HOW TO LAUNCH YOUR OWN BEAUTY BRAND

Beauty is big business.

Globally worth around $528 billion, the BeAUTY AND PERSONAL CARE market is now fully democratised with tradtional beauty powerhouse brands existing alongside celebrity brands, retailer own labels and market disrupting entreprenuers.

If you have the passion and budget, the beauty market is open to anyone who dreams of owning their own beauty business.

So if you are thinking about taking the first steps on your beauty brand journey, we thought it would good to share some thoughts on what to plan for first. As a team with decades of beauty development experience with large global retailers as well as beauty start-ups, we have experienced and worked through many bumps in the end-to-end product development journey.

So, where do you start?

BRAND DEVELOPMENT

When you have a spark of an idea, spend quality time working through your brand vision and plan.
What will your brand stand for and what are its values? Who is the target customer and why? Where will your brand be positioned in the market vs its competitors?
Laying down the brand foundations at the beginning, and understanding what will make it stand out from a crowd, is vital to set a clear path ahead and anchor all the decisions you make in the future.

BUDGET

Speak to an experienced product developer early on to understand the sort of costs involved in launching a beauty brand. There are many areas of costs to be aware of and factor into budgets at the outset - from regulatory support through to website creation. The more questions you ask at the beginning of your project will make sure you can set up your product brief and launch for success.

It may also be helpful to reach out to other beauty entrepreneurs to make sure you have a view of what costs to expect. Many in the beauty industry are happy to share their experiences! This will help to ensure you are going into your beauty launch with your eyes open and aren’t caught out late into your project.

TIMINGS

Depending on the type of beauty product you are planning to create, its important to be aware of timings. Even if you take off-the-shelf formulations, packaging and raw materials can be on leadtimes of up to 16 weeks. For new formulations testing will take 3 months, and for true innovation or SPF products you may find that project leadtimes stretch to 18+ months.

Once you know more about the leadtimes expected to develop a new range, work with a product developer to draft a project timeplan with deadlines for all key activities, and set a clear, realistic launch date to drive the pace of your decisions.

PRODUCT BRIEF

When drafting your brief for your product launch, think about every aspect of the formulation that matters to you. Whether its formulation claims (e.g. vegan), texture or fragrance, you need a clear idea about what you are looking for and what is going to matter to your customer. Then when you speak to product and formulation developers, you have the foundations of your product ready to build upon.

Understanding what markets you want to launch is is important to consider at this stage as well. This will make sure your formulators take into account the relevant regulatory compliance for that region.

If the first attempts don’t meet your vision, spend the time revisiting the brief and making sure you know what want to improve so you can give the clearest feedback possible.

For packaging do your research with experienced developers to understand what are your must-haves and what are your nice-to-haves. Sustainability will be one of the first things to discuss. Go out to beauty stores to look at whats out there in the market, so you can pull together examples of the sorts of packs you do and don’t like. This will set up conversations with your developer about what is going to work within your budget.

Finally, have a clear idea on your RRP, margin and target cost of goods. This will help make sure you achieve the best possible product within your budget.

MANUFACTURING PARTNER

An experienced product development agency will have a trusted network of manufacturing partners across the globe. This means you can issue your product brief to a number of manufacturers and select the best partner for you based on response to brief.

Make sure you know what to expect around things like production tolerances, management of excess components and payment terms. Standard terms and ways of working can vary, so having an early conversation on this means that you and your manufacturing partner are on the same page from the outset.

LAUNCH PLAN
Understanding which markets you want to target is really key not only to shape your product brief, but also to set up the right conversations with retailers and distributors. What are your priorities for launch markets, and where do you want to focus in the future?

Again, speak to industry experts about setting up for retailer conversations so you know what sort of questions to prepare for. The earlier you start these conversations the better so you can shape your launch plans early.

Take the time to find the right partners for PR, marketing and website development. There is no point coming up with an amazing product if nobody knows it exists!

We hope this helps with getting started on your beauty brand journey - it’s an amazing industry which we love working in!

If you would like some support delivering your beauty range to market, please get in touch for chat.

THE BEAUTY BRAND COACH