I traded derivatives for a living.
Now I make bug repellent.
No PE. No VC. No brand-building committee.
I came up in finance, not the outdoors. I built Longsleeve because the repellent aisle made you choose between something that works and something you can stand to wear. Here is how it happened.
HBS New Venture Competition Grand Prize · NSF SBIR grant · EPA Reg. No. 101457-1
It started with my sister-in-law.
Miami, 2016. The summer Zika arrived.
She was pregnant in Miami during the Zika outbreak, and needed serious mosquito protection she could tolerate using every day. Picaridin, an established repellent active the CDC recommends, was the right tool. The formula around it was the missing piece, so I set out to build one.
How it happened.
Five steps, one long road.
- 2016My sister-in-law. She was pregnant in Miami when Zika hit, and needed real mosquito protection she could stand to use every day. Nothing on the shelf qualified.
- HBSThe pitch. I pitched it at Harvard Business School and won the New Venture Competition. Grand prize, no equity sold.
- NSFThe backing. The National Science Foundation funded the testing with an SBIR grant. A research grant, not an investor.
- 2 yrsThe formula. Two years at the bench with a chemistry team. We landed on a short, nine-ingredient, fragrance-free lotion: 20% picaridin, 5% squalane, 5% glycerin.
- 5 yrsThe registration. Then five years of EPA review. On December 11, 2025, Longsleeve was registered under Reg. No. 101457-1, up-to-14-hour claim and all. No outside equity, start to finish.
A small company, in the open.
Longsleeve is sold by Hour 72, Inc., a small company in New York. The lotion is manufactured for us in Florida. It is registered with the EPA, the agency that regulates insect repellents in the United States; it is not an FDA product.
Every ingredient is on the tube, all nine, active and inactive, with the role each one plays. Repellent labels are only required to name the active ingredient. We name all of them.
Longsleeve took no outside equity. It was funded by the Harvard prize and the NSF grant.
One more thing
These days you will find me on a trail upstate with my dog, which is not where anyone who knew me at a trading desk expected me to end up. I set out to fix this for my sister-in-law, and somewhere along the way it handed the outdoors back to me: the long Saturday hike, dinner that stays on the patio past dusk, the hours I used to surrender to bug season.
So when this site tells you to close it and go outside, I mean it literally. The bugs are handled. Go.
If you email drew@longsleeve.com, you get me. Not "the founder's office." Not a customer-experience platform pretending to be a person. Me.
Andrew Rothaus
Founder, Longsleeve · New York