She Ran a 6-Month Clinical Trial Instead of a Launch Party

Melanie Barr: Welcome to She Built It. I'm Melanie Barr. Dr. Joyce Park is a Stanford and NYU trained, board certified dermatologist with two companies and more than a million people paying attention to what she has to say. Through T with MD, she has built one of the most trusted science-based skincare and hair communities online. Through Crativ, she has taken what she has seen in her clinical practices, patients overwhelmed by hair loss and unclear what actually works, and built a scalp and hair brand around it. Dr. Joyce Park, welcome to She Built It. You are a practicing dermatologist, founder of Crativ, creator of T with MD with more than a million followers. You have built expertise, audience, and a company at the same time. How do you think about the business you are really building across all three?

Speaker 2: >> None of this was planned. If I could go back and talk to young Joyce when I was in college, pre-med, I thought I would go into med school, become a doctor, and practice medicine until I retired at the age of 65. I had no idea the twists and turns that my career would take. I started veering off my course when I decided to take a year off of medical school. In between second and third years, I decided to pursue a medical journalism gap year. That fellowship year was incredibly exciting, fun. They sent me on adventures around the world where I worked for Dr. Nancy Snyderman as part of NBC News in their medical unit. I learned how to write, edit, produce, shoot my own content through the Stanford Graduate School of Journalism. It was really fun. Part of that year, my fellowship director asked me to figure out this thing called social media. Back then, we didn't really know what to make of it cuz this was 2011. This was 15 years ago. She said, maybe we'll start with a blog. She gave me a little space on the corner of the internet on the Stanford Global Health website. I would update the blog every week with what I was doing, where I was in the world, what I was learning, and what I was putting out. I enjoyed that so much that after I went back to medical school, I decided to my own domain and continue blogging. It went from blogging, long form content, to creating pretty photos and flat lays, OOTDs with skin care info put on top of it on Instagram. It wasn't until TikTok exploded onto the scene in 2020. I was home on maternity leave. The world was shutting down because of COVID. I needed a creative outlet. I started dancing on to that was my initial introduction onto that platform. It literally was to have a creative outlet to do these choreographed dances that were super cringy in retrospect, but really fun.

Going viral

Speaker 2: One of those videos went mega viral overnight where I was doing a dance, not well. I was putting on top of it facts about what types of foods might potentially worsen your acne. It really interested people. I thought, wow, this could be an incredible opportunity to educate the public about skin and hair health, do it in a fun, educational, non-intimidating, and very approachable

Melanie Barr: way. That's how the platform ballooned. >> It's so great that you took that year that you could think through a little bit of what you really wanted to do. I had no idea that your platform started with you dancing. I would not have

Speaker 2: guessed that. >> All those videos are still there, so you

Melanie Barr: can go back and see it. >> We all want to be entertained and not get the information we are looking for in a way that is taking us out of our everyday life, everyday world. Unless we're looking for information, we're looking to be entertained and not be able to do both.

Speaker 2: >> Yes. And that form of entertainment also keeps changing as the world evolves, as attention spans evolve, and as the platforms themselves evolve, who the algorithm favors. Back in the day when Instagram was just photos, I'd be posting more about lifestyle content and weaving in skin and hair education in that. Then with the advent of short form video, everything changed. It became about dancing at the beginning, slowly transitioned away from that. You're always changing and tailoring your content and changing with the times and

Melanie Barr: the cultural waves. >> And with the audience that you built before Kerative, how did that trust and direct relationship with people change the way you were able to launch and grow your company?

Speaker 2: >> I feel very fortunate that I was able to grow a platform so organically and over such a long period of time. When I started out on social media, the term influencer was not really a thing. There were no other medical professionals on social media. It was considered extremely unprofessional actually because it was so new and people weren't sure are you going to post about something that breaks HIPAA or are you going to post something you're not supposed to online? And I was always very careful about that. You're doing something that's outside of a lot of doctors' comfort zones. Back in the day, it was heavily scrutinized. But I bring that up because what is very unique about my community is not that I built it all by going mega viral on TikTok in 5 years. My community has grown up with me since 2011. We have gone through so many life stages together from when I was a student not knowing what type of doctor to become to me applying to become a dermatologist.

Speaker 2: They watched me move to New York, go through residency, meet my now husband, date him, and then get married. My community was with me as I got pregnant and had my first baby, got my first big girl job as an attending. We really have gone through so many ups and downs in my career and in my life. For example, even yesterday I was catching up with someone who I don't see very often and he said I watched your video about your IVF journey. It really helped me in my own infertility journey. My community knows me not just as a doctor that dances on TikTok or not just as a doctor who gives skin and health information, almost like a pseudo friend because we've been through so many years together. That length of time, that relationship, and that trust that's built up over a decade and a half is what really gave me this platform to launch Querative off of because part of the reason why I launched Querative was because my community had so many questions and concerns about hair loss. After seeing it in clinic, after getting tons of questions on my community, I thought we can really do better. We can really make products that are not only scientifically backed and clinically validated, also feel good, smell good, make you want to use these products as a part of your self-care.

Querative

Speaker 2: >> Tell us about Querative. >> Querative is my dermatologist-founded hair care brand. It has a scalp-first philosophy, which means that every product in it carries scalp-skin benefits as well as hair benefits. We launched in April of this year, 2026. I've been working on it and ideating on it and going through various versions of it for the past three years. We launched initially with a serum. I actually have it right here, the Redensyl Hair Treatment Serum. I basically put in it all my dream actives for both scalp and hair. Because I am a scientist and a dermatologist at heart, instead of doing a fancy launch party or investing in crazy PR mailers that I see everywhere and receive, I invested in a six-month clinical trial where we had a dermatologist evaluate every subject to rule them in for the study, diagnosing them with thinning. We had standardized before-after photos at baseline, three months, and six months. We did surveys with the participants every six weeks for six months, and that same dermatologist who evaluated them at baseline checked every subject again at three months and six months. And they found that our product was able to help bring about increased hair volume, density, thickness as evaluated by an independent dermatologist. I was just so proud to see those results because we really went above and beyond what the bar is for testing and beauty. I know that changes in scalp and hair take time. You won't be able to show any meaningful or lasting change in just one

Melanie Barr: month. >> It's great that you did that because all the pictures and the interest and all of that is great. If the product doesn't work and isn't designed well and isn't healthy for us, we're not going to keep

Speaker 2: buying it. >> Absolutely. There was no way that I was going to launch something if I wasn't 110% sure that it was going to actually work. Because as a dermatologist, I know what options we have to give patients. I recommend them to patients every day. I would never say use my product instead of a derm recommended treatment. I would never say that. My products fill a very important white space where you have science-backed ingredients wrapped in a formula that actually has amazing textures, feels really good on the scalp, disappears instantly with no residue. It's products that people actually want to use and can fit into your everyday routine.

Melanie Barr: >> And it's my favorite thing to talk to entrepreneurs who see a product and think I can do it better and who actually take the chance and go and create it. Good for you for making that leap, for doing it.

Speaker 2: >> Thank you. I've always been interested in being an entrepreneur. My family showed me that being an entrepreneur can pay off and my dad was always working in tech startups and watching his path was very inspiring. Growing up in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, early 2000s, it was all about tech startups and I did not go into tech. Looking back, I wish that I had explored that more, but I'm obviously very happy where I ended up. My husband it was in tech. I got to live vicariously through him and also through my dad. But I've always been just super energized and excited about working on something I'm passionate about, which is something like caregiving or something about educating the masses. It's just something I feel really strongly about. >> You could be going more towards tech

Melanie Barr: than you think you are with all of the media and the growth around a product.

Speaker 2: >> That is >> true. I have successfully roped my husband out of his retirement from tech into helping me with Kerative because it's running a whole company and I'm still seeing patients and I'm still running T with MD and 5 days a week on T with MD. My husband has very graciously agreed to step in and he's running finance, operations, sales, and whatever else I need help with, honestly.

Melanie Barr: >> Yeah, that's you have that support. >> Yes, I feel very lucky.

Melanie Barr: >> There is often a gap between what performs well online, what consumers want, and what the science actually supports. How do you build a brand

Speaker 2: without compromising credibility? >> The clinicals are very very important to me. Even on the T with MD side, if I decide to partner with a brand, it's important that I can see the clinicals that they've done so that they can back up all of their claims with data. For Kerative, when we were deciding how to formulate the products, I went back to the drawing board and my product formulator and I looked at peer-reviewed studies and we went back and looked at literature reviews and randomized control trials to see what ingredients actually had evidence behind them to support their loss and hair thinning.

Testing the Serum

Speaker 2: Because of the rigor with which we selected our ingredients, that led to first an internal study where I tested the serum on my own community first because I wanted to make sure that we were heading in the right direction. I tested it on members of the T with MD community first. They tested the serum for 3 months, filling out surveys every month, sending us before after photos. I was getting feedback from them that this is a product they really loved. They were really starting to see a difference by the third month. Also, even though hair takes a while to see a difference, the scalp skin, you can see a difference earlier in your skin. People were finding it less dry, less irritated, more hydrated, more calm. By the end of the 3 months, I was saying this is it.

Clinical Study

Speaker 2: This product has legs. Let's take it and run it through an official 6-month clinical study with a dermatologist. Then we'll really know, right? Testing it and being rigorous about it was always the plan from the very beginning.

Melanie Barr: >> Yeah, and March I think about the scalp and the hair because what the hair comes

Speaker 2: from instead of just focusing on the hair. >> That's right. So we know that healthy scalp skin is truly foundational to having healthy hair. As a dermatologist, I've spent over a decade looking at scalp skin specifically. We know that for hair loss disorders, no matter what the disorder is, we always check your skin first to make sure that we're not seeing inflammation or flaking or yeast overgrowth. In clinic, there's a whole bunch of things that we can do too to assess scalp skin. We can take a small skin biopsy and look at it under the microscope to truly see what's going on underneath the surface of the skin because oftentimes that's how we diagnose inflammatory scalp conditions that lead to hair loss. Scalp skin is absolutely so important and foundational to having healthy, thriving hair.

Melanie Barr: >> Consumers are now getting answers from experts, creators, brands, and search engines. How do you think the way people decide who to trust is changing?

Speaker 2: >> For the past decade, people were getting their information from social media. It could be experts in their field on social media, but it could also be people who have a passion for the field or who happen to have great skin or who happen to genetically be blessed with great hair who then start giving advice because of how they look. As a practicing dermatologist, I always tried to educate my patients that be very mindful of who you're following and getting advice from. Check their credentials. If they're talking to you about medical issues, do they have a medical background? Do they have the credentials to back up what they're saying? If one influencer is saying what worked for them, you should do this too, but their only credential is, well, I have great skin or I have really great hair and this worked for me, that's not good enough for me. Within the last couple of years, more and more people are getting their information from chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude. With that, I always say trust but verify. You can take it as a starting point. I wouldn't trust the chatbot over your doctor in terms of what you should do and putting together your treatment plan.

Melanie Barr: >> And it's so smart for you to have the trust through your community over years because now accounts are popping up and who knows how long they've been there and they're giving out information. I would think that having that trust over the years and being as a doctor is who you should listen to when you're going for medical or any kind of advice as it relates to something like the scalp.

Speaker 2: >> Honestly, it is getting a little bit hard to even know because have you seen

Melanie Barr: these AI influencers? >> Yes. >> I am >> what I was thinking.

Speaker 2: >> shook. Yes. I'm sure we can go off on AI and advertising. I have seen so many fake AI accounts mimicking not only doctors. So the same AI face is a GI doctor in one video, a dermatologist in the next video, a plastic surgeon in the next video. I've even seen AI patients. I've seen videos of AI generated people who have very striking skin deformities like large birthmarks on their face or nevi moles all over their body. But then I was like, wait, that's a really interesting pattern. It's like flowers or this is not a natural line that the body would follow when creating moles. The whole point of that was to garner sympathy because these videos would say I've been bullied all my life for looking this way. This magical product saved me. All the comments would of course say like, oh, but beautiful. Don't let the haters get you down. By the way, this product looks amazing. It's all fake.

Melanie Barr: >> Mhm. Now we have to go to the trusted person and the trusted account even more now than ever. >> Yes. Also verify that the trusted

Speaker 2: account is a trusted account because it can be hard to know. I've been fooled a few times because AI generated content is getting more and more realistic. Being able to discern what 's real and what's not should be a fundamental skill that we are teaching everyone in today's day and age.

Melanie Barr: >> Yes. What is the biggest growth challenge that you're facing inside

Speaker 2: Carrot Tip right now? >> I've never done this before. I'm a dermatologist by training. I'm a content creator, so I know social media pretty well, but I have never done any of the rest of it before, like managing a supply chain or I know how to work with brands from the influencer perspective, but now I'm a brand trying to work with content creators, so it's like a flipped relationship. One of the biggest challenges I have is knowing how to outsource because I'm so used to doing things myself, but I've not done many parts of this business before. Finding talented individuals who can take on and own parts of the business for me and really trusting them to own it because I don't have the experience or skill set that they have. That has been a steep learning curve for me and also even finding these talented individuals because I'm not coming from the beauty industry. Luckily, through T with MD, I've worked with a lot of brands and I've become friends with a lot of founders. I lean on them too for advice or recommendations and referrals of who I can go to when I need. That's one big challenge in scaling.

Melanie Barr: >> And going back to your community, it's so great that you have that and that

Speaker 2: you've built that over the years. >> I'm very grateful for my community that follows me as well as my beauty community of people that I've worked with for the past 15 years and grown relationships with and I consider all of

Melanie Barr: them my mentors as well. >> You started as the expert and became the CEO and leader. What has been the most challenging throughout that transition and how has it changed the way you lead as your business grows?

Speaker 2: >> I have never had to manage anyone before, which I don't know if that would be surprising or not. As a dermatologist working in a hospital, I wasn't really in charge of the hiring or firing of anyone or even the training because I was given staff to work with. I was never responsible for making the ultimate decisions. Now, this is the first time that I'm in charge of hiring my team, also learning how to lead them, how to give them enough instruction, letting them have some freedom and ability to express what they want and what they need. One thing that I've learned in just the five months now since we've been launched I'm learning to be better about is to check in and see how people are feeling, whether they are feeling overwhelmed or if they need my help or if they need more bandwidth by hiring on or bringing additional people onto the team. Because a lot of times people may tend to and I find this more on women, we just take on more and more and more because we can. Just because we can do something doesn't mean we should necessarily always take it on.

Checking in with the team

Speaker 2: I mean, I'm of this too. Totally guilty of this. Stepping back, checking in with each individual on my team, making sure that their workload is appropriate, that they feel like it's manageable, also making sure their reports are having a good relationship with them. These are all new things that I'm learning.

Melanie Barr: >> So true. And it takes time to manage the team, check in with the team. It's interesting how sometimes we have to schedule that time in because we're so busy thinking about the work we're doing or the overall growth of the company. You're right. It's so important that that doesn't get lost.

Speaker 2: >> Yeah. It's really easy to get lost. And then another similar point to that is asking team members, what are they excited about doing? Because if you have someone who's been doing one aspect of the business for a long time, just because they're good at it may not mean that they want to stay in that role forever. Maybe they want to explore their new skills, which could be helpful for the business too. So reminding myself to check in, make sure that people are all in a good place within the business. We don't have any full-time employees, so everyone I work with is a part-time contractor. And that has worked out really well for us.

Melanie Barr: >> Mhm. I really love that. It's great that you can work like that today and build a

Speaker 2: business in that way. >> Yeah, and all of us live across the country. Some people I have met in person, majority I have not. We're just spread out across the country in across different time zones. It works. I feel like this opens up a greater talent pool to work with.

Melanie Barr: >> It does. >> It will love the flexibility, too.

Speaker 2: >> I have a team member I've worked with for eight years and we've never met in person. Well, obviously video, but never actually met in person. It's amazing you can find incredible people to work with that way.

Speaker 2: >> Uh my hope is that one day I can sponsor a team meetup or a relationship building retreat or something. I think it would be really fun to get everyone together.

Melanie Barr: >> be fun. Yeah. You built a medical career, a media platform, and a company with a team. What brings you the most joy in what you're building now?

Speaker 2: >> I'll start with my dermatology practice because I decided to do something very unconventional there as well. After several years of practicing in a traditional clinic model, I decided to pivot and I now run a teledermatology clinic where I can accept patients across three states, New York, California, and Washington. Patients can book by the amount of time that they want for the appointment. I made this change because in a traditional clinic model you are slotted for 10 to 15 minute appointments and you are back-to-back. So you're seeing 25 to 30 patients a day. 15 minutes is truly not enough time for me to spend with a patient, especially if it's a brand new patient. I want the time to be able to build some rapport. I always felt so rushed where it got to the point where I was thinking, how do I get out of the room when I get into the room and how do I keep everything on track? Like what if they start asking more questions? What if they want to bring up five different things to talk about? I felt so limited. In this new model, patients know exactly how much time they get with me because they book me for a certain amount of time and I have the patient fill out a very extensive questionnaire before the visit and make sure to review that whole questionnaire before we start. I go into the visit already knowing a lot of their history and being familiar with what they're coming to me versus going into a room blind and needing to get all the history and do the treatment and evaluation all within 10 to 15 minutes.

Patient experience

Speaker 2: It has worked out really well for me. I find that my patients enjoy being heard. They like having the extra time and they enjoy having the ability to not only talk about their medical dermatology issue, also for me to build every single patient a full-on morning and evening skincare routine. Or if I'm seeing a patient for hair loss, I build them a whole weekly rotation of these are the shampoos you should use, these are the scalp treatments you should use. Those are things that in a traditional dermatologist office setting you may not have the time to do just because of how insurance is reimbursed. The thing that brings me the most joy from Skin Refinery, which is my clinic, is the relationship that I'm able to have with my patients because of this more flexible model where we get all that time together.

Melanie Barr: >> Yeah, and it's because you want to open up. It's hard to walk into a room and open up about what might be going on and there might be additional things that

Speaker 2: take a longer time to explain. >> Yes. Even as a patient, when I go into a clinic visit, I feel slightly nervous because I don't actually know how long the visit is supposed to be and I feel bad taking up the doctor's time because I know they're so restrictive on time. I find myself trying to rush through my questions or feeling bad if I have to ask questions because I don't understand the timing. By having this clinic model where patients know exactly how much time they have, to be honest, I end up giving them more time than they book because that's just how I am. Patients enjoy knowing that ahead of time that they have this amount of time with me. So that's what brings me the most joy out of my clinic is that relationship that I have with my patients that I was very much missing in a more traditional clinic model.

Karative

Speaker 2: >> How about within Karative? >> I find all of it so so exciting. I love problem solving. Don't get me wrong. Every day there are a multitude of new problems, website breaking. My husband and I are truly doing it all. Like we are in Shopify coding the website with that little AI assistant to help us with some of the HTML. We are doing it all. I find it really fun. One of the things that was unexpected is working with my husband and discovering the side of him because I've always known that he was very intense about work, but we've never worked together on something before. He is still very intense about work and he has a high bar for all of our consultants and teammates who work for us. He's also at the same time very very respectful me. He always says to me you're the CEO and at the end of the day it's your company. So even if I don't agree, I'm still going to go along with your decision. >> It's amazing.

Melanie Barr: >> I'm really grateful for him. >> How about outside of business and work?

Speaker 2: >> Outside of business and work it has to be the kids. Right now I just have so little bandwidth for anything else in my life. It's like work and then being a mom. I have a six-year-old and a two-year-old. They always tell me that they never have enough time with me. The mom guilt never ends. I travel quite a bit for work, whether it's for tea with MD to work with brands or whether it's for care initiative. When I am home I try to be very present. I try to put my phone away in the evenings so that they can get dedicated mommy time. It is hard, but they bring me so much joy and they humble me. They teach me a lot.

Speaker 2: They also bring me a lot of joy. >> Yeah, and those are fun ages because

Melanie Barr: they don't know what went on in your day. I remember those ages. Yeah, and putting your phone away at night they'll

Speaker 2: remember those moments. And when they get older I have twins that are about to be 13. You will be arguing with them to put

Melanie Barr: their phone down. >> Oh my gosh, I bet you have teenage

Speaker 2: daughters. >> coming. I have one of each. I have a boy and a girl.

Speaker 2: >> fun. I have one of each as well. And it is also fun learning about how they need different things from parents and just watching them grow and develop. It's so fun. We just finished potty training my daughter last week and it's a huge

Melanie Barr: milestone. No more diapers. >> Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing with us how you can make our hair and our scalp more beautiful and how you're building your business. Please share with us how and where we

Speaker 2: can find you. >> For tea with MD, that's for skin and hair advice from me. You can find me at tea with MD on all the social platforms. Then Kerative is available at k e r a t i v . com.