Our Journey to Notch: Why I Made Bug Repellent Feel Like Skincare

Notch started with a question I couldn’t shake.

It was summer 2024 in Austin, Texas, which meant two things: brutal heat and mosquitoes everywhere. I was reaching for bug repellent constantly, and every time, I wondered why something made to go on our skin sat on the shelf next to household chemicals and insecticides, and why it looked, smelled and felt like it belonged there.

Why weren’t we treating repellent like skincare?

I’d spent more than 13 years in consumer products and retail by then, six of them at Whole Foods Market in aisles like beauty and supplements, and I’d learned how much a product’s aisle shapes the way we feel about using it. Bug repellent was in the wrong aisle.

So I set out to make one you’d be proud to keep next to your skincare. It had to protect, with a plant-based active backed by published research. It had to feel good going on: a lotion, a hydrating base, a light floral scent instead of a chemical one. And it had to belong on your vanity, not in the camping section. The name came from the same place. Notch is a play on “no itch.”

There was no playbook for a skincare-style repellent, so we wrote our own, inside the EPA’s minimum-risk rules for every ingredient. It took nearly two years of formulation, testing and supplier development to get to a formula where performance and feel live together.

We started with the research, not the trend, and the research kept pointing at geraniol: one of the best-studied botanical repellent ingredients, and one of the few with evidence against both mosquitoes and ticks. We use it at 5%, right where the studies show protection takes off, and it happens to smell a lot like rose petals. The result is Nourish + Defend, in a berry-colored tube you won’t want to hide.

All that reading didn’t feel right to keep to ourselves. Shopping for repellent is confusing, and everyone deciding what to put on their skin deserves the same information we had. So we scored around 200 repellents by the same rules, our own included, and published all of it at BugRepellent.Guide, a repellent research site run by the Notch team.

Notch is available now at notchwellness.com, with more formulas and formats on the way, and we’re bringing it to stores. If you’d like to carry it in yours, our wholesale page is the place to start.

And if you try Notch, I’d love to hear what you think. You can reach us anytime at hello@notchwellness.com.

Thank you for being part of this from the start.

ShannonFounder, Notch