Allies of Skin

The number on the brand's hero mask, 1A, is a quiet nod to a very long road. Travis built the company around repair because he spent his late teens and early twenties trying to repair his own face. The reconstructive work that followed his accident was botched, and complications brought necrosis, infection and five separate returns to the operating table between nineteen and twenty-one to fix the dents left behind. He has spoken openly about the psychological collapse that came with it, including an attempt on his own life, and about therapy as part of what brought him back. Channeling that obsession into formulating skincare for other people was, in his telling, a way out.

That history is why the formulas fixate on growth factors, peptides and regeneration rather than simply hydration or glow. To build them, Travis studied biomedical science for two years and pharmaceutical science for two more before going hunting for ingredients with genuine healing logic behind them. The debut product, a daily firming treatment stacked with brighteners, antioxidants and peptides, remains the line's most-loved, and set the template: multifunctional formulas engineered to compress several steps into one.

The brand also carried a second life for a while. In 2020 it launched PSA, a lower-priced, sustainability-minded sibling line, then sold it off in 2023 so the team could concentrate on the flagship just as Travis was raising his first outside capital. That round, a twenty-million-dollar strategic investment, was earmarked for a serious push into the United States after years of bootstrapping. Travis has also described the early skepticism he met as a young Asian founder pitching a performance brand from Singapore, repeatedly the youngest person, and often the only Asian one, in the room.

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