When Jared Pobre and his wife, former WWE star Stacy Keibler, moved to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, he expected more time outdoors, skiing, hiking, fly-fishing. What he experienced was how extreme conditions accelerate skin aging and damage, leaving his skin raw and red. When searching for solutions for his skincare, not only were options limited, but nothing seemed to help. Out of frustration, he tried one of Keibler’s pricey serums.

“Within a week it cleared everything up,” he says. “That’s when I asked myself, why doesn’t something like this exist for men?”

Pobre is the founder and CEO of Caldera + Lab, a high-performance skincare brand helping men take a proactive approach to skin health. The company launched its first skin product in 2019, a serum called The Good, which quickly became a national bestseller. What began as a mission to create effective, science-backed skincare for men has since grown into a profitable eight-figure business with a loyal following. Caldera + Lab now offers a full range of products, including cleansers, moisturizers, serums, eye treatments, sunscreen, and hair care.

In the men’s category, where “innovative skincare” sounds like an oxymoron, Pobre wants to build something that approaches ingredients and science with the same care as leading women’s brands like Estée Lauder and L’Oréal. Getting there required more than surface-level fixes, it required investing in clinical research, sourcing high-performance ingredients and formulating with precision.

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Digging into the details

After Pobre’s aha moment, he started researching what might make a men’s brand different. A former ad tech CEO who had built a nine-figure company from scratch, he knew how to spot a market gap and saw one right in front of him. In Jackson Hole, he wasn’t the only man stealing his wife’s skincare; the region’s extreme climate made the effects on men’s skincare more obvious and urgent, but even beyond Wyoming, men’s skin faces challenges that are sometimes less visible but equally damaging

“I found other men in Jackson Hole buying $185 serum for women, just like I was,” he recalls. “And these were rugged guys—not the type you’d expect to be using high-end serums. That’s when I knew there was a real customer here.”

Pobre met with botanists and ethnobotanists to learn how indigenous people in the region had used local plants like fireweed, yarrow, and nettle for centuries. These “survivor plants” endured freezing winters and harsh elevations by producing unusually high levels of antioxidants. That resilience, he realized, could be translated into skincare.

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Building the brand

Naming the brand took some real thought. Ultimately, Pobre landed on Caldera + Lab, a tribute to the volcanic caldera at Yellowstone and the science behind the product formulations. The visual design was both modern and rustic, a reflection of Jackson Hole’s unique identity, where city slickers live out their outdoorsman fantasies.

“That balance—the ruggedness of Jackson with the polish of a professional life in the city—is what we tried to capture,” Pobre says.

Finding customers

The true test arrived when The Good went to market. Exercising caution, Pobre ordered the smallest production batch he could—10,000 units—aware of the risks with launching a new brand in an unproven category. To his surprise, by the end of the first year, he was already reordering and growing momentum.

Much of the traction came through social media ads that funneled customers to a clean and simple landing page. “What gave us conviction was when guys started asking for more,” Pobre says. “They wanted a cleanser, a moisturizer, SPF. That’s when I knew this wasn’t just me. There was a real market here.”

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Lessons from missteps

Caldera + Lab’s path wasn’t perfectly smooth. Early marketing agencies failed to deliver. Brand identity work dragged on as he pieced it together through multiple firms. But those bumps became lessons.

“In every company I’ve built, I’ve learned that taking shortcuts doesn’t pay off,” Pobre says. “Whether it’s product development, marketing, or hiring, you’ve got to do the hard work.”

Eventually, he pulled all his marketing in-house, a decision that reshaped the business.

Scaling the vision

This week, Caldera + Lab launched two new products: The Great, an anti-aging serum, and The Hydro Layer, an anti-aging moisturizer. Pobre sees this as the next frontier: not just formulas with clean ingredients, but science built specifically for men’s skin.

“It all started with me borrowing my wife’s serum in Jackson,” he says. “I’m still just as curious—and just as committed—as I was that first day.”

US employers are bracing for the steepest jump in health insurance costs in at least 15 years, with premiums projected to climb nearly 10% next year — on top of years of already sharp increases.

Benefits consultants Aon and WTW told the Wall Street Journal that employer health-coverage costs are set to surge about 9.5% and 9.2% in 2026, respectively, the fastest rise since at least 2011.

The average family plan now runs roughly $25,500 annually — equivalent to the price of a small car.

“It’s an unsustainable number for a lot of employers,” said Shawn Gremminger, head of the National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions. He said the reaction from companies “ranges between upset, shocked, freaked out and resigned.”

Insurers say premiums are being driven up by rising hospital bills, wider use of medical services and expensive new drugs — particularly the GLP-1 weight-loss and diabetes treatments like Ozempic, Wegovy and Zepbound.

More cases of cancer and chronic conditions among working-age Americans are also straining coverage.

Some businesses are pushing costs onto employees through higher payroll deductions or bigger deductibles. Others are exploring plan redesigns to limit access to certain hospitals or specialists.

A WTW survey found 60% of large employers plan to consider switching insurers or pharmacy-benefit managers in the next few years.

Troy Morris, CEO of space-services company Kall Morris Inc. in Marquette, Mich., said his firm pays 100% of employee premiums but was hit with a 20% increase for the plan year beginning in August, after a 9% hike in 2024.

Out-of-pocket maximums for families rose to $10,000, from $8,150.

“It’s a hard choice that makes you sick to your stomach,” he said.

Mutual of Omaha, with 6,300 workers, saw double-digit cost growth this year and dropped coverage of GLP-1 drugs for weight loss.

The insurer said its pharmacy-benefit manager warned it would lose lucrative rebates if it tried to create a program to manage patients’ weight-loss maintenance.

“We’re certainly frustrated,” said Steven Schlange, the company’s vice president of human resources.

Pam Kehaly, CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona, called the escalation “the worst I’ve seen.” She said aggressive billing by some providers, sometimes aided by artificial intelligence, is adding to the surge.

Kirk Roy, chief actuary at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, said conditions once considered illnesses of old age — including atrial fibrillation and joint problems — are increasingly showing up in younger, working-age employees.

“Diseases that we usually thought of as for elderly, we’re seeing more and more,” he said.