Marcia Kilgore: 'Instead of luxury labels, what people want to portray is their own brand'
Marcia Kilgore was watching telly when she had the idea. "I thought, what about Netflix but for beauty – so everyone could get a bigger piece of the beauty pie?" The woman behind Bliss Spas, FitFlops and Soap & Glory, Kilgore has long been renowned for "disrupting" the industry, but this project threatened to go even further, toppling it on its side, skidding into a hedge.
I'd heard a rumour that Kilgore's new venture was such a threat to established beauty brands that she'd received death threats. She chuckles. "There's room for us and for them. After all, Netflix exists, but people still go to the cinema, right?"
This is how Beauty Pie works: you pay £10 a month for membership, and then you can purchase its carefully curated collection of make-up and skincare at factory prices. So, that's £20 lipsticks for £2.24, excellent foundation (in Armani-esque bottles) for £4.75, and the new "Super-Eye Energy Peptide Infusion Cream" for £5.65. The pricing is totally transparent, and the products are comparable to those in the fanciest beauty halls.
As Beauty Pie nears its first anniversary, now with tens of thousands of members, Kilgore says the key to its success lies in the "personal brand". Rather than define themselves through designer labels, she says: "What people really want to portray is their own brand."
Only a fraction of the cost of a luxury product is the product itself. The rest is what Kilgore calls LMAO, or "Landfill Marketing and Overheads." Kilgore spends days at cosmetics factories: one will produce a perfect lipstick, at another she knows a product mixer who specialises in foundation. "You become quite elitist in terms of the quality. If something doesn't have good colour payoff or the pencil is a bit too dry, I reject them."
Of the luxury brands, she says, her voice dropping a little, 95% buy the same products she does, tweaking the colours slightly, whacking it in their own packaging and adding a few zeroes to the price – often 30 times the price it costs to make. "We had this skin brush from Korea, a rechargeable one in soft-touch rubber, for £18," Kilgore says. "In shops it would be more than £80. I've seen things like it in the airport for £300." Is there a company she finds particularly disingenuous? She puts her hand over the tape recorder and mouths the name of a brand whose moisturisers sell for £200, and whose formulations can be found for a 10th of that through Beauty Pie.
Ozohu Adoh: 'The luxury market was not meeting the needs of women of colour'
This year Ozohu Adoh, a Nigerian-born ex-accountant, launched Epara, the first luxury beauty brand specifically targeting women of colour. The line has already been bought by Harrods, which knows its audience: in 2015, says Adoh, every £1 in £3 spent in the store was by a Nigerian.
It began by accident. "I had excessive dry skin on my face. I tried all the luxury skincare brands and they just didn't work." She researched ingredients, making her own concoctions using mainly oils. "It took several iterations before I got something that worked," says Adoh. When her skin cleared up "friends started to ask me for this thing in a nondescript jar." That was three years ago. She has since developed a line including cleansers, a mask, serums and eye cream. Many of her ingredients, such as marula and moringa oils, and mango butter, are found on African soil. "I want to take them mainstream," she says.
Some have asked why women of colour need their own skincare line. "The market was not addressing our needs," says Adoh. "Due to higher levels of melanin, typical problems present differently in darker skin tones. Uneven skin tone caused by hormonal issues or acne scarring can take much longer to heal."
Tricia Cusden: 'Society hasn't yet come to terms with the fact that we're living longer'
"The beauty industry assumes we are all engaged in an anti-ageing battle," says an emphatic Tricia Cusden, the 70-year-old founder of mature make-up brand Look Fabulous Forever. "I am determined to change this."
Cusden, a former management consultant from south London, has a "pro-ageing" attitude to beauty. She launched Look Fabulous Forever in 2013, "after wasting £50 on products meant for skin a lot younger than mine" and becoming "increasingly exercised" by the "insulting" rhetoric around older women and their beauty routine. Cusden's mission was two-fold: create products and imagery that were "honest, featuring women over the age of 55"; and to use "positive language, to represent ageing as something to embrace, not to fight against"...
