REAL CHEMISTRY
Its client base largely consists of pharmaceutical and life sciences companies that are seeking to reach and engage healthcare professionals and patients.
It is a specialist agency, operating exclusively within healthcare, and that focus is itself a significant differentiator in a crowded market.
The company’ s work is powered, in part, by AI and data analytics, but the human relationships that make that work possible are, according to Ontonia, just as important as the technology behind them.
Understanding why requires knowing something about how Ontonia arrived at Real Chemistry in the first place.
Ontonia’ s career path Her career path is, by her own admission, anything but conventional. She began her working life buying pet products for an e-commerce site in New York City. It was not a role she had sought out or planned.
“ I just thought I was having fun making some strong partnerships along the way,” she recalls.“ I didn’ t even realize it was procurement at the time.”
But the experience was formative. She learned to negotiate, to set up websites and to manage the end-to-end process of buying and selling – skills that would prove essential to everything that followed. From e-commerce, she moved into higher education procurement.
There, she helped build out afully operational dental college, working across multiple departments to coordinate procurement, real estate and compliance.
“ If the teams you’ re supporting don’ t know your name, you’ re not building a true partnership. You have to be a human”
Ontonia Hamlin, SVP of Procurement & Real Estate, Real Chemistry
It was her first encounter with the kind of regulatory rigour that would later define her work in healthcare.
Next came out-of-home advertising, a sector in which Ontonia partnered with stakeholders across multiple US cities, including New York, Portland, Minneapolis, Chicago and Philadelphia, as well as a stint in London.
That period coincided with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and a broader moment of national unrest, requiring Ontonia and the team to fundamentally rethink how they operated while remaining lean and responsive to their clients.
Each of those chapters added something to Ontonia’ s professional arsenal.
“ All of those pieces – e-commerce, outof-home advertising, higher education – truly have been the pieces of my toolkit here at Real Chemistry,” she explains.
“ How I wanted to lead my team, how I wanted to partner with both internal stakeholders and third-party partners – all of that came from paying attention to what worked and what didn’ t.” realchemistry. com