Farmacy

Mark Veeder grew up on his father's Christmas tree farm, and the dirt never washed off. By adulthood he'd built a career in luxury PR and experiential events, the kind of branding work that throws splashy parties for home-furnishings labels, but he kept gardening obsessively on the side. On his upstate New York plot he noticed something he'd never seen: a bright green echinacea bloom unusually loaded with cichoric acid, a phyto-compound he'd later claim packs roughly 300 percent more antioxidants in its roots than ordinary echinacea. He cultivated it with horticulturist Robert Beyfuss and patented it as Echinacea GreenEnvy.

A plant patent isn't a business, though, and Veeder needed someone who could turn a flower into a formula. He found David Chung, a serial operator who'd run import and cosmetics-retail ventures before launching the high-tech line 3LAB and taking over Englewood Lab, a contract manufacturer that quietly formulates for some 90 brands, reportedly including names as rarefied as La Mer. Chung had been wanting to build his own naturals brand; he recognized what Veeder's weed could anchor, and the two shook hands on a 'farm-to-face' concept that married soil-grown botanicals to lab-grade science.

The brand went on air at QVC in its first weeks, a channel that suited Veeder's showman instincts, before its hero, the Green Clean cleansing balm that melts away makeup, became the slow-burn cult product that carried it into Sephora's aisles. Honey-based masks and moisturizers followed, lending the range a coherent, sticky-sweet identity. Chung, who immigrated to the U.S. as a child and has spoken candidly about the eventual windfall, later folded the manufacturing know-how into newer ventures. The throughline is that Farmacy is, unusually, a beauty brand born from a literal harvest, then engineered into something that actually performs on the shelf.

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