Oceanwell

Oceanwell is a German natural cosmetics brand built around ingredients from the sea, above all a fermented extract of sugar kelp, combined with seawater and a collagen obtained from jellyfish. It is developed, made and sold by oceanBASIS GmbH, a small company on the Kiel waterfront that grew out of marine research and brought Oceanwell to market as its own brand in 2009 [5]. The parent company is older: it was formed in 2001, so the two dates describe different things, one the firm and the other the brand [10].

The range covers face and body care, with separate lines for everyday use, sensitive skin and ageing skin, plus treatments for professional use in beauty salons. Its products are sold through specialist natural-cosmetics retailers, spas and beauty salons, and online. The brand is active: it entered Switzerland and Austria in 2025, and in 2026 oceanBASIS marked 25 years of seaweed research.

Oceanwell's roots lie in applied marine science rather than in the beauty trade. In 1994 Levent Piker, Peter Krost, Susanne Heise and Christian Koch set up CRM – Coastal Research & Management, a consultancy producing studies on how coastlines are managed. oceanBASIS today describes CRM as its sister company and as the groundwork for everything that followed.

In the late 1990s the marine biologist Inez Linke and her team were researching sugar kelp (Saccharina latissima, sold in cosmetics under its older name Laminaria), a brown seaweed that grows up to three metres long and is native to the Kiel Fjord. According to the natural-living magazine Schrot&Korn, a study they carried out for the state of Schleswig-Holstein and a German environmental foundation showed that a seaweed farm could increase biodiversity and help counter climate warming. In 2000 the group put the idea into practice with a seaweed farm in the fjord, which the company describes as the first of its kind in Germany.

The question behind the work, as the company tells it, was how to use the Baltic Sea sustainably while also protecting it. Linke later explained the appeal of seaweed for skin care through its own survival tricks: sugar kelp produces minerals, sugars and plant compounds called polyphenols that help it heal wounds and avoid drying out when exposed at low tide, and she argues that the same compounds can protect human skin from UV-related stress.

Accounts of who founded the company differ in emphasis. Schrot&Korn reports that Linke founded the start-up in 2001 together with Levent Piker and two other partners [10], while float Magazin names Piker and Christian Koch as the scientific colleagues with whom she first experimented with seaweed [11]. The company's own history page says oceanBASIS was formed in 2001 "with the support of Inez Linke" and four pioneers. Its team page presents Linke as founder and managing director, Koch and Piker as managing partners, and Peter Krost as a co-founder who was there from the start when oceanBASIS emerged from CRM [4]. Susanne Heise, a co-founder of CRM in 1994, is not presented as a founder of oceanBASIS; the company notes that she is now a professor in Hamburg.

The move from research to cosmetics was, by Linke's account, partly self-taught. After developing their own methods for extracting and fermenting the seaweed, she told Schrot&Korn, the team took a popular book on making natural cosmetics at home into the laboratory and gradually turned from marine researchers into skin-care developers.

The company's first step in 2001 was a gentle extraction technique for Laminaria seaweed, intended to keep the plant's active compounds intact. The business was registered that year as O'Well – Ocean Wellness, first as a partnership and then as a limited company. The company's press materials date Oceanwell itself to 2009, when oceanBASIS launched it as its own natural cosmetics brand. Both dates are therefore correct: 2001 is the founding of the company and 2009 the launch of the brand.

Before Oceanwell existed, the company sold a first natural cosmetics range, Baltic Care°, which went on sale in 2002 in beauty salons and wellness centres in Schleswig-Holstein. Research widened in 2004 to collagen from marine sources, and in 2006 to the antiviral and antibacterial effects of algae. In 2008 O'Well – Ocean Wellness was renamed oceanBASIS.

The company calls 2009 a key year. It launched the Oceanwell Professional.Line for salons and the NATRUE-certified Oceanwell Basic.Line for consumers, opened a new 6,000-square-metre seaweed and mussel farm on long lines off Kiel-Pries, and began research into algae-derived compounds against cancer with the University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein. In 2010 it filed a patent application for its own collagen made from jellyfish [2], which reached the shelves in 2012 as the OceanCollagen line.

A second wave of growth came in 2015, when the company launched the Biomarine Cellsupport line for sensitive skin, set up a food business with the seaweed brand Meeresgarten, and started its "Protect the Ocean" initiative. The website and packaging were relaunched in 2017, and the sales team was expanded in 2018. In 2020 the company began exporting to Hong Kong and relaunched its online shop; in 2021 it published its first balance sheet under the Economy for the Common Good, a framework in which companies report on their social and environmental impact. In 2023 the Oceanwell and Meeresgarten shops were merged into one. In 2025 the brand was launched in Switzerland and Austria through exclusive distribution partners [2].

Oceanwell belongs to oceanBASIS GmbH, which is based at the Tiessenkai in Kiel-Holtenau, overlooking the locks of the Kiel Canal. The brand has stayed with the company that created it, and oceanBASIS is run by its partners: Linke, Koch and Piker as managing partners, with Krost also involved in managing the company. In 2024 Schrot&Korn listed Linke as managing director and put the workforce at 24 [10]; the company itself describes a team of more than 20.

Besides Oceanwell, oceanBASIS runs the seaweed food brand Meeresgarten and carries out research on marine active ingredients. Its in-house staff include biotechnologists working on algae extracts and on jellyfish collagen, as well as a diving and mapping team.

Oceanwell sums up its core idea in a short phrase, "Das Meer nutzen und schützen" – to use the sea and protect it at the same time. Its stated values are responsibility for people and the environment, especially through protecting the oceans; careful use of resources; respect and fairness; and freedom and creativity. The brand's German tagline describes it as natural cosmetics "that let you feel the sea".

The company stresses that it does not come from the cosmetics industry. On its team page it describes its staff as marine biologists, process engineers and researchers first, and says that with Oceanwell it can multiply its commitment to the sea. According to the company, it uses only actives from seaweed grown in sustainable aquaculture or gathered by hand in an environmentally sound way, and it avoids short-lived cosmetic effects created by synthetic ingredients. Linke has described the protection and sustainable use of the oceans, in line with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 14 ("Life below water"), as the guiding aim of the company's work.

Independent coverage has noted the brand's unusual niche. Schrot&Korn wrote that organic cosmetics based on marine actives did not exist before Oceanwell and remain unusual today [10]. float Magazin went further, describing Oceanwell as the only certified natural cosmetics brand based on actives from fermented brown seaweed.

The centre of every Oceanwell formula is the fermented seaweed extract. As float Magazin describes the process, the harvested kelp is frozen, mashed, fermented with yeasts and bacteria for four weeks and then filtered. Linke calls the result a "blue pharmacy". The kelp no longer comes from Kiel: it is grown in organically certified aquaculture near Trondheim in Norway, where the water is cleaner and saltier than in the Baltic [11]. Extraction and fermentation still take place at the company's own site at the Tiessenkai, and the seawater used in the products comes from the Kiel Fjord. The marine ingredients are combined with a small number of plant-based basics such as aloe vera, jojoba oil and shea butter.

The range is organised into three main consumer lines:

- Basic.Line has the highest share of seaweed extract and is aimed at moisture and everyday care. The company says its Algen-Wirkstoffkonzentrat (algae concentrate) contains up to 36 per cent Laminaria extract. - Biomarine Cellsupport is designed for very sensitive, dry and irritated skin and is fragrance-free. float Magazin describes it as suitable as supportive care alongside treatment for atopic eczema and psoriasis. - OceanCollagen ProAge is built on the company's patented collagen from jellyfish, which float Magazin calls the first natural cosmetics with collagen from the ocean.

One of the company's earliest products was a gel mask for professional salon treatments, made with more than 50 per cent seawater and 10 per cent seaweed extract. It survives today as the Zellaktivierendes Meeres-Gel (cell-activating sea gel), which the company re-issued in a large anniversary size in 2026. Other named products include the Sanfte Gesichtscreme Tag & Nacht, a gentle day-and-night face cream, and the OceanCollagen Face Cream. In 2024 Schrot&Korn counted 27 products in total, from a toner and a pro-age line to sun creams, food supplements and treatment packs for spas.

Oceanwell carries the NATRUE seal, an international certification for natural and organic cosmetics [7]. The company says its products contain no parabens and no ingredients from petrochemistry, such as mineral oils, paraffins or silicones, and that they are not tested on animals. Not every line is vegan: the Basic.Line and Biomarine Cellsupport contain no animal ingredients, but OceanCollagen does not qualify, because its collagen comes from root-mouth jellyfish, a group of invertebrates [8].

On effectiveness, the company cites a clinical-dermatological study of its Biomarine Cellsupport Moisture Cream with 20 participants. In their own assessment, 90 per cent said it reduced roughness, helped dry skin and was well tolerated, 80 per cent found their skin soft and supple, and 70 per cent said irritated skin was soothed [8]. Oceanwell also states that seawater has scientifically confirmed soothing effects on psoriasis and atopic eczema.

As of August 2024, the company told Schrot&Korn that it was working on a scalp serum and an active ingredient from bladderwrack, another brown seaweed, and on turning leftover seaweed material into bioplastic for packaging. That was already possible in prototypes, Linke said, but not yet at the company's volumes.

Ten cents from every Oceanwell product sold go to the company's own initiative, Protect the Ocean [5]. According to Schrot&Korn, the money funded the protection of sea turtles in Côte d'Ivoire for seven years; more recently the company has worked with the association One Earth One Ocean to recover lost fishing nets, known as ghost nets, from the Baltic Sea.

The company has published balance sheets under the Economy for the Common Good since 2021. It also measures its carbon footprint with ClimatePartner and offsets emissions, and it states that it has stopped selling through Amazon. Its containers are designed to be recyclable, and its outer packaging is printed on FSC-certified paper by a regional printer. In 2024 the company moved its Glättende Augencreme (smoothing eye cream) into a tube made with 70 per cent recycled plastic.

The OceanCollagen Face Cream won a SPA Diamond award in 2012 [1]. In 2017 the Biomarine Cellsupport Nourishing Cream took second place in the BSB Innovation Price, and in the same year Inez Linke was named Businesswoman of the Year in Schleswig-Holstein.

The brand has been profiled in the German press, including a portrait in Schrot&Korn in 2024 and a feature in the sailing magazine float on Linke and the sourcing of its seaweed.

Oceanwell is an active brand. In 2026 oceanBASIS marked its 25th anniversary with a special edition of the Meeres-Gel. The brand expanded into Switzerland and Austria in 2025, following exports to Hong Kong that began in 2020, and the company issued product news as recently as July 2024. Its products continue to be sold through specialist natural-cosmetics retailers, spas, beauty salons and its own online shop.