More than 50 years of Institute Dr. Schrader – always with an eye on the future
The Institutes Dr. Schrader can look back on a long company history. The starting point was July 3, 1973. Dr. Karlheinz Schrader began his own business in the basement of a rental building in Bevern by founding a research and development laboratory for cosmetic and pharmaceutical products. Initially the development laboratory and the Creachem GmbH started. After just six months, the company moved to Sylbecker Berg on the outskirts of Holzminden, to the site of the former Florida Chemie.
The demand for services in the area of hair and skin physiological testing increased so rapidly in the 1980s that Skin Physiology emerged as an independent institute for routine testing. To be able to serve global customers with court-approved reports, further expansion was necessary and so the Institutes Dr. Schrader moved to the Bülte-area in Holzminden in the mid-eighties. After the reconstruction, it was possible to introduce the first climate test rooms for scientific studies.
To complete the service offering of the institutes, an analytical laboratory, the Ancopharm, was founded in 1994.
In 2001, the company founder’s son, Dr. Andreas Schrader, took over the institutes. The state-certified food chemist particularly expanded the area of testing for skin and hair by establishing new methods.
In 2004 he founded the International GmbH, which participates in a joint venture in China to better serve the Asian market.
Test methods from Schrader used worldwide
Testing methods that are still used worldwide today go back to the inventive genius of the company founder, such as measuring skin moisture (corneometry) and determining the sebum content of human skin (sebumetry). In the 1990s, further procedures such as non-contact determination of the skin surface profile (FOITS) to be able to demonstrate the effectiveness of anti-wrinkle creams, or the measurement of the number of photons on human skin (chemiluminescence) to be able to detect negative environmental influences on human skin. From the early 1990s onwards, one focus of scientific work was the testing of sun protection factors of cosmetic products. Today, the institutes, together with experts around the world, are setting another milestone in the creation of a new ISO standard for determining the sun protection factor. The institutes not only enjoy a high reputation worldwide in the field of sun protection, but also in other areas of evaluating the effectiveness of cosmetics. In addition, the testing of deodorant products and the entire field of application testing of hair care products also play an important role in the in-house test studio. All these tests have led to decades of improvement in cosmetics through the support of our test subjects, which made a hundred thousand tests possible in all these years. In addition to the global players in the cosmetics industry, the international consumer associations are also among the institute’s customers.
In order to be able to design research and test conditions that are particularly practical, there are 18 fully air-conditioned test rooms in Holzminden which house numerous special facilities, such as two SPA POOLs, to determine the water resistance of sunscreen or dark room laboratories, to measure photon emissions on human skin and hair. In Max-Planck-Strasse, four expansion stages resulted in a total capacity of approx. five thousand square meters of testing and laboratory space, where seventy people are currently employed.
A joint venture exists in China to conduct tests on Asian skin and hair since 2004. For this purpose, an institute was established in Beijing to be able to conduct studies with test subjects on site in China.
The branch of Institute Dr. Schrader is in Kassel on Königsplatz since 2017 with a team of five employees. Also, in Kassel skin care products are evaluated under scientific conditions with volunteer study participants.
Always looking to the future
To continue and to successfully expand in its unique structure, the Institutes Dr. Schrader as a former medium sized company started in June 2023 into the future with two companies, the Institut Dr. Schrader Creachem GmbH and Institute Dr. Schrader International GmbH, both 100% subsidiaries of the Normec Group.
Normec is an independent service company operating in North-West Europe and specializing in testing, inspection, certification and compliance (TICC) in the food, safety, sustainability and healthcare sectors. Areas of expertise range from water, air and soil quality to fire protection, food safety, medical hygiene for patient safety, GxP training and now cosmetics. Normec’s goal is to grow as a leading TICC company where quality is a top priority.
The financially strong parent company ensures that Institute Dr. Schrader will continue to invest in new methods and growth so that all customers can continue to rely on a strong and trustworthy partner with a high scientific reputation.
Thomas Meyer has been part of the management since the beginning of 2024 and has taken over as CEO of the local institutes from Dr. Andreas Schrader.
