Keratosis Pilaris may sound like the name of a Greek shipping tycoon, but to those afflicted with a skin condition often referred to as “chicken bumps”—as half the world’s population is—it’s no joke.
The widespread nature of that malady, and the frustrations that people have had in trying to get rid of it, prompted a Kansas City dermatologist to start compounding applications for treating KP. And that, in part, is what gave birth more than 12 years ago to what today many might consider an “overnight sensation” on the local business scene: DERMAdoctor.
The company is overseen by Dr. Audrey Kunin, with an assist from her business-minded husband, Jeff, chairman of the radiology department at Saint Luke’s Hospital. It is leveraging both its reputation for quality skin-care products and nationwide exposure on cable shopping channels into the role of serious player in the skin-care game.
Exposure in magazines such as People Stylewatch, Family Circle, Allure, Beauty Biz and Oprah Winfrey’s O have all contributed to raising the company’s profile. But the shopping channel experiences with QVC and HSN in particular, Kunin said, had posed enormous production challenges, because in reaching more than 150 million homes around the world, the company had to ramp up production to meet a demand that was unknowable before the first infomercial spots ran.
Based in the Crossroads Arts District just south of Downtown Kansas City, DERMAdoctor develops much of its own product line, and also warehouses, processes and ships orders across the country and internationally with its staff of more than two dozen.
The process has been a crash-course in business development, Audrey Kunin said. “I wish I had known what I was getting into!” she laughs, recalling the lessons she’s had to take in product development, logistics, packaging, shipping and more. But she credits her husband’s business acumen for steering her through the pains of early start-up.
Kunin is personally involved with all of DERMAdoctor’s product development, and she also selects other products that supplement the company’s line, yielding more than 250 treatments for three dozen ailments, ranging from acne and athlete’s foot to tick bites and warts.
That’s a long way from where the company launched in 1998, not so much as a business but as a hobby that she could pursue after taking maternity leave from her practice as a cosmetic dermatologist. Some hobby: From that humble beginning, DERMAdoctor has grown into a company with annual revenues exceeding $10 million.
Its big break came early, when U.S. News and World Report presented Kunin’s company with Best of the Web designation in 1999. E-mails began pouring in after that, Kunin said, became the basis for unplanned market research.
“What we found from those is that women were looking for products that didn’t exist,” she said. “So we started making them.”
In addition to her reputation in skin-care circles, she has become a sought-after interview subject on television and radio reports dealing with skin care, and has broken into books—Simon & Schuster published her “DERMAdoctor Skinstruction Manual” in 2007, and it now has a digital Kindle version available through Amazon.com.
And along with storefront operations at its Downtown base and on the Country Club Plaza, the company operates through DERMAdoctor.com, processing on-line orders and offering information on skin-care maladies and suggested remedies.
