Jeremy
Horowitz

Jeremy Horowitz runs Hume Supernatural, a clean personal care company that treats the skin like an ecosystem rather than a surface to spray. The flagship product is deodorant, but the pitch is bigger: prebiotics and probiotics that work with the body's microbiome instead of scorching it. The brand has become the fastest-growing natural deodorant in its retail channel, and it sits on shelves at Whole Foods, Sprouts and CVS.

The company he leads refuses the usual startup shortcut. Most young beauty brands buy an off-the-shelf formula, slap on a label and call it innovation. Hume builds every formula from scratch with chemist co-founder Melissa Christenson and a San Diego biotech partner, Sirenas Marine Discovery. The inspiration is odd on purpose: extremophile plants, the kind that survive in the planet's harshest ecosystems, get studied for what they might teach a stick of deodorant.

Horowitz co-founded Hume in March 2020 and launched it digitally, which is to say he opened a consumer brand the same week the world stopped leaving the house. The timing looked catastrophic. It turned out to be a lesson in building lean, direct, and online-first, back when everyone else was still figuring out what a Shopify checkout was for.

Start with the resume that doesn't add up, because the gaps are the good part. Horowitz studied at Duke, finished his undergraduate degree at Georgetown, and took a Juris Doctor from USC's Gould School of Law in 2002. He started as an associate at Latham & Watkins, one of the biggest law firms in the country, doing the corporate work that is supposed to define a career.

Two years in, he joined the San Diego Padres as Associate General Counsel. He never really left. Over 16 years he climbed from the legal department to running Petco Park events, to corporate revenue, to senior vice president of business development. He learned how a business actually makes money by watching a baseball team sell everything that isn't baseball: concerts, corporate boxes, the ballpark itself on nights when nobody was pitching.

Then a pivot to money. In 2017 he became Chief Investment Officer at Selby Venture Partners, where the job was to spot the consumer brands worth betting on. He had already tasted it as an angel: an early stake in the beverage brand St. Archer, and a hand in a business model that got duplicated all the way to Australia. Somewhere in there, watching other people build brands, he decided to stop watching.

The pandemic launch didn't sink it. Hume grew into the fastest-growing natural deodorant in the natural retail channel, according to SPINS data. The Wall Street Journal named its product Fragrance-Free Deodorant of the Year. Retail buyers who normally take years to warm to a new brand said yes: Whole Foods, then Sprouts, then CVS.

The cap table reads like a group text you'd want to be on. Oscar winner Lupita Nyong'o and soccer star Alex Morgan are among the investors. Advisors come from Vuori and Meta. Kelly Leveque, the celebrity nutritionist, signed on as investor and advisor. Horowitz, who spent years deciding which founders were worth backing, assembled a bench of believers around his own idea.

By 2025 the company projected between $8 and $10 million in revenue across roughly 7,000 offline retail points, and expanded from underarm deodorant into all-body care. The plan is not to be a deodorant company forever. The plan is to be a microbiome-supporting bodycare company that happened to start under your arms.