The first thing to say about the mindset of a leader is there needs to be vision. A leader needs to be looking forward.

There’s one professor who talks about seeing around corners- having the ability to see what’s coming and predict that. The other part of the mindset is comfort with ambiguity and comfort with uncertainty. Some people call it agility. What I’ve heard agility defined as is ‘Knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do.’ I think that’s really important for anybody who’s leading these kinds of efforts.

It’s that spark of creativity and the ability to see themselves as an innovator, and to really motivate the team as well. To draw out the best and create the right kind of environment for their team.

There needs to be that element of empathy, first of all. To understand other people aren’t walking in their shoes and to understand what they’re going through. Leadership today isn’t about command and control. It’s about coaching and coaching people to bring them along. As a leader, you’re not so much concerned about your own creativity. It’s about drawing the creativity out of other people. It’s about setting the right kind of conditions that are going to allow people to be creative.

A concept that’s being talked about quite a bit today is the element of psychological safety. You’re going hear that term quite a bit. You’ll probably hear about it more in the future, but it is about leaders who create the right environment, the right conditions, and the right climate where people feel comfortable to bring their ideas forward. They can go to their boss or they their leader, look them in the eye, and tell them the truth without fear of reprisal.

Phase One: Transforming Marketing Brief into Design Strategy

The design process is not merely about selecting fonts or images for packaging. It commences with converting a marketing brief into a comprehensive design brief. This initial phase lays the groundwork for developing a strategic approach to packaging design, setting the tone for subsequent stages.

Phase Two: Integrating Diverse Skillsets for Refinement

In subsequent phases, a myriad of skills come into play, ranging from strategic expertise to artistic prowess. Professionals adept in logo development, illustration, photography, and graphic design collaborate to refine the design iteratively. Each stage enhances the quality and precision of the final product.

Phase Three: Transitioning from Design Approval to Production

Upon client approval, the design progresses to the production phase. Here, meticulous attention to detail is paramount. Production professionals with proficiency in software tools like Illustrator ensure seamless translation of designs into production-ready files. They navigate project parameters, material considerations, color limitations, and manufacturing complexities with finesse.

Conclusion: The Holistic Impact of Package Design

Package design not only influences brand perception but also sets trends in brand activation, including social media presence. Moreover, sustainability considerations permeate every phase of the design process, reflecting a growing commitment to environmental responsibility. Amidst diverse creative inputs, a structured methodology underpins the beauty business’s packaging design endeavors, ensuring coherence and efficacy.

How does a color consultant find the best colors for a client? First, you look for relationships, colors that relate favorably to your client’s skin tone, hair, and eye color.

You’ll go through a series of comparisons using drapes, makeup, or other diagnostic tools. To get the best results, your client usually is wearing no makeup and is under daylight balanced conditions.

You’re looking at the value and the brightness level of the coloring, the undertone of warm or cool, and the contrast level between hair and skin. The goal is to select colors that favorably enhance your client.

Colors in skin tones can be described as warm or cool. Warm colors are those with yellow in them and cool colors have blue in them. A person’s skin has a yellow undertone or a blue undertone, a cool or warm temperature – they’re interchangeable.

You’ll look at how light or dark your client’s skin tone and hair value are. People with lighter coloring look better in lighter colors, and those with deeper tones favor deeper shades. Also, consider if they have brighter or more muted coloring.

The result – your client knows which color palette is best for them and can use that palette to guide them. Everything will mix and match easily because it has natural harmony. This palette also applies to makeup and hair color.

In summary, you observe the value level – the degree of light or darkness in the skin/hair; the undertone – how warm or cool the skin/hair is; the chroma level – how bright or soft the person is; and the contrast level – the degree of contrast between hair and skin.

Like enhances like. People with warm skin tone and hair wear best warm colors, and those with cooler undertones will look better in colors that have more blues, lilacs, or rose in them. Most color consultants are entrepreneurs. If you want your own business, many people could benefit from a color analysis.

In the beauty business, it’s important to find a way to differentiate yourself. At some point you will get recognized and move up the ladder in your beauty career. Try to learn and listen as much the beauty professionals around you and really observe.

At some point in your career, you’ll get to a place where it’s not only about what you do but also the other people around you. Once you start managing people, it can be a very difficult transition. When you go from producing things yourself to having to step back and kind of set the stage of what needs to happen, but not do it yourself, it’s a challenge.

Empower other people to do the work and educate them on how to do it. Try to expose your teams to as much online beauty education and information as possible. Great companies have to set a culture and then attract people who are fully engaged and comfortable with that culture. This culture then nurtures the employees and is so symbiotic with their own personal beliefs that they feel fully realized in their roles.

Having enough industry information and beauty education to be empowered to make your own informed decisions is key. If you don’t have full information, it thwarts you from being able to think fully about a situation. Try and make sure your beauty team has exposure to as many things as possible in the company. Full view of what the financials are, full understanding of who the retail partners are, and an understanding of what the three-year vision is for the company. Make sure people have the ability to see all of this information to make the best decisions for the company, team, and themselves with that context in mind.

I worked for L’Oreal, where I began my career, and Estee Lauder, where I completed my “big company” phase. Working at a large corporation is, in my opinion, priceless. For me, it was like getting a second MBA. It was in an MBA program tailored to working in the beauty industry.

I was also gaining exposure to global markets and working with some of the best tangential organizations in the industry. I worked with the best:
* Manufacturers
* Fragrance houses
* Consulting organizations
* Digital agencies
* Strategy agencies

These opportunities provide a well-established framework for considering everything from business planning to management. How do you get a product to market, and how do you get the most out of your partners, whether they’re PR firms or creative firms?

Then there’s the strategy aspect, which involves exposing yourself to the industry’s best and brightest minds, both within your own organization and with your strategic partners.

I can’t emphasize enough how much I believe that background prepared me to work in smaller organizations later on. Discipline and strategic thinking are two things I attempt to impart to smaller businesses.

Take the best of what you’ve learned in larger companies and apply it to a smaller setting. Flex the structure as needed, but also be adaptable where necessary. You’ll need to consider the limited resources in a smaller workplace, the potential need to react quickly or function without comprehensive knowledge. I’d argue that all of my big-company experience prepared me for working in a smaller company.

Beauty companies have a choice when it comes to formulating. Here’s an inside look on the different processes beauty companies can take in the beauty business.
The formulation can be a stressful journey for a founder because there are so many different logical paths that you can take to get there. You can be as extreme as doing it completely in-house, purchasing a lab, hiring a chemist, purchasing all the material, doing it yourself, or self-production.

The other extreme is white labeling something that exists. Which for some brands that work, for other brands it doesn’t. You’re pre-purchasing a formula that already exists, slapping your logo onto it and then you are bringing it into your distribution channel. FACULTY is in the middle.

What we do at FACULTY is work with some of the best suppliers and formulators in the industry to put together custom formulas. Have them tailored to how we want them in a way that we believe is going to add value to the customer.

Now, what does that mean?

That means working with our advisors who have spent almost 30 years at some of the biggest makeup brands, who have created some of the makeup brands and skincare brands you probably use today, and determining what makes sense for the skin type we’re going after.

When we think about the differences, the male skin type is much more porous, which means that grime, dirt, dust, debris get into your pores, clog them, and give you acne and all other skin problems that come from that. What we’ve realized is that the makeup products that exist on the market, do the same thing because they’re made with comedogenic ingredients and comedogenic ingredients clogs your pores.

What we’ve said at FACULTY is whenever we get the chance, we will always make it with non-comedogenic ingredients. This means the products are better for your skin chemically, and leave you feeling good about what’s on your face and not worried about getting acne or any other skincare, irritations, and problems.

We take all these design principles from trying to build a premium formula to thinking about the skin type we’re going after to the experience of pumping a product into your hand or taking it out of a bottle.

We triangulate all of those together to come to a formula that we believe works for the market and our customers.

At Givaudan, we work with several different clients, including fashion brands, celebrities, and haircare brands that want to create a fragrance or fragrance that goes into a shampoo. For example, a celebrity asked for a fragrance that smelled like her baby.
The Brief of a Celebrity Baby
We agreed and set up a brief to understand what her baby smells like. When we asked what her baby smelled like, she replied, “Well, my baby smells like my baby.” The brief is used to obtain the specs for the fragrance.
However, it was tough to obtain the specs because we had no idea what her baby smelled like, nor would we likely meet her baby. We began pulling information from a client that wants a brief that smells like a baby.
How does the celebrity want to use this? Is this fragrance in a bottle? Or a lotion?
The Process of Cruelty-Free Beauty
How our perfumer builds that product will depend if the product is going to be a body lotion, which requires less amount of fragrance that must be mixed differently than a product in a bottle.
Typically, products in a bottle have an alcohol base, which requires a different concentration and different amounts of ingredients. She wanted the fragrance inside of a bottle, but she wants it to be very safe and very soft, stating, “You know, I want it to be cruelty-free.”
We went back and we pow-wowed. We figured what the baby smelled like by the only evidence she provided: it’s how it comes out of the bath. We made sure the norms or regulations went through the regulatory department that tells us what ingredients we can use to make the product cruelty-free.
By the way, all our ingredients are cruelty-free. Just to put that out there.
We considered that she may want it made vegan. Most ingredients in fragrance are vegan, but there are a couple that isn’t because, believe it or not, you can’t use beeswax. Beeswax isn’t vegan, right?
For example, many people say, “I want a honey fragrance, but I want it to be vegan.” To honor their requests—we use our pow-wow. For our celebrity, we found the regulatory pieces we want to hit, the ingredients that smelled like a baby coming out of the bathtub.
We also had to ask ourselves how much did she want to spend? How much fragrance do they want to put into the product and all the other regulator pieces? From there, our evaluator and our perfumer get together and talk about how they are going to build the fragrance. It is usually made through the computer.

When it comes time to formulate products, you can certainly hire someone to come up with your product concepts and a general ingredient brief to pass off to a chemist to formulate, but you don’t have to go that route.

To find a lab, you can Google contract manufacturers and cold call them to set up intro calls.

“We found the lab we launched our first four products with through an ingredient supplier who supplies some of the best natural and organic oils and extracts to labs around the world,” says one beauty product producer. “We said, ‘Listen, you work with all these labs. If you were creating your own product line, which lab would you partner with?’”

“I wasn’t looking to go to a big box lab that everybody uses, because then I was going to get formulas that everyone else has,” adds the producer.

Each lab has its own product brief form that includes the ingredients you want to use, the ingredients you don’t want to use, specifics about the percentages you want in your formula, marketing ingredient callouts, and the viscosity—whether you want it thin, like a serum, or whether you want it thick. The lab asks about the packaging components you’re going to be using for that formula because they can’t create a dense cream if it’s going to need to come out of a pump.

You’ll send the completed product brief to your chemist. Then, you’ll have a call with your chemist and you’ll pay a fee for the product development.

The fee is usually quite small. Labs aren’t charging $50,000 to formulate a product. They’re charging more like $1,500.

Where labs make their money is when you place your order for 10,000 units or 100,000 units or a million units, explains the producer.

“The one thing I found to be extremely helpful was having a contract right out of the gate with the lab that specifies formula ownership,” says the producer. “You want to own your formulas. Most brands don’t know this, so they launch their brand without owning their formulas. And if you don’t own your formula, the labs don’t ever give you the recipe.”

A lot of people have this idea that fashion, beauty and editorial is this hyper competitive industry, where stepping on people is the most strategic move to propel your career. When in actuality, that is one of the most detrimental things you can do to your career.

Sam Escobar, Digital Deputy Editor of Allure, says about workplace relationships, “People who are your interns, if you’re not very nice to them and you don’t facilitate them to learn more, they’re not going to like you later on. And maybe they won’t be your boss, but they might know somebody who might hire you and they might say something.”

That’s obviously not the only reason that you should be kind. In general, it’s bad for your career to think of everything as this huge competition. In business there is sometimes a belief that if someone else fails, you win. That’s not the case. Escobar explains, “If your team is winning, you are also winning. And that’s amazing.”

Escobar believes the key to success is being reliable, consistent and hardworking. “I think if you are very capable of being communicative and working on a team well, those are all things that are going to work so much better than if you gossip about people or devalue other people’s work. Because that’s not fair to them and it’s not fair to your team no matter what the ranking is seniority wise.”

Escobar advises everyone to develop relationships. Whether it’s in a workplace, internship, or even school, get to know the people you’re working with. “That way you can actually feel a connection to those people. And they will blossom into natural friendships, which is also wonderful. Because who doesn’t want to be able to commiserate at the end of a really long day with somebody who actually understands it?”

Like all other consumer-based industries in recent decades, the beauty industry has undergone an enormous change. There are a lot of reasons for this.

The internet has impacted every possible business on the globe. This is partly to blame for the changes within the beauty industry. But I think the beauty industry is also very cyclical.

It goes through periods when larger brands and corporations are very powerful. Then it switches to periods where small businesses dominate the industry.

Until around a decade ago, the beauty industry was all about the big companies. We’re all familiar with Estee Lauder, L’Oreal, Avon, and Revlon. They’re the most well-known beauty brand across the world.

But we’re now at a point in the cycle where the beauty industry is much more consumer-driven and customers are much more excited about smaller businesses. And it’s not just the beauty industry. It’s also the fashion and food industries too. The small players aren’t faced with the same challenges that they use to be.

The Internet has enabled any business, no matter how big or small, to become global. They can create a stunning website and build their social media accounts to grow an audience quickly. The internet has given businesses the chance to grow but that doesn’t necessarily mean they will have the resources to keep up with this growth.

But this is much less challenging than it used to be. It’s less expensive and requires fewer resources. The barriers to entry are much smaller but you usually need a large volume of resources to keep your business going.

The biggest shift in the industry is the move towards smaller businesses. The second biggest shift is the shift in consumerism.

The beauty industry is now more personal and consumer involvement is tenfold what it was just 15-20 years ago.