Looking to accelerate innovation within its consumer business units Beauty Care and Laundry & Home Care, Henkel has established an internal idea factory and incubator teams. These think tanks will combine agile work approaches with the scale and expertise of a global company.

The teams will be tasked with anticipating trends, identifying new business models and services, and developing product concepts to capture growth opportunities and continuously expand the businesses. The key priorities for these groups are speed and agility, working as “entrepreneurs within the company” while closely collaborating with internal and external partners.

The “Fritz Beauty Lab,” whose name is inspired by Henkel’s founder Fritz Henkel, aims to identify attractive niches with a growth potential for existing brands or white spots to create completely new brands. The team works in a defined innovation funnel to create incremental business concepts, which are rapidly prototyped and tested directly in the market. By leveraging the potential of e-commerce and online platforms, minimum viable products will be directly offered to consumers, accelerating the validation process. Once proven successful, the product is launched more broadly to determine the future extent of scalability.

“Our market environment has become increasingly competitive and disruptive, and innovation speed has significantly accelerated. To step up to this new reality, we must anticipate trends before they start trending, identify new business models before they become big and innovate with high speed,” says Jens-Martin Schwärzler, Executive Vice President Henkel Beauty Care.

Love Nature GmbH is Henkel Laundry & Home Care’s new sustainability idea factory focused on developing new business innovation and sustainable solutions starting in the field of laundry and home care products. Following the approach of developing prototypical, sustainable innovations to market maturity in a short period of time, the Love Nature team relies on intense co-creation with consumers, sustainability-minded influencers, and sustainability experts.

“Sustainability is a central pillar in our innovation strategy. With Love Nature we are going one step further to develop innovations with a holistic sustainability approach that make eco-friendly choices easier and more joyful for everyone,” says Bruno Piacenza, Executive Vice President Henkel Laundry & Home Care. “Technologies and the demands of our consumers are changing at an unprecedented pace. With the new idea factory, we will pilot innovative and sometimes daring solutions while accelerating scalable new business models and holistic sustainability concepts.”

Recently, their first brand launch was announced: The Love Nature brand offers a range of products for washing, dish washing, and cleaning. The products are plant-based and certified by renowned labels such as the EU Ecolabel or ECARF. Its formulas contain high levels of ingredients of natural origin, and the products are available in a resource-saving and sustainable bottle fully made of recycled plastic. In addition, Love Nature offers products at refill stations in selected stores in Germany.

In a global and connected economy, consumer preferences are evolving at an increasing rate and are becoming more sophisticated. To keep pace with this, strategics need to become more agile in order to bring relevant innovations to the market in a more agile way. While it’s pretty rare for big beauty companies to launch brands direct-to-consumer, Henkel is harnessing the power of D2C by launching a number of brands incubated internally like Better Natured; through deals like the acquisition of a 75% stake in Berlin-based Invincible Brands Holding, a business comprised of three fast-growing DTC brands: HelloBody, Banana Beauty, and Mermaid + Me; as well as tech investments like Indian start-up m.Paani.

Henkel’s strategic framework focuses on impactful innovations, supported by increased investments to create a competitive edge. Independent and fast processes and access to Henkel’s global resources will help these new innovation teams to develop successful brand and sales strategies.