COSMETICS BUSINESS LIVE
blends. With nine of these fragrances, you can have thousands of possible combinations, but we narrow these down to three choices. What clicks with people most is those 20-45 minutes. We can really involve people in the making. They understand what’s in their fragrance, because we’ve brought in the idea of deconstructing it first. Thomson: There’s also the sustainability angle. With this ‘shelfie’ culture, so many products get thrown in the bin when you don’t know what is working. So we’ve really gone down the stripped back routine at Skin + Me. We believe you need your hero treatment product that has all the active ingredients that you need for that step, and the rest of your routine is really simple: it’s a moisturiser, a cleanser and sunscreen, and that’s it. Meldrum: Also, celebrating the individual is very important in society nowadays. As Emmanuelle said, with personalised fragrance, you get the chance to show your personality and what you’re really like. Then there’s the fact that personalisation has changed. When it started out it was quite superficial, eg, putting a monogrammed name on something, but now it’s going deeper and it’s quite functional as well, especially in skin care.
I’m very interested in is personalising the consumer’s purchase journey: how do we discover products, how do we reach the decisions that we make?
What is it about bespoke beauty that appeals to the consumer? Dover: Our research points to two key factors that are driving this space. The first is ‘overwhelm’. There are so many brands on the market now and it is really hard to decide what you’re going to buy. The online channel has exacerbated that hugely. Then on top of that is that consumers really want that return on investment. They want to know that the products they buy – whether skin care, hair care – are going to work for them. Moeglin: I see clients every day and the part that resonates best with them is the experience they are going through. For our semi-bespoke process, you come in, you have a quick consultation, you go through a selection of perfumes, which are minimalist fragrances, and then people can select two or three of their favourites and we show them possible
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Why has the predicted skyrocket in bespoke beauty not yet happened, and will it? Moeglin: Because it’s hard! There is not a clear formula or path like with 90% of launches when commercialising a product. You have to be very creative as a brand or team. You have to have a living product that adapts constantly to regulation, to demand, etc. There are many creative ways of going around it, but that’s an issue if you want to sell in different regions. China, for example, does not allow mixing: all packs have to be wrapped to be sellable. And then you have the education of customers who have not come across bespoke beauty, who are like ‘what is this?’, so you’re talking about your brand for half an hour – and some will convert, but some will not convert. Thomson: The regulations just aren’t up to date and that’s why we don’t have personalisation everywhere. But, at the same time, we do need these for safe cosmetics – and if you have a billion combinations you’re not going to know if that preservative system is going to work, or if that product will have that shelf life. There is a lot to iron out.
What other challenges have you experienced in this area? Meldrum: Time. Bespoke and personalised takes time and everyone has an ‘Amazon Prime’ mindset. Science takes time and that’s hard for the consumer to understand. The way we’ve tried to deal with that is via communication. Dover: Price remains a barrier. That is something that will come through more and more: how we offer different tiers of personalisation. And, stemming from that, is accessibility more generally: thinking about where these products are available. Not everybody lives by Oxford Street and has the ability to go into a store to shop for these products. Online massively helps there, then you have Target and Walmart in the US, for example, offering in-store tests, which puts bespoke in front of more people.
What is the future of personalisation in beauty? Thomson: AI is probably going to be the answer. [Skin + Me] have got huge data sets now, especially doing questionnaires, etc, online. At Skin + Me we can’t just shove that into a machine and get machines to do everything, because we’re prescription-led, but cosmetics companies actually can do this. They have huge amounts of data and get that feedback loop where you find out what does and what doesn’t work, and you can train that data to make better personalised choices. Meldrum: Beauty was one of the industries to turn Covid around for themselves with AR try-ons, etc, and I think the marriage of science and technology, bringing the science and making it accessible, is the future for us. Via our [Skin Trust Club’s] recent collaboration with Madar, we’re trying to create a patient monitoring tool for dermatologists to test their patients’ skin with Skin Trust Club. Skin health is a big area; 44% of our users identify they have a skin condition when they open our app. That’s what we see as a big step for us. Moeglin: With fragrance there’s the ‘can I do it?’ aspect. There has always been that barrier of how do you empower the customer enough so that they are happy to [experiment with fragrance] on their own. Dover: It’s all about accessibility, understanding and gateways to communication, as well as the tiers you can offer to make it mainstream. That will be important
December 2022 45
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