In November 2024 Dom Bridges, the founder of the Margate-based skincare brand that was then called Haeckels, was in a bit of a predicament.
It had been a tough year. The company was seeing the effects of high overheads and a few bad business decisions, and then Bridges learnt that Ernst Haeckel, the German zoologist whose illustrations of botanicals had originally inspired the brand’s name, had touted ideologies rooted in racism. In November 2025, Bridges took to Instagram to reintroduce the brand as Dulcie, named after his 10-year-old daughter.
“It was a no brainer, in terms of changing the name, it didn’t mean a lot to me,” Bridges tells Broadsheet, speaking over the phone from his farm in Cornwall. “In the event that the company got so big that I forget to look at the tiny details, then [I thought that] maybe that name would take me back to what I found so amazing about that book [of illustrations by Haeckel that inspired the brand]. But that was it, it’s just not my world.”
During the year when the brand was going by Formerly Known As Haeckels, the brand’s loyal customer base allowed Bridges the time to really think about the next era. He even notes that he saw an uptick in new customers during that period.
Eventually, team members contributed ideas to a suggestion box, and Margate locals often stopped the skincare founder to offer their thoughts.
“I can’t stand up and be a spokesperson, protect it and push it forward under a name where there’s no [personal] link,” he says. “Mrs Bieber [Hailey Bieber, founder of Rhode] isn’t in the garage pumping out that skincare. We are mixing and boiling and fermenting it. It’s a complex business.”
In 2012, Bridges was picking plastic from his local Margate beach to create a cleaner and safer environment for his soon-to-be-born child to enjoy. An abundance of seaweed on the shores helped ideas about using it to make skincare products start forming. Bridges thought seaweed’s abundant anti-bacterial and hydrating qualities could change the industry’s perception that natural formulas weren’t as impactful. He made the first products in his kitchen and 13 years later, the brand still touts seaweed as its hero ingredient.
While the business started from thinking about the quality of his kids’ childhoods, the new name comes from thinking about Dulcie’s shopping habits.
“She’d bought some bloody awful spray from Boots that her pocket money could only afford, and some substandard face wash, and we just found ourselves – much the same as I did with my dad, trying to make a guitar – making a face wash, and we were having all these amazing conversations. As she’s gotten older, I’ve found we’re even more together. So I just asked her how she’d feel if I called the brand after her, and she was totally cool with it … and then she quite comically negotiated some equity, which I thought was commendable.”
The seaweed in the products is still hand-harvested from Margate’s beaches, and ends up in bottles that, when returned to Dulcie, become compost for Bridges’s farm. Produce grown there is either used in new formulations or ends up in store as a free gift to customers. Circularity grounds the business, and that won’t be changing.
“Does it feel like the skincare industry cares about it? It feels like they don’t give a monkey. It feels like most customers can’t give a monkey’s as well,” he says of Dulcie’s farm-to-store approach. “But to me, I feel like I’ve saved the world with my own little ecosystem. I’m deeply proud of all the people that have helped the company get to that point, because it’s pretty special.”
