Meet the new beauty disrupters
time2017/07/24
Meet the new beauty disrupters
“Why is the skincare industry not in great shape right now? Because everything is the same,” says Sue Y Nabi. The 49-year-old beauty industry veteran is speaking in her light-filled apartment overlooking London’s Hyde Park. “I’m fed up with ‘miracles’,” she continues. “And I don’t believe in focus groups — they’re good for telling you you’re not making mistakes, but they don’t give you the recipe for success.”
As she speaks, Nabi, a formidable figure with raven hair, gestures towards a coffee table covered with forest-green samples of her new skincare brand, Orveda, which will launch at Harvey Nichols, London, on July 1. The range is the culmination of three years of work and a sizeable personal investment from herself and her business partner, Nicolas Vu, whose background — unexpectedly — is in hip hop and music artist management.
The brand will come under intense scrutiny from the get-go. This is Nabi’s first independent venture since leaving L’Oréal in 2013, where she was president of Lancôme worldwide. Her reputation within the beauty industry as one of its most influential figures is unparalleled. In 2012, she created Lancôme’s bestselling fragrance, La Vie Est Belle, securing Lancôme’s status as the number one world luxury beauty brand. At the time, the brand’s record in fragrance was faltering; Lancôme went on to become the number one in Europe and five years later the perfume is still in the top three worldwide. Nabi helped expand the business to one with a turnover of €2.3bn. She was inclusive before being inclusive became a brand-concern. As president of L’Oréal Paris she changed its famous tagline, “Because I’m worth it”, to the less arrogant-sounding, “Because we’re worth it”, and hired the 68-year-old Jane Fonda as one of their faces. After building the company into a €4bn business, she left L’Oréal in 2013 and although L’Oréal rivals courted her for numerous consulting roles, she politely declined them all.
“They tweak your ideas into something very basic,” she explains of her decision, “but I could have made a fortune.” Instead, she has endeavoured to do “what I would have done at L’Oréal if I’d been allowed to create my own brand, which is to create something we are proud of.”
The traditional beauty-brand model of business today is led by focus groups, consumer research, celebrity endorsement and market fluctuation rather than an interest in developing authentic product. Nabi is on a mission to disrupt those attitudes. “Companies have strong cultures, and they want everyone who works for them to follow that culture,” she says. “But the marketing person who comes from a business school doesn’t know what a woman of 49 is looking for.”
Orveda (the “or” means “origin” while “veda” is inspired by Ayurveda and the philosophy of encouraging the skin to heal itself) is hoping to capture consumers looking for something different. “If I did something average, people would kill me,” she says. Launching with 18 new products, including lightweight serums for younger, oilier skins and rich face creams for older ones, alongside five different face masks and five cleansers, it’s not cheap (the Firm Brew Botanical Cream costs £300), but it is innovative and intelligent with high concentrations of active ingredients that even the most advanced skincare laboratories were challenged to deliver.
“Some of the American beauty laboratories spend their lives working on textures,” says Nabi. “Then, when it comes to adding the actual active ingredients, they only add a hint so they don’t risk ruining the texture. To me, this is like focusing on making a new drug taste nice without knowing whether it works or not.”
The range is big on clean, high-performance, bio-technological formulas and tried-and-tested skin heroes such as healing enzymes and probiotics to boost its ability to “glow”. But perhaps more interesting than what she’s putting in, is what she’s leaving out. There’s no pink-for-girls packaging for example — it’s a gender-neutral range inspired in part by Nabi’s own gender change more than 10 years ago. The products are all vegan. Many of the preservatives have gone, and she hasn’t used any ingredients that provoke an irritation in the skin, a common device aimed at cheating the way to a shortlived glow. Neither will you find any retinol, the vitamin-A derived ingredient popular in many anti-ageing creams. “I know that dermatologists love retinol, but it’s pushing your skin to extremes, and in the long term, do we really know what it does? Sure you’ll have beautiful skin for now, but in 10 years’ time?”
“There has long been this idea that you have to suffer to have beautiful skin,” she adds. “Everything the industry has been doing for the last 50 years has been about stripping it of its natural oils, weakening the skin barrier, killing the [mostly good] bacteria that live on it. We’re about working with the skin, not against it.”
Nabi is one of a new wave of disrupters shaking up the industry at a time when the big brands are looking increasingly vulnerable. Both Estée Lauder and Clinique sales in skincare fell by single digits in August 2015; Elizabeth Arden saw sales drop 13 per cent in 2014. There has been some recovery, but the drop in footfall to department stores, the traditional home of the skincare giants, hasn’t helped. With the US-based Macy’s set to close 68 of its stores in 2017 (Estée Lauder’s biggest client) the bigger brands are being forced to re-think their sales strategies. They will also have to compete with a new generation of start-up, independent brands. Marcia Kilgore, a 48-year-old entrepreneur with nearly 30 years of experience in the industry, has modelled her new business on giving customers more for their money.