November 24, 2025 |
For just over a year, the beauty brand formally known as Haeckels has been without a name. Last November, Dom Bridges, founder of the Margate-based biotech skincare and fragrance company, alongside its former CEO, Ann-Margret Kearney, made the decision to distance the brand from German zoologist Ernst Haeckel who originally inspired the name. Haeckels’ scientistic ideologies were steeped in racism and would be later connected with the rise of Nazism. In an Instagram video shared to his personal account last year, Bridges explained was unaware of this when launching the brand in 2012, having decided on the name after discovering a book of Haeckels’ drawings of wildlife creatures.
So, the brand relaunched, revising its product range and overhauling its packaging (the majority of products come now come made from a compostable material called vivomer). To announce the rebrand, Bridges called upon the company’s tight-knit Margate family to front a wholesome social media campaign.
And it was all done without a name.
“Initially we had it’s ‘About All Of Us’, which was a tag line I’d used for many years. It had heritage and made sense but sadly there was a conflict with a SU TV show of the same name,” says Bridges, “This caused a huge issue as it meant we basically had to launch without a name…. which is a little unorthodox, to say the least.”
Last week, Bridges unveiled the brand will now go by Dulcie, named after his daughter, who is aged 10.
The relaunch in 2024 came at a stressful time for the company, which Bridges says was haemorrhaging money (in 2022, Estée Lauder made a minority investment in the brand). “When I sat down to think about the whole reason I started this, and these were stories that I would tell to customers in the store, it was due to becoming a dad,” he says. “My wife Jo had a few miscarriages, and despite the pain, physical and emotional, she continued until she became pregnant, and Dulcie was born in Margate. I can’t begin to understand the strength and bravery in my wife, but when Dulcie arrived, it was magical and had a huge impact on us.”
While his wife was pregnant with Dulcie, Bridges took it upon himself to clean Margate’s beach so that when Dulcie was born, the family could play on it safely together. After first experimenting with locally sourced seaweed to make soap in 2012, it was when upgrading the beach were Bridges first begun to study, in-depth, seaweed’s naturally hydrating, anti-bacterial qualities which is the key ingredient to most of the brand’s boundary-pushing products today.
“The whole business is very unusual in the sense that it’s all our stories entwined a love affair of a town of the sea, there is no escape its part of us and always will be. I think we are all products of that in some way,” says Bridges.
Why was Dulcie the right name for the brand? “I think we are the most authentic, real thing in beauty,” says Bridges of the company, which creates all its own products inside its HQ (a converted casino in the seaside town) and tailor-makes all its facial and massage treatments at its London and Margate wellness rooms. The company is part social enterprise, also, running a community sauna on Margate beach since 2014. “Everything has potential: a person, an animal, a town, a beach. [The brand is] real and beautiful.”
Once Dulcie agreed for the brand to be named after her (she is now an older sister to an adopted brother), Bridges took the idea to his team. “The whole business is so personal, I love it. I love them. I’ve worked with key local members of my team for 12 years. [About the name] they were like ‘Yeah, it makes total sense. To create something [new] makes little sense. Names come from stories. Dulcie’s name is actually a long-running family name, so it even has greater heritage.”
With the new name comes no radical changes to the look of the brand. “The packaging will remain the same for a time, we are inviting people to write on the bottles and we have also created bio-stickers if people want to play with the branding it’s all up in the air,” he says. “There was huge over orders on shellworks stock and we have to be responsible in its usage, we have new designs and we will release later. Nothing vastly different, just a few different ways to extrapolate information digitally for the customer.”
Instead, Bridges’ attention is on sustainable product innovation. The brand has reintroduced its Christmas tree distillations made from pine extracts of disused Christmas trees. Also in the works is a body enhancement formulation with a unnamed big sports brand, and moving into the new year the brand will be focused on ideas around “product freshness”.
“I can’t say anymore but it’s something to think about,” says Bridges. “Why doesn’t the skincare industry concern itself with freshness like the way good food remains nutrient-dense the quicker its consumed? Carrots from Morocco aren’t as good as the ones from your local farmer, but we’ll pay a lot of money for a formula that’s been sat in a bottle for who know how long? Skincare needs to be alive and fresh and amongst the people to be the best relevant version of itself.”
Photography courtesy of Dulcie.
