The Glossy Beauty Podcast

Skin care isn't just for the face, according to Nécessaire co-founder Randi Christiansen. Christiansen founded the company with Nécessaire co-founder Nick Axelrod in 2018 and debuted digitally first. Their original lineup of clean products -- a curated assortment of body washes, body lotions and sex gels -- was quite unorthodox for the beauty industry just two years ago."Nick and I really felt philosophically that skin doesn't stop at the neck," she said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast.Christiansen saw a gap in how much money people were willing to spend on skin care for the face, as well as for their favorite matchas. "It was very clear to both of us that there was just room for what we call real ingredients in body," Christiansen said.Nécessaire's now expanded product line <a href="https://www.glossy.co/beauty/clean-beauty-brands-revert-to-self-care-focused-marketing">entered Sephora.com last month</a>, and pandemic permitting, will debut in its stores in August. The company plans to grow 300% to 400% this year, Christiansen said, in part thanks to this new relationship with Sephora.

The age of ongoing confinement seems tailor-made for the industry's clean beauty segment."We couldn't be in a more timely position in terms of what we've been pushing for as a brand," said Kosas founder Sheena Yaitanes on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.Kosas launched in 2015 with lipstick before moving on to a full clean color assortment. It recently flexed its personal care muscle by debuting deodorant. The company closed a series B in January, on the tail of revenue in the $50 million to $60 million range in 2019. It's expected to triple that business, according to previous reporting by Glossy."I have long believed that the look of beauty was changing. I have long felt alienated from the beauty conversation when you're talking about a makeup routine that requires 15 products or an hour and a half. And I'm a makeup lover, so I know I'm not alone," Yaitanes said.

Some beauty products trickle down from medical use to everyday consumers by happenstance, but Augustinus Bader's skincare line is the opposite, according to the company's CEO Charles Rosier.Rosier first learned about Professor Augustinus Bader's research around a "wound gel" in a case study involving a young burn victim. "Basically, using that wound gel [Augustinus] was able to prevent skin graft and scarring to that child," Rosier said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "I was really shocked that the thing could exist, but was not widely available."As Bader -- a professor of stem cell biology at Germany's University of Leipzig -- told Rosier then, he felt that pharmaceutical companies weren't as willing to fund clinical trials because "the number of cases of burned people in the Western world was not so high. Most cases are actually in the third world," he said. "For a pharmaceutical group, it's not necessarily the most valuable customer."Rosier decided to step in and co-found a consumer-centric version of the company in 2018. He thought a skincare brand could help fuel Bader's greater work -- "he's the brain doing the research, I'm the guy behind the scenes," he said. The line has gone on to earn accolades among Hollywood celebrities for its rejuvenating effect, not just its medical expertise. That was by design -- in lieu of a pricy marketing campaigns or influencers, the company distributed samples through a personal connection in Los Angeles in its early days.Since then, Augustinus Bader has slowly added new products to its line-up to complement its cult status "The Cream" and "The Rich Cream," which retail for $265. The company expects to earn $70 million in 2020, up from an estimated $24 million in 2019 -- but Rosier doesn't see the company putting dozens of products on store shelves (or online, where it makes most of its sales), despite the demand."We can't lie about it. That product is efficient on its own and it nourishes the skin cells' environment so your skin cells make the right decision," Rosier said.

Credo is betting that customers stuck at home are as beauty-minded as always, but that more than ever, they now have the time to do their research about clean beauty."Health is what anyone is thinking about right now," Credo co-founder Annie Jackson said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "I think if we didn't have a customer before this and we do now, it's because she's really understanding that investment in health -- really educating herself on certain chemicals and how they could impact health or the environment."Credo carries items from about 135 brands, according to Jackson, and incentivizes them with "more kudos and marketing" to create transparent packaging -- and to stay away from what Credo considers less-than-clean substances.Still Jackson doesn't think of clean beauty as an exclusive part of the market anymore. Case in point: the retailer's latest collaboration with Ulta. She talked about the benefits of partnering with Ulta , consumer trends during the pandemic and just how many product submissions Credo entertains on a monthly basis.

Millions of Americans are still out of work as the coronavirus pandemic's ripples through the economy, and many are unlikely to return to the jobs they held a few months ago.A few companies -- including Stella & Dot, Ever and Keep -- have stepped into that vacuum, offering gig economy work for people willing and able to sell cosmetics, clothes and fashion accessories."We really started growing when unemployment was at 8 and 9%. And in some ways you could say the growth of our business was somewhat counter-cyclical, because when people had a greater financial need, not only did you see more people join, but you saw the people that did join work more and earn more," Stella & Dot founder and CEO Jessica Herrin said on the Glossy Podcast of the 2008 final crisis.The company counts about 30,000 "ambassadors," though the number of people actively selling on a monthly basis is between 8,000 and 10,000, according to Herrin.Prior to Covid-19, Stella & Dot, Ever and Keep went through a $50 million tech revamp to connect sellers with a digital platform (inspired by Shopify, Pinterest and Polyvore) allowing them to set up a curated selection of products -- a storefront, essentially -- which they can then email or text to customers.That foresight has been key to surviving as a business during coronavirus."Browse commerce is just done," Herrin said. "Who wants to go to a website and search and come up with a thousand options and look for reviews that may or not be real, rather than get a curated assortment texted to you with personalized recommendations?"

Ted Gibson and Jason Backe had to close one business to make another work.The married couple (a hairstylist and colorist, respectively) and business partners say it took closing down their flagship salon location on Fifth Avenue in New York City in 2017 to allow them to rethink their futures. What they landed on was a L.A. smart salon "powered by Amazon," that had no receptionist and no inventory -- their hero product, the Shooting Star Texture Meringue, was not sold in store, but on Amazon."We knew that that model of 25 chairs, 12 assistants, a huge front desk staff, the overhead of the product -- we knew that that model was a dinosaur," Backe said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast.In the latest Glossy Beauty podcast, Gibson and Backe talk about bouncing back from having just $2,500 in the bank because of Covid-19, how some beauty companies are all talk when it comes to supporting Black businesses and what the salon of the future looks like.

Uoma Beauty founder Sharon Chuter is more than ready for the reckoning coming to monocultural corporations in America."Now I can be more vocal about it because I have little to lose," Chuter said on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "I didn't start my business to be a billionaire. It was part of me using a platform to speak up against what was going on."The Nigerian-born founder launched the #PullUpForChange campaign earlier this month, calling for the brands that had come out in support of Black Lives Matter to disclose the number of Black employees on their own payrolls, including those at the corporate and executive level."You're not giving them jobs," Chuter said about the brands. "You take their culture, you repackage it and you sell it back to them at a premium. Meanwhile, you're not employing them."Some beauty companies divulged these statistics, alongside promises to improve, but for Chuter, "pulling up" also means being held accountable for that down the line -- every six months, specifically."In six months, some people won't have made much progress. That's reality. Especially right now in the Covid-19 era," she said. "So we want to establish two national days where all national companies pull up for the Black community and let us see."The Black population makes up 13.4% of the country as a whole, but Black employees only account for 8.6% of Fortune 500 board seats and 3.2% of senior managers, according to data reported in The Economist. According to McKinsey & Company, only 1% of Black business owners get a bank loan in their first year of business, compared with 7% of white business owners. And The Washington Post found that only 1% of founders who have raised venture capital are Black; in 2018, 81% of VC firms didn’t have a single Black investor.Chuter is ultimately optimistic. "I have to be," she said. By way of solutions, she urged companies to develop executive talent from within a company's ranks while putting out calls for employment at historically Black colleges and universities; to front ad campaigns and messaging with Black models and organizers even at the cost of alienating certain consumers (or investors) who don't understand the moral urgency; and creating diversity boards that exist outside a company's own workforce."Unless they're independent, they do not have power to implement change because they answer to you, so they're going to give you the answers that you want to hear," Chuter said. "And that's something that every big company should be thinking of right now."

Beauty companies that fail to bring diverse employees into their teams, for executive-level to entry-level roles, aren't just at risk of failing on a moral front -- they're also leaving money on the table, according to Mented co-founders KJ Miller and Amanda Johnson."Money talks. So maybe you don't understand why it's important that I have a lipstick that works for my skin tone, but you can understand that black women outspend their non-black counterparts by 80%," Miller said on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "The smart investors got it and they are now investors in a really successful brand, and the other investors didn't. And that's on them"Miller and Johnson graduated from the same 2014 class at Harvard Business School, and launched Mented in January 2017. Sales grew by roughly 400% in the following year, during which -- after pitching 80 VCs -- they raised a pre-seed investment of $1 million. In 2018, the company raised $3 million in further funding.In Johnson's view, "Diversity in beauty has always been 'a trend.' Sometimes it's really up, sometimes it's really down. It depends on what models are on the runway, what's chic in a season," she said. "But the reality is people of color have always been around."Regarding the killing of George Floyd and the protests that continue to sweep the country, Johnson acknowledged the gravity of the climate, especially as black founders and leaders."We’re making it," she said. "The thing that continues to brighten the day and push us forward is obviously, our families and our passion for the thing we’re building, but also our customers. We have had some of the most heartfelt emails and social comments over the last couple of months and weeks, whether it was about Covid[-19] or about social injustice, encouraging us to keep going, to keep fighting, that our company matters, that what we're doing is important. Sometimes just that one message is the thing that can keep you going in what is an incredibly difficult day."

The coronavirus pandemic has created more uncertainty for brick-and-mortar locations, but it's an opportunity for companies to ramp up the expertise and service stores were known for digitally."That is not going away," Unilever Prestige Group CEO and EVP Vasiliki Petrou said in regard to virtual consultations and other digital innovations. "It just will grow stronger. Being future fit is definitely taking that muscle to the next stage," she said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast of the group's brands such as Tatcha and Murad.And while that aspect of a brand's presence demands evolution, Petrou thinks that conversely, consumers these days are especially attracted to hero products from the brands they know and love."In crisis people tend to go back to the bigger, credible, iconic products versus, let's say, the more 'discovery' ones," Petrou said. "Consumers want to go to a safe haven."Petrou wouldn't confirm or deny rumors that Unilever Prestige was in talks to acquire British makeup brand Charlotte Tilbury, only teasing that "some [rumors] are true, some are not." But she did explain the company's overall approach to M&A."We're always about founder-led brands. We're always looking at new business models, new approaches, whether there's a big idea that's globally relevant, and definitely looking at all categories," Petrou said.

When Murad CEO Michelle Shigemasa turned the skin care company's focus to direct-to-consumer sales versus wholesale last year, it was with the goal of getting to 50% DTC within five years.Now Shigemasa estimates a much faster timeline. "I think that'll happen in the next two years, max," Shigemasa said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast."We've seen digital sales that frankly surprised us. We knew that they would accelerate, but to this degree, I don't think we understood," she said. Sales on Amazon and Murad's own website have also at last doubled, Shigemasa added.Like just about every company in the industry, the Unilever-owned brand is aiming to take as much customer engagement as it can online with the onset of Covid-19. Shigemasa called virtual events "One of the big challenges we have on our list that we're working on."Virtual "skin check-ins," an effort that involved shifting personnel from frozen brick-and-mortar outlets -- including Sephora, Ulta, Macy’s and Nordstrom -- have led to 300-400 appointments a day, she saidConsidering the uncertainty caused by the pandemic, Shigemasa sees no reason to look back. "When we look forward at brick-and-mortar, I'm not sure they'll ever be the same, to be frank."