TheIndustry.beauty LIVE! Emma Lewisham on readying your brand for retail

During TheIndustry.beauty LIVE! ‘Marketing In Beauty – The Next Frontier’ in partnership with More2 and Noatum Logistics, a crowd of beauty industry professionals learnt about the ways to deploy tech, data and creativity to stand out from the crowd, reach new customers and retain and grow existing customers.

Emma Lewisham, the Founder of her namesake brand, sat down with TheIndustry.beauty co-founder Lauretta Roberts to discuss how she built her skincare label from the ground up and how to ready your brand for retail.

She launched her namesake skincare brand in 2019, creating a range of natural skincare products backed by the "highest calibre of green science and innovation in the industry". Commenting on starting a business during a global pandemic, Lewisham said: "You really see how strong you are in the most challenging situations and actually it helped fuelled our growth."

Emma Lewisham, dubbed 'the world’s most intelligent skincare' is formulated fundamentally differently from the rest of the industry. The brand's formulations focus on the physiology of the skin rather than the ingredients used in products.

Lewisham created the brand after being advised to stop using her current hyperpigmentation product by her doctor while she was pregnant. After an extensive hunt to find a safe alternative, she found a gap in the market. This spurred her to create her first-ever product – the Skin Reset Serum. Since then, the range has expanded to include a cleanser, exfoliant, serum, eye cream and sleeping mask, as well as face creams and oils - all of which are refillable and are below the £100 price mark.

Lewishman noted: "We don’t want to overwhelm the customer. Next month, we’re launching a game-changing acne product. It’s going to change people’s lives, that’s why I’m excited about it." She continued to explain that the incredibly technical product is medical grade so there has been a struggle to get it to market.

Initially, the Founder didn’t set out to start a beauty brand, instead she "set out to solve problems in the beauty industry". For example, she wanted to create sustainable change in an industry that needed it.

She believes to be serious about ending carbon waste, we need to not skim around the edges. Plastic and glass have a lifespan of 400 years, the product isn’t evil it’s how we use it. So, the company came up with the idea to collect and reuse its packaging, which reduces its precious carbon emissions by 70%. What's more, refills now make up 45% of the business and they have a higher margin, so it’s a win-win for consumers and retailers.

Starting as a direct-to-consumer company, it has now expanded into Harrods and is also set to launch at Liberty and Harvey Nichols. Lewisham is on a tour of the UK with Space NK, its newest third-party stockist. This came about after Meca, the Sephora of Australia, shared notes with Space NK. Whilst on this tour, the Founder is teaching staff how to sell the incredibly complex, science-based products.

For brands looking to expand into third-party retail, Lewisham advises:  "It’s a big step up if you want to do it well. You’ll need more team members and you’ve got to have your ducks in the row.

"You need to have a supply chain in place and product coming - a well-oiled machine. I recommend giving it a year."

Over the next few years, Emma Lewisham is homing in on the markets that it's already in. Its strategy consists of digging roots deep in the places they’ve expanded into.