there wasn’t any available.
The company focuses on men’s skincare by providing no-nonsense products that they say work for many skin issues, which their customers love.
It focuses on a three step approach that provides a combined solution they said no other companies were offering.
Ms Jackson said often the skincare routines she sold at Mecca required six or seven steps and they wanted to simplify that for males.
After formulating their skincare line, the couple designed packaging with step numbers and abbreviations for which time of day they should be used, which is the first in the market.
They system includes face & beard wash for the morning, a deep pore exfoliant -for the evening and a hydrating moisturiser that can be used at both times.
They are also vegan, free of nasties like parabens and are manufactured in .
According to research firm Inkwood, the n skincare industry alone was worth about $3billion in 2021 and is expected to grow to about $4.4billion by 2028.
It said the growth in the sector is largely expected to be around the trend of natural, ‘minimalist’ and vegan formulas.