Dr Andreas Maier is Head of Consumer Care at the WeylChem Group of Companies. Established in 2005 as the Fine Chemicals platform of International Chemical Investors Group, the group consists of nine operating companies in four different countries across Europe and the US, serving multiple industries.
WeylChem is not best known for personal care products. What is the nature of your presence in this market?
The Consumer Care business was established within the WeylChem Group in September 2015 and had a small booth at In-Cosmetics in 2016. We have already a Home Care product line and have know-how in personal care space as well, in addition to our large fine chemicals group. The consumer care business is the personal care market interface, selling the know-how and technologies into personal care, with a new team and a new approach
Are you launching new products here?
Yes, there are two new products, both under our WeylCare brand name, which we established just last week. WeylCare ATBS is a thickener based on a polymeric sulfonic acid. We are offering it mainly for applications in skin care, where it gives a very soft and silky feeling on the skin. It is superior to the carbomers and acrylic acid-based thickeners that are typically used and these are what we are mainly competing with. The thickening properties are superior, the pH range is a little bit wider but most of all it is about the sensory feeling: it simply melts away from the skin, so a moisturising cream containing it is still very light, feels very rich and is easy to spread on the skin.
And the other one?
WeylCare CetylP is the potassium salt of cetyl phosphate. There we saw a need because it is quite a useful emulsifier for heavy sunscreen formulations with high SPFs. Sunscreen is a very ‘in’ topic at the moment and we saw some opportunities because there are some similar products but not that many and secondly this provides better usability than other products. Both of the new launch products are based on chemistries we master already. We have had good interest in both products here and confirmation of what we see as their advantages, particularly for the thickener.
Both also go into quite a wide range of applications: skin care, body care, sun care, make-up…
A third product we have manufactured for quite some time is Allantoin. It has an even wider range of applications. This is a natural ingredient but the natural form is not used on the market as widely. This is more of a legacy product within our Group, that we manufacture for decades.
WeylChem is known as an industrial chemical firm, which is not the norm at In-Cosmetics now. Do you find any resistance to the name?
No, we didn’t get any of those comments or any questioning why there is the phrase ‘chemical’ in our name. I think a lot of people realise that the basis for many formulations is still polymer chemistry or phosphate esters or other chemistry. What we are looking at now is whether we can apply our chemical know-how to use more bio-based materials. For a company of our size, it is most likely to be about applying good chemistry to bio-based raw materials, more than inventing new actives and additives That will probably be our next step. We aim to add at least one new product per year under the WeylCare brand.
