Gerard Camme did not begin with oxygen. He began with a shop floor, an eye for clothes and the practical education of watching people decide what they wanted to become. Born and raised in Queens, he was a self-described fashion obsessive before beauty claimed him. His early career ran through French Connection and Giorgio Armani, places where a brand is never merely a logo. It is lighting, texture, service, posture and the half-second when a passerby turns toward a window.
Then Fresh called. Camme was at Armani and regarded the invitation with suspicion. Skincare sounded like a category error for a man preoccupied with fashion. A meeting with Fresh founders Lev Glazman and Alina Roytberg rearranged that assumption. Beauty could change a customer's demeanor almost immediately. The merchandise was smaller, but the emotional room around it was enormous.
That unlikely switch became the center of his working life. Camme joined Fresh in 2004 during its expansion under LVMH. He learned how a sensorial product travels without losing the intimacy that made someone pick it up in the first place. Later came Atelier Cologne, where he spent roughly a decade and became president. He helped develop the fragrance company's global business and its path to a 2016 acquisition by L'Oréal, then stayed on as a L'Oréal executive to keep building the brand with a larger global team.
The operating apprenticeship
A second act with laboratory notes
By the end of the Atelier Cologne chapter in 2021, Camme knew what a luxury brand looked like before and after an exit. What he wanted next was not another competent variation on an existing shelf. The proposition that found him was much stranger: a skincare company spun from work in biomaterials, built with scientists, surgeons and engineers, and organized around a system for carrying oxygen.
His collaborators included entrepreneur and inventor Brad Patt and biomedical engineer Andy Carter. Their earlier technology work dealt with delivering oxygen at a surgical site. Element Eight would adapt the delivery concept for topical cosmetics. For Camme, the attraction was the whitespace. Here was a story with technical provenance and one plain, familiar noun at its center.
The name performs the first piece of translation. Oxygen is the eighth element on the periodic table. Element Eight turns a scientific platform into a memory device, with the turquoise packaging supplying the visual punctuation. The company's OATH acronym stands for Oxygen Amplified Therapy. The technical case can extend into patents, formulations and testing. The consumer doorway is simply eight.
“Keep it simple, keep it authentic, keep it real, and evolve.”Gerard Camme on the brand he wants to build
Simple, in this case, did not mean quick. Camme has described a roughly five-year path from encountering the concept to putting products on sale. Element Eight finally debuted on November 3, 2022, with three $250 creams organized around peptides, squalane and hyaluronic acid. The range was small enough to explain at a counter without requiring a whiteboard. Each product gave the unfamiliar technology a familiar cosmetic companion.
The counter is still the classroom
Camme had spent years accumulating retailer relationships, but the pandemic corrected one of his assumptions. He once imagined that launching a new brand would mean knocking on familiar doors. Instead, digital communication became part of the product. A founder needed a compelling social feed, an evolving site and enough clarity to survive the distracted rectangle of a phone.
Element Eight nevertheless understood the value of physical proof. In early 2023 it moved into select Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus stores. Nordstrom followed in the wider distribution story. The shelves did something a website cannot: they placed an unfamiliar bottle beside brands customers already knew, allowing texture, packaging and a trained conversation to carry part of the argument.
In November 2023, the company announced a $6 million SAFE financing round. Existing investors supplied $2.5 million and new investors contributed $3.5 million. The mix was unusually close to the product: 45 percent came from surgeons, dermatologists and PhD scientists, while management, employees and board members accounted for another 14 percent. It was capital, but also a compact map of conviction around the table.
When the technology is complicated, make the invitation simple. A clear name opens the door; patient education, product experience and evidence can occupy the room behind it.
The next expansion was geographic. Element Eight entered the United Kingdom through Harrods in July 2024, supported by a local country-management partner. Sephora added a larger digital door, and the line grew beyond its first trio into serums, an eye product and additional creams. By 2026, the company had been selected for BeautyMatter's NEXT50 cohort. The nouns stayed consistent as the footprint widened: oxygen, science, luxury.
A salesman for confidence
Camme's public manner is direct, brisk and fond of an instruction that can fit on a Post-it note. Asked what beauty means to him, he answered with one word: “Confidence.” Asked for a lesson from the industry, he offered three: “Just keep moving.” Setbacks become information, then tomorrow's adjustment. It is the language of an operator who has already watched one brand pass through acquisition and another take years to reach its first customer.
There is also a useful contradiction in his taste. He likes simplicity, but he has built his current company on complicated science. He values natural-looking beauty, but operates in an industry that never stops inventing new interventions. He has decades of relationships, yet learned that relationships alone could not substitute for a digital story. The contradictions are less a problem to solve than the work itself. A founder stands between expert teams, skeptical buyers and customers who owe him no patience.
His beauty conversion offers a smaller version of the same lesson. At Fresh in the late 2000s, a facial oil seemed absurd to him. He had oily skin and could not understand adding more. Then he tried the Ancienne oil, admired its spare formula and kept using it. The anecdote is not really about oil. It is about a practiced merchant remaining available to surprise. Certainty helps a pitch. Curiosity helps a career.
Camme's connections form a bridge across industries: the founders of Fresh; the fragrance entrepreneurs behind Atelier Cologne; the L'Oréal organization that absorbed it; Patt, Carter and the scientific founders around Element Eight; and retailers from Bergdorf Goodman to Harrods and Sephora. His role has rarely been to stand at one end of that bridge. He moves between the rooms, carrying what one group knows into language the next group can use.
The value of arriving late
Founder mythology likes youth because youth photographs as velocity. Camme's story makes a case for sequence. Before he asked investors to believe in a skincare company, he had helped develop freestanding stores. Before he explained a new cream, he had watched Fresh expand. Before he built Element Eight, he had seen Atelier Cologne grow, sell and continue inside a global corporation. Each chapter supplied a different piece of commercial judgment.
That judgment is visible in Element Eight's order of operations. The company launched narrowly. It sought prestige counters where explanation was possible. It raised money with participation from people close to both the science and the business. It entered a new country with local support. None of those moves guarantees permanence. Together they describe a founder who treats distribution as choreography, not a collection of logos.
The approach also reflects a merchant's respect for context. A cream encountered at Harrods carries one set of expectations; the same formula on a phone screen must establish its own atmosphere. Camme's background connects those scenes. Store planning taught him where attention moves. Fashion taught him the force of presentation. Skincare taught him ritual. Fragrance taught him how an intimate product can cross borders. Element Eight asks him to assemble all four lessons while preserving room for a scientific team whose work cannot be reduced to decoration. The founder is neither the laboratory nor the counter. He is responsible for the handoff between them.
Camme's stated ambition is equally measured: build a brand people look up to, earn a place in many routines, remain credible and authentic, keep evolving. No promise of conquering the world. No theatrical deadline. The aspiration is routine, perhaps the most demanding territory in consumer goods. A launch can win curiosity once. A routine must win the next morning.
Oxygen is invisible, but Camme's operating method is not. Make the difficult idea legible. Give it a physical setting worthy of attention. Repeat the central story without sanding away its substance. Stay open to the product that initially sounds like a mismatch. Then keep moving, long enough for accumulated experience to look a little like foresight.