The Interview: Reinventing bathing with Mircea - founder Stéphane Chambran on building a conscious, premium beauty business
After 20 years at L’Oréal Luxe, Stéphane Chambran, founder of the luxury bath and body brand Mircea, knows a thing or two about the beauty industry. He has set out to remind us all of the ritual of bathing and how we can use products that are both luxurious and truly sustainable.
You’ve had a long career in beauty. What lead you to create Mircea?
I had the privilege to have a great time at L’Oréal, leading global brands and working with passionate teams to create the innovations that constantly redefine beauty. But I felt that it was all about skincare, perfume and makeup, while the category that is part of people’s everyday lives - bathing, a ritual for humans for thousands of years - was seen as secondary. The perfumes were not great, the foams were average, and it was not a focus for innovation. At the same time, I felt the urge to find a solution to the biggest challenge of the industry: its packaging footprint, the fact that it puts into the world quantities of plastic that are not recycled - ending up in landfills, oceans or being burned. I came to the realisation that the beauty industry, born with petrochemicals, was so linked to the plastic industry that it would probably be easier to start from scratch.
Also, having worked on luxury brands, I studied the creative indie brands, like Byredo, so much that I felt that to create a brand and products that resonate with other creative people, it must come from your heart and soul - which is very hard to achieve when you work in a corporate environment.
Tell me about the name Mircea, the brand image and how it came to be.
The signal to start working on Mircea came when ENSCI (one of the greatest design schools in France) accepted my application in design. This was when I had to tell L’Oréal that I would have to leave. I thought I’d learn about design, 3D and materials - which I did, of course. But, in a more profound way, I also learned that design is grounded in the humanities. And I love history. I started to read everything I could find about our beauty rituals, and most specifically, bathing rituals. This led me to discover Mircea Eliade - one of the great scholars of religion and everything sacred. Our Western world has been deprived of its spiritual beliefs. So, for most of us, bathing is about hygiene. But, as homo sapiens, we’ve been around for 100,000 years, and bathing has always been more than just getting your skin clean (by the way, we could argue about the right frequency of bathing, but one must accept that our habits are more social than rational or science-led). I am trying to bring back this sense of self-renewal into bathing. Then I learned that Mircea means “peace, world and cosmos” in Slavic. What a great word for this moment of self-care, one of our very few daily ones.
The brand image is the incarnation of Mircea. There’s the idea that we’ve had this same body far before any civilisation - we picture prehistoric beings as almost animal-like, but this is not what science tells us. Picture times when we were not a dominant species, when we were part of our environment, and imagine what our bathing rituals were like. To shoot the campaign, I thought about my community in the indie surf industry: they are in sync with the environment - they need to work with tides, swells, and winds to capture the magic moment of communion between the athlete and the wave. So I got in touch with Yentl Touboul, who shoots amazing films for cool indie brands, mostly argentique. He put me in touch with Corentin Bertau, who is also from the surf/skate scene but has great experience in beauty as well. Corentin introduced me to Gabbi Spader, a model who is a true adventurer and nature lover, committed to fighting plastic and living a more conscious lifestyle. I managed the production and the weather and elements were with us during this magical shoot.
Mircea uses no single use plastic or no synthetic ingredients. How long were the products in development and did you have pit falls along the way in creating a truly sustainable brand?
The technology of soluble actives was already being developed, but I could not find a brand that truly had good qualities of use, great scents and great foams. It took me a year to source and try all innovations from the most advanced labs, and it took us another year to develop our exclusive formula. We are completely changing the game in terms of sensoriality. For instance, we put more than three times the amount of perfume that existing brands were using. This meant that we failed miserably industrially and had to work with engineers to change our machines in order to blend our essential oils perfectly with our soluble formula. In a way, when you are on a mission to upgrade everything about body washes, you accept pitfalls and rework because your benchmark is clear and simple.
So many brands mascarade as refillable, when essentially, they are just creating two bottles, whereas your approach to your refills truly are sustainable. Can you tell me about the unique refilling process for the consumer?
This is exactly the context we could no longer bear: watching leading brands claim they have a refill just because they are selling the same bottle without the pump, and at almost the same price. Then the same brands claim that customers are not ready for refills. Our conviction is that refills should use significantly less material (ours are six times lighter), be way easier to carry, very easy to use, and much cheaper (almost half the price). So it is a no-brainer for everybody. Most people now know that beauty products are made of 80% water. Why not sell the actives, rather than carrying water all across the world in a plastic jar that will almost never be recycled?
You’ve managed to make a luxury experience when using the product, and also down to the packaging both inside and out, a rarity in today’s world due to cost of goods and so on. Did you have to compromise from your original vision or is it what exactly what you envisaged?
No, because I have been designing products for 20 years, so I know perfectly the cost of each component and the margin needed to grow. This meant from the start that our product would be prestige. I believe this is the challenge that competitors trying this technology have been facing: they came from the same vision (the beauty industry has to exit plastic), but they wanted the big part of the cake - the mass market. With a new technology, you will miss both margin and quality of use. We chose prestige, which means that we could have it all. Also, do not forget that less material means less cost for everyone.
The scents and formulations are exquisite. What does the formulation process look like and how do you decide on the scents you use?
That’s such a pleasurable part of the process. I have worked with Robertet for many years. They are the best when it comes to natural scents. I came to them with a repertoire of essential oils that I had accumulated through my research on the rituals of bathing and where they took place (forests, rivers, mountains, orchards, etc.). The perfumers composed blends from these repertoires. To me, the scent of nature is incredibly multi-faceted. Think about when you walk through a wood - your nose will capture an herb, a resin, flowers, and other flavours carried by the wind. So our blends are full of different essential oils, with two leads for each. Technically, it was very complex because instead of formulating into 400ml of body wash, you formulate into 46g of concentrate that will then be dissolved into water. This meant that the perfumer had to completely reconsider the strength of the scents. What he did is truly a perfumistic innovation.
The brand is not even a year old and you’re already stocked in one of the most sought-after beauty halls in the UK – Liberty. How do you pick your retail partners and any plans for a retail roll-out in the UK?
Meeting the team at Liberty and receiving their super positive response was a dream come true. To me, they are among the very best curators of beauty in the world. We are in no rush in terms of commercial expansion. We want to start by being part of the lives of the happy few who create our world (designers, chefs, photographers, filmmakers, graphic designers, architects, etc.) - people sensitive enough to care about the impact of what they buy on their skin and their environment. We believe they shop in concept stores, second-hand luxury stores, and similar spaces. We are entering The Goodhood as we speak. These are the kinds of super cool stores we are so happy to partner with because they understand the desires of creative people like very few retailers do.
With just one UK retailer so far and your DTC channel, how are you marketing the brand today?
Well, we are not in a rush; we only pick those who have the very best affinity. And we are happy to serve our British customers through our mircea.care, which works wonders. The UK is very dear to my heart - I’ve lived there many years with my family, and before that, as a student, I worked as a barista for Starbucks!
What are you plans for extending the range? Will we see body lotions and scrubs for example, anytime soon?
More delicious scents, and more categories. But as you’ve understood, Mircea is walking on two legs: desire and radical eco-conception. It would be easy to create a beautifully scented body lotion, but if it means using the same old plastic refill or making it hard for the consumer to use, we won’t do it. This is a real formulation challenge.
Finally, which brands do you admire in the beauty space from a sustainability stand-point?
I wish I could name a few, honestly, but the brands I found desirable are not really serious about their commitments to the environment, and the brands I admire from a sustainability standpoint are too crafty. This is the reason why I created (and self-funded) Mircea.
