This wasn’t the rebrand we planned. It ended up becoming the one we needed.
Two years ago we launched pureskin around one overlooked problem: every morning and night, people finish a carefully built skincare routine by pressing their face into a damp, days-old bathroom towel — undoing the work at the very last step. Our fix was the simplest thing we could make: a clean, single-use cotton towel. We called the company pureskin, because pure skin was the outcome we wanted for you.
80,000 customers later, we hit a wall that had nothing to do with towels. “pureskin” is built from two of the most common words in skincare — and the skincare industry is crowded with giants, and giants have lawyers. Keeping the name would have meant years of legal fights over two generic words, against companies with far deeper pockets than a two-person towel brand. We looked at that fight and asked the obvious question: is this where we want our time, money, and energy to go? Or should it go where it always has — to the people actually using our products?
At first, renaming a brand that 80,000 of you trust felt like a setback. Then it forced a question we honestly should have asked on day one: in a single word, what do we actually do?
And the answer was never really “pure skin.” That’s the result. The idea is different: what we make isn’t a towel. It’s a step. The one that comes before everything else — before the serums, before the actives, before you add anything to your skin, you stop working against it. We’ve always called it Step Zero.
It turns out there’s already a word for it:
The moment we saw it, the trademark problem stopped feeling like a problem. The old name described an outcome any skincare brand could promise. The new one describes a philosophy only we’ve built: better skin comes from better understanding — not bigger routines. Get the step before right, and everything after it works harder.
So: pureskin is now prefix™. A name that’s ours, for an idea that always was. Same towels, same team, same obsession with the overlooked problems affecting healthy skin — and simple solutions that fix them at the root.
Thanks for being here before it was obvious,
Brandon & Bryan
Co-founders, prefix™
