Our Story

In 2019, my wife and I left our jobs to travel the world and learn to scuba dive. Beneath the surface, while falling in love with the underwater world, we found something we weren't expecting. Large sections of reef were quiet. The fish were thinner. The color was off. And we kept hearing the same sentence from dive masters across the globe: "You should have seen it ten years ago." The more we listened, the more we understood. Coral reefs are living filter feeders. They absorb everything in their environment, which means the small daily choices we all make on land eventually find their way into the water. Personal care products are part of that picture. So is what we eat, what we wear, and how we travel. None of it lives in isolation. It all ends up somewhere. That realization came home with us. We started looking at our own bathroom counter differently. We started reading labels we'd never read before, and asking why a moisturizer needed thirty ingredients to do the work of six. We wanted something simpler. Something we could understand. Something that did right by our skin and didn't add to the load on the ecosystems we'd just spent two years swimming through. So we made it ourselves. We call it the 6-Ingredient Rule. Pasture-raised beef tallow. Non-nano zinc oxide. Organic beeswax. Jojoba. Aloe vera. Coconut oil. Six ingredients you can read out loud, sourced from people we know, blended by hand into a jar that does what it says and nothing it doesn't. We started with one product because we wanted to get one product right. Reef Collective is the rest of the work. It's the brand we built around that first jar. It's our way of supporting clean water initiatives, the conservation partners doing the real work on the ground and in the water, and the small businesses trying to build a future where reefs can thrive. Protecting reefs isn't only about preserving beauty. It's about preserving biodiversity, food chains, and the health of the planet we all share. If you'd like to get involved, reach out through our contact form. We'd love to connect you with some of our favorite conservation partners and small businesses working to restore our oceans. And if you've been looking for a simpler way to take care of your skin, we hope our jar is part of how you do that. Derek & Sierra Winokur Founders, Reef Collective