Adore Beauty launches new skincare brand AB LAB
Adore Beauty’s Kate Morris is giving power to the people with its latest endeavour.
For a company which stocks more than 13,000 beauty products, it’s difficult to imagine there was much missing from Adore Beauty’s considerable offering.
But there was one category, according to founder Kate Morris, that its Australian customers simply weren’t satisfied with.
Sunscreen.
“What we heard from our community was that they wanted something that had skincare benefits, but they wanted something that actually suited their skin type and provided a particular finish,” the entrepreneur explains.
“But everybody of course then has different requirements; some people would like matte, and some people would like dewy and some people wanted somewhere in between.”
A customer survey conducted by the e-commerce store, which became a publicly listed company in 2020, also revealed a third of their shoppers didn’t regularly apply an SPF, despite knowing the impacts of prolonged sun exposure.
“This is a survey of pretty loyal beauty consumers,” Kate points out, “and so, you can just imagine how much worse that is out in the broader community.”
The feedback laid the foundation for AB LAB, Adore Beauty’s new private label.
The brand is launching with three SPF products – a Dewy-C SPF50+ Facial Sun Milk, Barrier Boost SPF50+ Facial Sun Cream, and Barely There SPF50+ Facial Sun Cream.
Sunscreen is currently in the throes of a perception shift among Millennials and Generation Z, with brands such as Ultra Violette, Naked Sundays and WotNot overhauling the idea of SPF as merely a sun safety measure into a core element of one’s cosmetic arsenal via the use of Instagram-able packaging and active ingredients.
The Australian sun protection market, which currently sits at about $343m according to forecasting company Statista, is expected to grow by about 11% annually.
It’s comparatively small to the US and European markets, however Morris says the Australian beauty consumer is incredibly informed and discerning.
“The customer that we have here in Australia really is quite sophisticated,” she says.
“It‘s not like it was 20 years ago, when the industry could kind of tell people what to use. And there was not a lot of transparency in educating customers about how things work.”
Today, Morris says, customers are demanding authenticity, ingredient transparency and more importantly, performance.
“That‘s what we’re really noticing; this increasing trend towards authenticity and people wanting things that actually work,” she explains.
“A lot of our decisions are around making our ranges cruelty-free and vegan and including post- consumer recycled plastic in the packaging, and we‘ve got that’s kind of as a starting point for us, but something we want to continue to iterate and improve on over time.”