Being involved in the cosmetic product industry can be challenging. It is a competitive field with the biggest names worldwide. If you have a skincare line, you will be competing with those big brands to gather and attract loyal customers. As a result, you might only have a small audience to work with when attempting growth for your company’s revenue. It can be disheartening to see what you’re up against, but you must remember that they started the same way you did. So, giving up hope should not be something you look forward to yet.
The global cosmetics market is projected to grow massively within the next eight years. Standing at an estimated $393 billion in 2024, the market is expected to reach $758 billion by 2032. While you might not see it yet, you can turn your skincare line into a disruptive beauty brand that could become the next big thing! Of course, it is only achievable if you take the right steps. Here are a few steps to integrate into your operations to make your skincare line a disruptive beauty brand for the future.
Product Development and Innovation
Creating a disruptive beauty brand can be challenging, especially when you are going up against big companies with nearly unlimited resources and equipment compared to you. They have the best scientists and developers to ensure that their skincare line has products medically approved quickly to make waves among its millions of consumers. Unfortunately, a small beauty brand can only follow those big companies’ recipes because it is the approved formula. You might be able to insert a few secret ingredients here and there, but you will essentially be copying or replicating their products. If you want to be known as the disruptive beauty brand, then being original might be necessary for your operations.
Developing an innovative product that even big companies cannot ideate can help you build a skincare line built for success. However, it means getting scientists, equipment, and facilities to help you create them. Try to gather enough resources to accomplish that space, allowing you to develop medical grade skin care products new to the market. Of course, getting the things you need for innovative product development will require heavy investment, but that is the step that makes you a disruptive beauty brand.
Product Testing and Quality Assurance
Once you’ve developed the innovative skincare line products that will make your business popular, you must start performing testing and quality assurance. This is an important step in your quest to build a strong beauty brand, ensuring your customers have a comfortable and positive experience. Product testing and quality assurance usually involve clinical trials, pH balance tests, odor and stability tests, and phase development. There will be a whole line of workers that need to be hired when you perform product testing and quality assurance, making it necessary to get to know those you need to tap to make things work.
Once your products get medically approved, it is time to consider the demands of logistics. It should be part of product testing, since they might need to be sealed in airtight containers at specific temperatures to ensure products don’t get spoiled or containment problems. You might have to partner with logistics providers with reefer transportation to ensure your products remain safe and healthy during transit. Product testing and quality assurance will be necessary in the development phase of your skincare line, making it necessary to prioritize investments in those areas.
Packaging and Design Innovation
While you might focus initially more on ensuring you produce quality products, it might not matter if the packaging and design is not attractive to customers. There will always be a thing for aesthetics, especially in the cosmetics industry, which places high value on appearance. If you want to ensure you attract customers to your products, you must be willing to put in the work for packaging design. Thing is, you might have to make more investments in that aspect.
Hiring graphic designers should be the first thing on your agenda when creating beautiful packaging for your skincare line. They can craft multiple features of the package, including brand and logo placement, packaging shape and functionality, colors and patterns experimentation, and even formula integration. Graphic designers can also design the package that comes with the product itself, building a custom sticker that provides a personal message to the consumer and even a specialized box that adds more intrigue and aesthetic to the product. Of course, their final designs might require you to secure a custom packing service capable of manufacturing the result. Packaging might seem like the least of your worries when developing a new product to achieve your disruptive beauty brand goal, but it is necessary to ensure you can get customers interested in what you’ve invested so much in.
Collaborations and Partnerships
Turning your small business into a disruptive beauty brand will not be possible without making a few connections. In today’s world where social media reign supreme, you might find it challenging to make noise without getting your product in front of their eyes. As a result, networking with different kinds of people will be necessary. Cosmetic and beauty influencers hold so much influence over their respective audiences, which could range well into the thousands and millions. If you put your product on their pages, your sales could receive a significant boost, making it necessary to invest in partnering with them. Social media marketing can also help you compete with big brands for attention, with paid and sponsored ads being available for business pages.
Of course, your skincare line might have more medical applications than cosmetics. As a result, your collaborations and partnerships might be more ideal with hospitals or derma clinics. A dermatologist can promote or even prescribe your product to patients, acting as a salesperson for your brand. Pharmacies and groceries can stack your items on their shelves and aisles, ensuring potential customers have access to them. You must learn how to make those collaborations and partnerships work in your favor, making it necessary to improve your networking skills, along with your sales team, if you want to build a disruptive beauty brand.
Branding and Visual Identity
Unfortunately, big companies are at an advantage when it comes to becoming known as great brands. It is easy for them to become household names, especially when they already have TV commercials and commercial retail stores all over the world. For a small business looking to make noise, it can become a more challenging quest to get your branding as popular as those corporate giants. However, you can do your best instead.
Your brand requires a visual identity, putting emphasis on the name and logo you’ve developed. You must try your best to make sure they are all over the areas where your customers can see them. If you have a physical popup store, you can invest in custom signage to ensure they can see it from miles away. For social media pages, you must ensure that your brand colors and patterns are always harmonious with your logo and products. Those pieces, when well integrated, can be appealing to the eyes. It will take a lot of work to attract people to your business, but nailing branding and visual identity can certainly help.
Sustainability and Ethical Practices
Of course, everything you do will be under scrutiny if you want to be a disruptive beauty brand. In this context, disruption has to be good, which means everything about the customer’s experience should be positive. The staff interactions, the product usage, and the responses to customer concerns should all be practiced and mastered to a tee. Good customer experience leads to great customer reviews, making it necessary to invest in that area.
However, it will be the situations that put you in a bad light that usually get the most attention for your business. Among the areas you need to worry about are sustainability and ethical practices. Businesses lose customers if they’ve done something wrong in their eyes, making it necessary to know what to do. Your product packaging might not be up to par with eco-friendly policies customers want you to follow, making it necessary to offer recycling programs to help reduce impact on the environment. Ethical practices require you to be transparent and honest at all times. Owning up to a mistake is better than lying and covering it up. When you know what to do during those situations, you can create better plans to prevent your customers from seeing you as the bad guy.
Community Engagement, Education, and Appreciation
It feels nice that customers come to you involving a product. However, you must also take an aggressive stance in engaging with your audience. Building a community around your business is a key factor to success. And if you want to be the disruptive beauty brand in your region, you must engage your audience in different ways. Participating in events with a popup store opportunity and providing free products for trial can be a good start.
You can take two different approaches whenever you interact with your community members. One is education, ensuring your consumers know what the difference is between your product and a big brand’s version. This allows you to point out your unique value selling proposition, giving consumers an educational lesson about why they should consider your product. You can do this in the form of brochures, trial sessions, and video demonstrations. Another approach is appreciation. When you make a big sale to a new customer, you can go all out by sending out a personal message, a free second product, or a thank you bouquet presenting the purchased item. Those approaches can increase community engagement, convincing others to feel more interested in what they are missing out on if they don’t inquire about your products.
E-commerce Expansion
Unfortunately, you might not have enough financial resources to build a commercial store yet. If that is the case, you must make a living out of online shopping. The good thing is that more and more consumers have started to prefer e-commerce over having to travel a certain distance to purchase products. As a result, you must live and breathe within the e-commerce domain if you want to be a disruptive beauty brand.
Besides the usual social media pages, you can build a website containing all your products. Then, you can set up an e-commerce channel that allows people to add your items to a digital cart to make a transaction. There might also be a few e-commerce stores popular within your nation, making it necessary to expand there. Of course, inventory tracking will be necessary here since you might be accommodating more customers than you can handle. It is a good problem to have, knowing that consumers are buying your product. However, you must ensure that their digital purchase journey feels seamless if you want to succeed in e-commerce.
International Expansion
It takes a lot of work to build a disruptive beauty brand in your nation, but you might finally make it. Expanding your small business to the point of getting customers everywhere in your country is a significant milestone to hit. However, your dreams should not stop there. With the power of innovation and the rise of technology, it is not possible to achieve your dreams to succeed internationally.
International expansion starts with networking. You must connect yourself with different types of people in various international events, which can be a good start. You can check with a business event catering service to see if there are conventions that can put you in front of interested foreign investors. They can be key to your efforts to expand internationally, especially when you manage to convince them that your products are worth the risk. Foreign investors might also come to you for franchising options, and creating a good package for yourself will be key.
Creating a disruptive beauty brand is not an easy journey. However, you can build yourself slowly into becoming one. Making noise in a competitive industry will require you to follow those steps diligently. Once you accomplish them, you stand a chance against the giants of the cosmetic world.