The Interview: Diana Stenbolt and Gemma Estrela, co-founders of Skindays

Curated skincare platform Skindays is looking to revolutionise the way customers shop for their skincare by focusing on personalisation and education.

The 30 niche, mission-driven skincare brands have been selected and curated by the two co-founders Diana Stenbolt and Gemma Estrela - both ex-Farfetch - based on tried and tested, effective formulas.

Both Co-Founders bring a unique set of skills to the table. Diana, who has a background in strategy management at Farfetch and Amazon Fashion, is the brand's CEO. Gemma, whose background is in marketing at Farfetch and ASOS, is the brand's Chief Digital Officer and responsible for the polished look and feel of the website and its functionality.

The story of Skindays started just before the world was thrown into chaos due to the global pandemic, and turned into a fully fledged business during lockdown. Seeing a gap in the market for a website that replicates the experience of talking to a knowledgable, educated in-store sales assistant in-store, Gemma and Diana have the ambition to become the go-to online destination for consumers looking for products that target their personal skincare concerns.

In this Q&A, TheIndustry.beauty speaks to the Co-founders just after they officially launch Skindays.

In a nutshell, can you tell me what Skindays is all about? 

Diana: Skindays is an online skincare marketplace, and we aim to bring the offline, in-store guided experience for skincare products to an online curated marketplace. Gemma and I both have an e-commerce background and we observed that there's this huge discrepancy between the experience that customers get offline, when they actually get to talk to customer services and buy the products, and the online experience which is merely a static display of products. We're essentially bridging that gap.

How many brands do you currently have on Skindays? 

Diana: Our marketplace currently has 30 carefully selected brands. They go from plant- to science- based and they're all mission-led brands – we’ve tried them all, we’ve met the founders and recognised that the story behind the brand is really purposeful.

And you recommend products as well right? 

Diana: We offer a test that allows us to understand our customer's skin type concerns and ethical priorities and based on that, we make product recommendations. And then the other part of this personalisation pillar is an educational part, which is really focused on guiding consumers on not only which products to use but also how should they use them. We help them to learn more about their skincare, their concern, and give tips and share practices, product routines… things like that.

And how did you two get started? 

Diana: Gemma and I met while working at Farfetch. I was doing investments and strategy there.

Gemma: And I was working in marketing and on the search engine optimisation side.

Diana: We had heard of each other and sort of worked on cross-functional projects, but we actually bumped into each other in the changing room at a Pilates studio - and we recognised each other and started talking. And I looked over at Gemma's gym bag and it was full of skincare products. She has around 20 to 25 products in there and I had one cream. I was really intrigued...as we carried on with the conversation, the idea for Skindays started to materialise.

The first question I asked her is where she bought her products, and I was really surprised to hear that she didn't have a go-to online destination. She always went in-store because she relied on the expertise of the sales assistants. As we were working at Farfetch at the time (and before that ASOS and Amazon), we bought everything online, so it really surprised me that she didn't have a go-to online destination to reference.

Gemma: As a bit of background, I'm from Valencia in Spain, and I never had skincare issues before I moved to London, when I started to really break out. As I was working in fashion, I started to wear really heavy make-up which I knew wasn’t good for my skin, so I started to investigate ways to improve my complexion, and my skincare journey began. I started to build my own routine.

Diana: When we started to discuss it further, we couldn’t understand that there was no go-to destination that Gemma would organically recommend in the same way that we would recommend a site for fashion or any other category.

After having discussed it further, I started taking pictures of all Gemma’s products. She stopped me & asked me what I was doing! I explained that as she clearly knew what she was doing I would just replicate her selection. She told me that I couldn’t as I have a completely different skin type. That you need to understand your concerns before you make a purchasing decision, and you can't just copy what I'm using because it might not be right.

We started looking online and we couldn't find an e-commerce platform that could really recommend us products but also let us browse and discover on our own. Quickly, we carried out market research with consumers and saw that there was a real opportunity for this.

So, Gemma you were clearly quite aware of your skin concerns and had built this routine for yourself, but where did that learning kind of come from? 

Gemma: I'm a very curious person, so I really went on this discovery journey and started reading medical papers, learning about ingredients. I really wanted to understand, not only about product formulations but also when you combine them how they work together. That's kind of our mission as well: we give consumers the skincare product, but we also want to coach them to understand what they should be applying to their skin in order to naturally glow.

And as a brand we are also keen to show customers to age naturally and to embrace their natural features. We want them to understand - if you're using a vitamin C, followed by hyaluronic acid, the results are going to be xxx. And these results might not be for you if you have a sensitive skin type.

I'm always learning too! And it can be so overwhelming. I always say skincare is kind of a hobby, it's a very overwhelming, oversubscribed industry...but if you get it right, you can really see the results.

So how did you curate those 30 brands that are currently on your site? 

Gemma: When I met Diana, I had my go-to brands that I had tested and loved and when I shared that knowledge with Diana, she built on that.

Diana: It started with her favourites because that's also where my skincare journey properly started. And essentially, we build out a list of brands that we were excited about, that one or both of us had used. But also, a common thread across all these brands was that they had a mission. When we look at the founders...when we look at the reason why those brands were created, they all have a very specific purpose. Often, the founders had experienced skincare issues, and that's why they developed their brands… or they had seen a very specific gap in the market. All the founder journeys were incredibly inspiring.

When it comes to their positioning, they go from plant-based to science-backed, so we don’t focus just on one category. And the reason for that is because customers are hybrid – they like to dip in and out of different categories. But also depending on the phase of your life, and just seasonality - you will need different products at different moments in time. Which is why the personalisation angle of the brand is so important – customers have the ability to filter products which adhere to a specific criteria; whether 100% natural, organic, anti-ageing, anti-blemish etc.

And what about price points?

Gemma: We have brands that are at a lower price point and then we have some brands that are slightly higher price points. Right now, we're geared towards the slightly more premium price points. Have said that, we are onboarding some brands like, an SPF brand right now whose average selling price is around £15, which will be obviously some of the lower priced items we have. We also have a couple of brands that are £25 to £40. Although we're geared towards a higher price point, we're trying to balance that and are speaking to some very interesting brands.

What about your roles at the company now?

Diana: I'm CEO. I look after the operational and admin side of the business, and then the commercial side of the business, as strategy and fundraising.

Gemma: I am Chief Digital Officer. I look after platform and everything that has to do with marketing.

I also want to dig-into the personalisation aspect a bit more - and the skin test specifically. Who developed that?  

Yes, so we are working with a third party and we're working with them on the personalisation feature. And then we work with a network of dermatologists to build validation behind it.

How did you come up with the name skin days?

Diana: It went back and forth a lot. We had another name initially and then we realised that it wasn't a name that was approachable to some extent. And then we brainstormed a lot.

Gemma: I always wanted something that the user would connect to skincare and beauty, but what we always like to touch on is persistency. Like this is something for them to go back to again and again and build a routine. What we often say is that for us you don't have good or bad skin days, it's about getting the best out of your skin all the time. We're aiming to guide our customers through skin changes.

Diana: It actually started out as The Skindays but then, like Facebook, we decided to drop the "the".