Andrzej Suwara — Founder, Cleansery®

What happens when creators stop licensing their names to brands and start building brands of their own?

For Andrzej Suwara, the answer is a new model of beauty entrepreneurship — one where creators keep the creative control and ownership, while an experienced partner manages the complex work behind the scenes.

Through Cleansery®, Andrzej connects creators with a network of manufacturers and laboratories across Europe, coordinating everything from strategy and formulation to compliance, production and e-commerce.

In this conversation, we explore the rise of creator-led beauty, the gap between manufacturing and market, and why the future of beauty may belong to founders who already have something more valuable than a product: a trusted community.

Q1.What problem do you solve, and what makes your approach different?

Cleansery® is a creator-led beauty brand house based in Kraków. We build complete, launch-ready cosmetics brands for content creators, founders and influencers — from strategy, concept and formulas to custom packaging, compliance, production and e-commerce development.

We work with driven founders & creators who have real, trust-based communities (typically from 50k+ engaged followers) who want to own a brand.

Since 2021, we've helped amazing founders build brands and set up supply chain across skincare, hair care, makeup and wellness.

We are a boutique company, so we add only several new clients annually who we see potential and feel flow.

We coordinate a vetted network of 250+ manufacturing & laboratory partners across Europe. Instead of running a single production line, we match each product to the right specialist lab that we know can deliver the best product.

The creator makes every strategic decision — product, positioning, packaging feel — with our guidance, and we run most of the 300+ operational decisions behind every brand — formula development, compliance, CPNP notification, packaging sourcing and production.

This approach makes creating a brand more fun, less stressful and doesn’t require chemical knowledge from the founder.

We’re not a factory — we’re the layer between a creator and the factory floor, so creators never have to manage dozens of suppliers themselves.

Most manufacturers understand chemistry; very few understand what a creator actually needs — how their content calendar works, what their community responds to, why a launch has to move at their pace, not a factory’s.

We work in their language: DMs, not procurement forms.

That combination — production expertise plus a genuine understanding of social, e-commerce and the creator economy — is what most of the industry is still missing.

Ownership is also important to us. I believe the brand must belong to the founder in majority ownership. We are either a supplier that in time becomes a trusted partner, without equity, or we can co-invest into interesting founders and hold small equity up to 12–25% — control is always in the creator’s hands.

Q2. What are you seeing in the Polish beauty & private label market?

Poland has very strong manufacturing infrastructure, but going from manufacturing to market is a long way. It’s not enough to create a product and try to sell it. There should already be distribution or community before the launch.

Most of the industry here still treats creators as a gimmick or burden. We treat them as a very important piece of their brand and people who just need help to set up, operate and scale.

They do what they do best — content and creative control — and we do the rest of the operational work.

While in the US, creator-led brands are the most important part of retail chains, and big corporations buy and invest in them because legacy brands are losing market share faster than ever.

On the other hand, not everyone can be a brand founder. Creating a brand is a complex task and scaling it is even harder.

Larger projects with MOQs starting from 2,000–5,000 pieces per product are usually complex in terms of packaging, innovation and originality. This is where future founders need long-term plans and the right partners who will help not only in the first batch but with scaling, new categories, innovative packaging and formulas.

Q3. What values are most important in the way you work with creators and build brands?

My team consists of three people: two junior formulators and myself, as Head of R&D. The atmosphere within the team is extremely important to us.

When you work closely together, you often spend more hours with your colleagues than with your loved ones, so we cannot afford to let negative emotions dominate our working relationships. Mutual respect has to be a fundamental value.

I have built the team gradually and carefully. There is no room in our team for personal agendas or individual ambitions at the expense of others.

The success of one team member is the success of the entire company.

A formulator’s creativity needs to be constantly stimulated, challenged and given space to grow. Whenever a formulation challenge arises, we discuss it together and brainstorm possible solutions.

Our clients are diverse, but they share one fundamental expectation: they want effective, innovative formulations that they can truly call their own.

They expect three things from us above all:

1. Integrity.
We never reproduce a client’s formulation for another customer, nor do we disclose critical details of their formulation or manufacturing technology. Confidentiality and trust are the foundations of our relationships.

2. A high level of expertise.
For us, expertise means much more than simply selecting the right ingredients. It means understanding the brand’s concept and translating it into an appropriate formulation, while also anticipating potential technological, regulatory or market-related challenges.

3. Long-term commitment to the client and the brand.
Our responsibility does not end when the invoice for the formulation is issued. In many ways, that is when the real work begins.

We support clients during implementation with the manufacturer, prepare additional samples, review marketing claims from a technical perspective, provide additional documentation and arrange further testing when necessary.

We also help address packaging changes, minor formulation adjustments, raw material availability issues and the many unexpected details that inevitably arise when a product moves from the laboratory into production.

The products we create are, in a sense, a joint achievement of the brand owner and our laboratory, even though we do not retain any proprietary rights to them.

We remain closely involved after launch, because products sometimes require minor adjustments once they enter real-world production.

Seeing our formulations on store shelves or nominated for industry awards is an enormous source of satisfaction and joy for us. It is one of the things that motivates us to keep learning, experimenting and developing further.

Q4. Where would you like to take Cleansery® next?

We’re on the path to be the top-of-mind partner for driven creators to build their beauty and lifestyle brands both in Poland and Europe.

This year, apart from building brands, we’ve added distribution possibilities in drugstore chains for our clients, to be even more of help for their growth.

In 10 years, I see that we have helped grow our current incredible founders into industry leaders with hundreds of millions in brand valuations.

I invite any industry experts, creator economy specialists and talent agencies to work with us.

For Andrzej Suwara, building a beauty brand is not simply about making a product. It is about giving creators the infrastructure to turn trust, community and creative vision into a brand they truly own.

As creator-led brands continue to reshape the beauty market, Cleansery® is positioning itself at the intersection of creators, manufacturing and entrepreneurship — helping founders move from audience to ownership.