Retail Week catches up with Skin+Me’s co-founder and chief executive Horatio Cary on the brand’s first retail partnership with John Lewis and Boots, its interesting business model and the journey so far
Horatio Cary is an engineer by education. Having worked with a food subscription business previously, his aim was to bring the benefits of a subscription model to the world of skincare.
That’s how Skin+Me began in 2020: a subscription-based company aiming to solve the skin-related problems faced by millions, starting with a simple online consultation with a dermatologist.
Since then, Skin+Me has grown to be a popular and disruptive brand in the skincare world. As the brand announces its first retail partnerships with Boots and John Lewis in the UK, Cary sits down with Retail Week to talk about the new chapter, its unique business model and future plans.
Why did you choose a subscription model for Skin+Me?
“We picked a subscription model because one of the biggest insights dermatologists gave us was that when they were prescribing ingredients, like Tretinoin, the products on the market that they could prescribe only had Tretinoin at a very high strength.
“It’s a really extraordinary ingredient that clears skin and treats acne. But the problem is that it leads to an early reaction and your skin needs to build tolerance to it. Because we can create personalised products for each person, the first month of our subscription we start people on a very low strength, and then the second month we increase the strength, and the third month we increase the strength. So, by being on a subscription, the journey is personalised and they actually get a better experience in skincare than they can get from anywhere else.”
Tell us about the new retail partnerships and how the subscription model will work in stores.
“The aim is to make the biggest difference you can to the most people you can. Over the last four years, Skin+Me has done really well in making that large impact. We now help hundreds of thousands of people every month, which is amazing. But we’d like to help millions and 75% of people prefer to shop in store and online. So we’ve always known that, in order to continue our mission and our journey, we need to go into retail.
“Then the question was: how do we do that? So I think there are two ways. One way is to take the service that we have online and bring that into retail stores. And we’ve done that in John Lewis. We’ve got these amazing in-store skincare specialists there and you can sit down and have a consultation, and either get products from the store or get signed up to our online service and get a product posted to you the next day.
“The second way is actually having products in store. Hundreds of thousands of people have used our products online. We have the very best dermatologists working for the business, looking at all those people and how each product ingredient has performed. We’ve developed a very deep understanding of what really makes skincare work and come up with a range of products catered according to skin type. It gives you a simple routine based on your skin type, so you can get the very best ingredients personalised to you.
“We’re going into nine John Lewis stores and about 300 Boots stores. We’ll be completely live across both estates by mid-October and we’re in a couple of stores as of this week.”
How much has the brand grown so far and what is the strategy going forward?
“We have more than 100,000 people subscribing every month, so that kind of gives you a sense of the revenue [subscriptions start from £29.99 per month]. We’ve more than doubled in sales in the last two years. We’ve moved from being completely unknown to now, where our brand awareness is higher than Drunk Elephant and Beauty Pie. These are some really big, well-known brands and growing till this stage has been a big part of the journey.
“Our movement to retail has been a really big deal for us, with a lot of work put into it. I think we want to perfect our relationships with these retailers and really make sure that we have the proposition absolutely right for our customers before we take on more partnerships.
“We believe we’ll really be able to create long-term, sustainable growth if we’re a bit more patient at the start, and nail the product and the customer experience. And we’re absolutely confident that the product is great, but we don’t know if the customer experience is perfect yet. So that’s the bit that we want to kind of take a breath and listen to in the next few months before we think about expansion.”
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