BioPhotas Inc. shook up the light therapy market 15 years ago with the first flexible LED device designed to contour directly to the body.
The medical device company is now entering its next stage of growth with the U.S. launch of Mystique, the first LED mask cleared by the FDA to treat acne, wrinkles and hair loss in one device, expanding its line of Celluma light therapy devices.
“We’ve sort of played out the first cycle of the company—Mystique marks the beginning of its second cycle,” co-founder Patrick Johnson told the Business Journal during a tour of the company’s headquarters in Tustin.
BioPhotas unveiled Mystique on April 16 and is hosting a U.K launch event today in London. The company said it expects to get regulatory registration for sales in the U.K., European Union, Canada, its largest distributor, and Mexico in the coming weeks.
BioPhotas, founded in 2011, has grown to more than $50 million in revenue with a compound annual growth rate of 44% over the last six years, according to Johnson.
The company is aiming for $100 million in sales within the next few years.
He expects the company to be “bursting at the seams” when its lease on its 25,000-square-foot headquarters expires in less than two years, with plans to grow its 52-person team by 20% this year.
The company is the 28th largest on the Business Journal annual list of medical device makers in Orange County.
Rise of At-Home Beauty Treatments
BioPhotas is tapping into the LED face mask boom sparked by pandemic-era spa closures and shift to at-home beauty treatments.
“People couldn’t see their esthetician and got really aware of how they looked on Zoom,” Johnson said.
Johnson said that customers have been asking the company “for years” to develop their own version of an LED face mask. The actual process to make one took three and a half years to address two main engineering challenges.
BioPhota’s initial challenge was finding out how to integrate enough electronics into the product.
Many of the existing masks on the market today are battery operated, compared to BioPhotas’ devices that are powered by microprocessors and software, according to Johnson.
“This product is more like Christmas tree lights,” he said while holding up a competing mask. “It’s off and on, one color, and more importantly, doesn’t put out enough energy to be therapeutically effective.”
Another challenge was figuring out how to get enough light to pass through silicone without being degraded.
The result of the company’s three years of research and development was a mask with five modes for treating aging skin, pain, hair loss, acne and body contouring with the ability to run two simultaneously.
Rather than having to strap it on, Mystique has a panel running over the head with the controller pack in the back to counterbalance it.
Mystique is set to retail at $895 upon full release, exceeding the roughly $300 average for other LED face masks.
“While it’s a little more expensive, it’s efficacious, built on FDA-cleared parameters and can do multiple things at the same time,” Johnson said.
Johnson said other masks on the market require daily use every day for three months, whereas Mystique’s recommended use protocol is three times a week for four weeks, delivering results in about a quarter of the time.
‘Secret Sauce’
Mystique uses what Johnson calls the same “secret sauce” used across its Celluma line of products.
Johnson drew on his orthopedic background to start BioPhotas, believing that a flexible device that wraps around the treatment area would be more effective than rigid panels.
Mystique employs the same flexible foam, which is sized in Tustin and sent to Ontario for assembly, allowing people to adjust how closely the mask sits on their face, including the eye, nose and mouth openings.
It’s a big difference from masks that are “one size fits all,” according to Chief Executive Curtis Cluff.
“There’s some really beautiful looking masks out there, but five minutes after putting them on they’re pressing on my face,” Cluff told the Business Journal.
Johnson hired Cluff initially as chief financial officer and president in 2022, who then brought in Vice President of Marketing Brian Gable, as the company experienced higher demand.
For the first five years, the company only sold directly to professionals despite having over the counter indication from the FDA.
“We needed to establish our credibility with the professional market,” Johnson said.
The next five years it began to pivot direct to consumer while still selling to professionals with the consumer business now accounting for half of revenue today.
BioPhotas has been debt-free and profitable for the last 10 years.
It went through Octane’s Launchpad accelerator for business and life sciences, which has helped more than 2,000 tech- and medtech-focused companies raise capital since 2010.
