Lead the Next Wave of Sustainable Beauty

GreenWave’s Kelp CoLab is for beauty and personal care brands ready to lead with both performance and sustainability. Whether you’re a marketer, product lead, or founder, CoLab offers a way to accelerate R&D without draining budgets, strengthen your sustainability leadership, and stand out with a unique ingredient story rooted in kelp. As Cohort Members, brands gain access to tailored kelp-based ingredients and expert formulation support to develop formulations that perform and connect with consumers’ demand for clean solutions.

Here is a look at the diverse ecosystem of collaborates that CoLab brings together:

• Beauty and Personal Care Brands are at the center of CoLab as Cohort Members. They align on key technical challenges and work directly with formulation R&D experts and ingredient suppliers in an iterative innovation process.

• Established Multinational Companies serve as Anchor Partners for CoLab’s technical challenges. They generate hypotheses, define success criteria, and ensure that solutions are grounded in real-world business needs, giving Cohort Members the chance to learn from industry leaders and apply those insights to their own innovation.

• Ingredient Suppliers tailor ingredient R&D to the specifications from the Cohort Members. They lead ingredient R&D, share insights on feasibility and scalability, and manufacture kelp-based ingredient solutions for this program.

Kelp CoLab gives beauty and personal care brands a way to explore the future of sustainable formulation—without taking on the usual risks or costs of early-stage R&D. As a Cohort Member, your brand will gain access to $50K in fully funded research, development, and formulation support, all designed to align performance with sustainability. Whether you're looking to explore the potential of kelp-derived bioactives, future-proof your ingredient sourcing, or connect with others working at the cutting edge of beauty innovation, Kelp CoLab offers a path forward.

Here’s what you can expect as a Cohort Member:

• Competitive Advantage: Gain an edge with kelp-based formulations tailored to your product goals, building products that perform while telling a unique sustainability story.

• Expert Formulation Support: Partner with leading experts to accelerate R&D, overcome technical hurdles, and de-risk innovation.

• On-the-Ground Perspective: An immersive visit to a regenerative kelp farm in Alaska, with firsthand insight into traceable supply chains.

• Collaboration & Community: Join a peer cohort of innovative beauty brands and forge tangible partnerships with industry leaders and disruptors.

Kelp is one of the fastest-growing and most sustainable crops on earth. It’s also a powerful ingredient for beauty and personal care innovation.

Kelp is multifunctional, with benefits for both skin and hair:

• Deep hydration and skin-barrier support

• Anti-inflammatory properties to calm skin and scalp

• Natural conditioning and texture for smooth, healthy strands

• Viscosity and sensorial performance in creams, serums, and styling products

• Sustainability and traceability from ocean-farmed, regenerative supply chains

Regeneratively ocean farmed kelp requires zero inputs—the ocean provides everything, with no need for freshwater, arable land, fertilizer, or pesticides. While kelp is in the water it is delivers environmental benefits such as absorbing nitrogen and carbon dioxide and increasing biodiversity.

Kelp is more than clean. It’s climate-positive, high-performing, and versatile across beauty categories.

The application period closes on October 6, 2025. Selected companies will be notified of acceptance by November 2025, with the program kicking off in January 2026 and concluding in October 2026.

There is an administrative fee of $1,500 for brands selected to participate, which helps cover program and coordination costs. Apply by September 22 to take advantage of the early bird rate of $500.

Selected brands receive $50,000 in R&D and formulation support, plus a fully sponsored trip to Alaska to meet suppliers and experience regenerative kelp farming firsthand. Our goal is to ensure this program delivers far more value than the upfront cost.

During the course of Kelp CoLab, directed ingredient R&D will be conducted on behalf of Cohort Members to support science-backed claims. By the end of the program, Cohort Members will have developed a kelp-based formulation for high-performing, sustainable personal care products using insights from this research. These formulations will showcase how kelp-derived ingredients can deliver meaningful consumer benefits—such as hydration, calming effects, or improved texture—while advancing innovation in line with the growing ocean-forward beauty movement.

GreenWave is a North American nonprofit dedicated to building and supporting the regenerative ocean farming (ROF) movement. Since 2014, we’ve helped scale ocean-farmed seaweed as a climate solution—producing high-yield, low-impact crops that offer a renewable, local supply ready to grow with demand.

Our work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Fast Company, TIME, and 200+ other articles, documentaries, and podcasts spotlighting how ocean-farmed kelp can help reshape supply chains across food, fashion, and beauty.

In many coastal communities, seaweed farming is expanding—repurposing boats, docks, and local expertise to build the next generation of ocean-based livelihoods.

We believe the beauty and personal care sector has a unique opportunity to shape how ocean-farmed ingredients enter the market—driving demand, setting standards, and telling a new kind of ingredient story rooted in performance, planet, and long-term value. That’s why we created Kelp CoLab: to help brands lead this shift, bridging the gap between ingredient innovation and real-world application to create ocean-powered products that perform.