Cover John O’Shea (left) and Jason Humphries are the co-founders of Suu Balm (Photos: John O’Shea and Darren Gabriel Leow)
John O’Shea (left) and Jason Humphries are the co-founders of Suu Balm (Photos: John O’Shea and Darren Gabriel Leow)
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Jason Humphries and John O’Shea, co‐founders of Singapore skincare brand Suu Balm, delve into the challenges and triumphs behind their entrepreneurial journey
Back in July 2023, Singapore hosted the 25th World Congress of Dermatology, which drew more than 12,000 attendees from 150 countries and territories, making it the largest medical congress the country had ever organised. A key feature of the event was an extensive exhibition area with booths by both global and local pharmaceutical and cosmetics companies.
At the event, a young student doing part‐time work at a booth for a global cosmetics company decided to approach a separate booth set up by a Singaporean brand. “My friends told me to come to your stand. Can I try your moisturiser?” she said to brand representatives at the booth. She showed them her hands, covered with itchy eczema patches, and was advised to try a bit of the product. She put it on, gave it a minute and then started pumping it all over her hands. What she had applied was the Rapid Itch Relief Moisturiser by Suu Balm, a home‐grown skincare brand offering products designed to soothe dry and itchy skin.
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Above Suu Balm’s Rapid Itch Relief Moisturiser
Suu Balm’s Rapid Itch Relief Moisturiser
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“Two weeks later, she sent us a note saying, ‘Thank you, you have changed my skin’,” recounts Suu Balm co‐founder Jason Humphries, who lets on that that was not the first time he encountered real‐life users who shared glowing reviews of the brand’s anti‐itch moisturiser. Before Suu Balm was available in retail stores, a 70‐year‐old man had marched into the company’s former shophouse space to purchase the moisturiser for himself. As Humphries tells it, the man, fondly referred to by Humphries as “Ronnie, from Ghim Moh”, just “walked into [the] office and declared, ‘I want your product and I want lots of it ... I got this from my doctor and I need more of it because I don’t want to go back to him.’”
Ronnie then told Humphries and his team that he had had difficulties sleeping at night as the air conditioning at home made him itch. Humphries recalls with a smile: “He told us, ‘My wife says I’m moody all day. But now, I’ve got Suu Balm and my wife says it saved our marriage.’”
THE ORIGINS
The story of Suu Balm began when Dr Tey Hong Liang, founder of the Itch Clinic at the National Skin Centre (NSC) in Singapore, noticed that existing moisturisers were not doing enough to achieve two things: relieve itch fast and effectively moisturise the skin.
With this in mind, he combined menthol, which has natural cooling and itch‐relieving properties, with a high concentration of a ceramide‐based moisturiser to create his own non‐steroidal formulation—one that he had proven to have provided relief after trial use on more than 1,000 eczema and psoriasis patients at NSC.
Meanwhile, John O’Shea and Humphries, the duo who would later commercialise Dr Tey’s product, had met as students at the Insead business school in Singapore. The two subsequently went into management consultancy, but eventually decided to establish what they refer to as a more “physical business”. Together, they started Good Pharmaceutical and later, Good Pharma Dermatology.
At a cocktail reception organised for the biomedical industry here, they were introduced to the Intellectual Property Intermediary, an affiliate of Enterprise Singapore that connects Singapore‐based businesses with innovative solution providers. One thing led to another, and a meeting was set up between the pair and Dr Tey at the NSC in 2013. The latter had already developed his own moisturiser by 2011 and the NSC was looking for a commercial partner to bring the product to more Singaporeans.
“We weren’t the first people they spoke to. I think we were the last. Everybody else had said no [to the partnership], including some of the big domestic and international skin firms,” shares Humphries, a former pharmaceutical executive. “These firms have subsequently approached us to buy [Suu Balm]. We said no.” In 2015, the moisturiser created by Dr Tey was introduced to the Singapore market—and later to other parts of the world—under the brand Suu Balm, founded that same year by O’Shea and Humphries.
O’Shea, a former medical doctor who coined the name, shares over an email interview: “I was inspired by the product itself, which provided soothing relief for people with itch. With this in mind, I started looking at what [company] names were still available; what had not already been trademarked. I tried to think of a phrase or word that sounded like ‘soothing’, but there wasn’t an existing word. I also really liked the word ‘balm’, as it describes something very comforting. Combining the two, I ended up with ‘Suu Balm’, which thankfully was still available and didn’t mean anything offensive in the languages commonly spoken in Singapore.”
Above Suu
Balm caters
to both adults
and children
Suu Balm caters to both adults and children
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Suu Balm offers a product for more than just Singaporeans struggling with eczema or itchy skin. “The whole reason for the NSC getting [the moisturiser] commercialised was to improve the skin of [all] Singaporeans,” says Humphries, who adds that “as a business, Singapore is quite a small market. You either play in the sandpit or expand. We felt that the reason Suu Balm was successful in Singapore could hold in other countries. We then very quickly set up our own business in Malaysia.”
Approximately two weeks before this interview with Tatler Singapore, Humphries met with Suu Balm’s stockist in Malaysia, a retailer with a chain of 500 pharmacies in the country, and was told that the brand had grown 92 per cent, year on year. For context, he shares that the moisturiser market in Malaysia is growing at about 5 per cent.
Today, Suu Balm, which has since expanded its offerings, is available in 13 markets, with the latest being China, and will add its 14th and 15th this year. Its largest markets are in Southeast Asia, and it operates its own businesses in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Hong Kong, while being supplemented by distribution partners elsewhere. The brand’s sales are now running at $30 million per annum, with strong growth in both existing and new markets, says Humphries.
BRIGHTER, GREENER FUTURE
Beyond scaling the business, Humphries and O’Shea are keen on reducing waste and being more sustainable in the brand’s practices. (This extends to their personal lives, with the co‐founders cycling to the Suu Balm office in Peninsula Plaza on many days of the week.)
In 2022, for example, a refill and recycle station was set up in the Suu Balm office to enable customers to replenish either their own bottles or refill bottles purchased from the company with two Suu Balm products: the Rapid Itch Relief Moisturiser and the Dual Cooling & Moisturising Cream Body Wash. Empty Suu Balm bottles can also be dropped off at the station to be recycled through the brand’s official recycling partner, Sembcorp.
This year, the brand has doubled down on its commitment to sustainability by introducing new tubes and bottles that are more eco‐friendly—a move sparked in part by Humphries’ realisation a few years back that Suu Balm was selling 10,000 plastic tubes worth of product each month. These new vessels are “made of more recycled content and [are] fully recyclable”, Humphries shares. “[This means, for example, that pumps] don’t have a metal spring in them, so they can be easily recycled. Having people tell us [our] products changed their lives is always good [to hear], but carbon footprint is also really important to us.”
Above Suu Balm has
products for
the face, body
and hair
Suu Balm has products for the face, body and hair
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ONWARDS WITH PRIDE
Building a business is hard work. Humphries likens it to frequently “taking two steps forward and one step back”. He allows that “you make mistakes, but ultimately, it’s fabulous to think you’ve achieved something. I like things like market share. But the other thing is meeting [customers] who tell us that Suu Balm [makes incredible products]. That’s what makes this business different from [others]. It’s a business that really does good.”
O’Shea voices similar sentiments. “The first time I saw [Suu Balm] products on shelves in (personal care store) Watsons, I felt very proud,” he reveals. “Every time a customer shares feedback with me that the products have helped them or their family member, I feel a great sense of reward —similar to how I felt when I was in clinical medicine .”
Humphries admits, though, that the formulas in Suu Balm products are not rocket science. “[They’re] very simple in some ways,” he says. “A little bit of menthol—which has been in Asian products for a long time ... but Dr Tey had thought of [formulating it] at the right levels, and people are comfortable with it and like it. [He thought] practically through it so patients could moisturise more often and get good results.”
To echo Humphries, anybody could have thought of developing a moisturiser like Suu Balm’s, but it takes someone like Dr Tey, who continuously strives to bring the benefits of clinical practice into our everyday lives, to get it just right.
Andrea Saadan is the Senior Digital Editor of Tatler Singapore. She oversees all digital content for the website and currently leads the Beauty and Lifestyle verticals. As a child, she had always enjoyed reading and writing but it was only after she joined her college newspaper, The Spectrum, in Buffalo, New York, that she considered a career in journalism. Her love for all things beauty started from the age of two—when she was caught playing with (and damaging) her mother’s YSL lipstick. On top of her day job, she is also an unpaid beauty consultant for friends and family. Besides make-up, her obsessions include the wizarding world of Harry Potter, podcasts, ice-cream, her walking pad and watching endless re-runs of The Office (US).
