EU med-aesthetic group launched a private-label GHK-Cu serum line in 11 weeks, end-to-end

Challenge

The group had 8 locations across two EU countries and wanted to extend its in-house GHK-Cu skincare protocol into a retail serum line sold to clients between visits. The Marketing Director had a clear positioning concept and packaging design in hand but no formulation expertise, no INCI-compliant ingredient list, no EU CPNP notification framework, and no manufacturing partner. Building this in-house would have taken 9-12 months; the marketing window for the retail launch was 6 months out.

Approach

Pepoderma's OEM team ran the end-to-end formulation development workflow against the brand brief: GHK-Cu sourcing at cosmetic-grade purity, formulation development with a chelator-free aqueous-gel carrier, stability protocol over the typical accelerated (40°C/75% RH) + real-time (25°C/60% RH) timepoints, INCI documentation alignment with EU CPNP requirements, primary packaging sourcing (airless-pump 30 mL bottle in the brand's spec colour), and finished-goods QC release. The brand designer handled secondary packaging (carton, IFU); Pepoderma handled everything from active sourcing through finished-goods QC.

Outcome

First commercial shipment landed 11 weeks after signed brief. The product launched on schedule for the marketing window and sell-through tracked at the upper end of EU aesthetic-retail benchmarks for first-launch cosmetic peptide products. CPNP notification was filed using documentation supplied by Pepoderma's regulatory team and accepted on first review without back-and-forth from the relevant member state authority.