“Innovation” is one of the beauty industry’s most overused words, alongside “community” and “disruption.” And yet, it remains the most elusive of goals for brands, product developers, parent companies, and marketers alike. In spite of a nearly endless stream of newness in the industry, most could not truly be called “innovative,” agreed the panelists for “Beauty’s Next Frontier” at BeautyMatter’s NEXT50 summit in Los Angeles on October 22.
In a conversation moderated by Roseanna Roberts, BeautyMatter’s Vice President of Foresight and Intelligence, panelists Joshua Britton, founder and CEO of Debut, Lauren Bowker, founder and CEO of Exist, and Colleen Quinn, Chief Innovation Officer at KilgourMD, spoke to the myriad challenges facing true innovation, which can come from retailers, investors, or the need for speed when it comes to launching new products.
When it comes to much of the “innovation” presented by the industry today, Britton believes that a whopping 95% is really “still just marketing.” He explained: “Innovation takes time … and the problem is that a lot of the contract manufacturers get their ingredients from the traditional incumbents, and those incumbents are not innovating,” he said. Take the current trend around “longevity,” another buzzword du jour. “You had the innovators who went after understanding and producing something novel, but … most of the incumbents just looked at their old ingredient portfolio and said, ‘How can I match that to longevity and push it out?’”
It makes sense, he reasoned; true innovation takes a lot of money and a lot of time, time that brands are not being allotted given the current cadence of launches expected.
Also, that time won’t always go as planned, Quinn noted, adding that true commitment to innovation, in fact, necessitates failure. “You have to prepare to fail. You want to fail. So you have to learn from the failure and move on. You need to be committed to the time, the money, and the whole team … And only within that environment can you make something truly new.”
Multiple barriers to innovation came up over the course of the conversation, with another being the demands of investors. Bowker emphasized that investors must understand how significantly an innovation may evolve during development. “[Investors must] understand what innovation is like. Because I can guarantee you, any idea you start today is going to look 10 times different by the time it actually gets to a shelf,” she said.
Retailers, the panelists agreed, present further challenges. “Clean” standards and restricted ingredient lists can force brands to limit formulas, a shift Quinn said has moved some companies to question whether the trade-off is worthwhile, particularly when direct-to-consumer and professional channels can offer alternative paths to market. “Brands are stopping and saying, ‘Do we want to do that? Do we need the retail shelves anymore?’ And it's a question that I'm very interested to watch because some brands are saying no,” she said.
As for the brands in retailers, brand teams and retail teams do not always agree on which products will resonate with consumers, Britton added. He noted that brand teams may spend months developing innovative products around identified consumer needs, only for retailers to steer them toward safer, more familiar formats—such as yet another lip gloss. "We've seen it [many] times where they've created something truly innovative, but some, you know, 18-year-old buyer has said, ‘Nope, my data shows that no one wants this, so you're not going to do it,’” he lamented.
Roberts characterized this reliance on existing data as a potential “self-fulfilling prophecy.” Bowker agreed, pointing out that data cannot demonstrate demand for something that does not yet exist.
Bowker then further illustrated that point with the example of a color-changing hair dye she developed at her company, The Unseen. After a conglomerate dismissed the concept as something consumers wouldn’t want, she posted it online, where it generated 80 million YouTube views overnight. “The studies these people’s data had were saying that nobody wants this, but actually, the community did want this,” she said. The response, however, demonstrated that putting unfamiliar ideas directly in front of consumers can reveal demand that conventional research may fail to anticipate.
Of course, more lip products appear commercially viable when lip products are already lining the shelves, while more novel concepts never reach them—and therefore never generate the data that might establish their potential. That is to say, a reliance on existing data creates a circular problem. A retailer cannot have data demonstrating demand for a product that has never existed.
Just as Quinn suggested more brands might bypass retail altogether, Bowker suggested brands might also take circuitous routes to launching innovation. Social media can allow innovators to put new concepts directly in front of their intended communities, and test demand themselves before committing fully to production. She advised founders not to wait for an idea to feel finished before testing how people respond to it: “My advice would be to just test—test and try. Like everyone’s always scared to put something out there and feel like it’s permanent.… Just put the ideas out and get feedback, because you won’t know unless you try it.”
The panelists also agreed that investment timelines can be limiting, too. Venture capital and private equity investors have established return expectations, and scientific discovery rarely progresses according to a predictable commercial calendar. Britton noted that brands backed by more patient sources of capital may have greater freedom to pursue meaningful research and development. “It’s really hard to do real innovation when you’re on someone else’s timeline,” he said. On the flip side, he pointed to K18’s proprietary peptide as evidence that owning ingredient IP can increase a brand’s potential value, giving investors a reason to accept a longer development timeline.
Even when brands are ultimately able to bring innovation over the finish line, the panelists argued that helping consumers understand new scientific innovation is, perhaps, the greatest hurdle of all. “The most challenging thing about beauty biotechnology is not the science, and it’s not the creation of the product,” Britton said, but rather communicating the science itself. Brand managers and marketers must first understand a technology well enough to explain why it matters. That explanation must then travel through retailers, press, influencers, packaging, and ultimately to consumers without losing its meaning—or overstating what the science can support.
Quinn agreed: “We have to do the emotional storytelling while still honoring the science. That is, dare I say, near impossible.” Brands need to communicate on multiple levels, she noted, explaining that some consumers primarily want a trusted recommendation and a product that performs while others scrutinize ingredient lists and clinical studies with increasingly sophisticated knowledge.
Only a minuscule portion of the preclinical and clinical data generated by product development teams ever reaches consumers, she added. Yet that unseen work remains essential to validating performance.
Ultimately, one challenge that can arise stems from the core fact that scientific and marketing teams tend to approach language from opposite directions. Scientists are, by training, precise, cautious, and resistant to statements the available evidence cannot definitively prove. Meanwhile, marketers need emotion, clarity, and a concise reason to care. Bowker noted that bringing those groups together requires teaching them to understand one another’s ways of thinking—and creating a culture in which scientists can ask questions, take risks, and occasionally be wrong.
That balance will likely only become increasingly important as regulators turn greater attention to cosmetic claims. During the Q+A portion of the panel, Britton predicted that brands conducting rigorous clinical testing—particularly placebo-controlled studies rather than consumer perception surveys—will be better positioned if oversight increases.
Ultimately, the panel’s overarching message was less about identifying the next miracle ingredient than about reconsidering the systems that determine whether it ever reaches the shelf. AI may accelerate discovery, biotechnology may create new molecules, and material science may introduce consumers to totally new formats. But none of those advances can succeed without companies who can accommodate uncertainty, experimentation, longer timelines, and inevitable failures.