Meet the new ‘it’ girl of skincare, Emma Lewisham

New Zealand’s Emma Lewisham went from corporate executive to beauty mogul, creating one of the industry’s most talked-about brands. Meet the woman behind the skincare empire.

Lara Worthington is the ambassador of New Zealand-based brand, Emma Lewisham. Picture: Emma Lewisham

New Zealand-born Emma Lewisham went from corporate executive to beauty mogul, and in the process created one of the industry’s most talked-about brands.

Since launching her eponymous skincare line in 2019, Lewisham has been leading a new breed of innovators who are proving that natural, scientifically-backed products can exist in the luxury space – and, along the way, has attracted fans from Margot Robbie and Lara Worthington to Naomi Watts.

As she tells Stellar of keeping sustainability at the forefront of everything she does, “It needs to be the future of beauty”.

Emma Lewisham is the new ‘it’ girl of skincare. Picture: Daniel Nadel for Stellar

It’s no surprise Emma Lewisham has good skin. The New Zealand-based founder of one of the most talked-about skincare brands is sitting in a board room at the Melbourne headquarters of mega-beauty retailer Mecca, where Lewisham’s eponymous skincare is stocked exclusively in Australia. For the 38-year-old, this marks a full-circle moment. “Mecca was where I used to spend a lot of lunch times,” she tells Stellar. “It’s where I spent my first pay cheque after university. It’s probably what inspired me to get into the industry.”

That industry, of course, is beauty, where revenue in the skincare segment alone is estimated to reach US$155.70 billion ($233 billion) globally in 2023.

Skin is well and truly in – fuelled, in part, by the huge influence of celebrity-owned brands such as Hailey Bieber’s Rhode and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop. And it seems the market for skin care is becoming just as trend-driven – and as lucrative – as make-up.

Australian model and businesswoman Lara Worthington is the ambassador for Emma Lewisham. Picture: Emma Lewisham

But Auckland-based Lewisham – whose previous employment was working in a high-powered position as a senior executive for a global technology company before she started her beauty business four years ago – says her interest in skin care started at a young age.

“My grandmother and my mother were always very sophisticated in the way they approached beauty,” she recalls. “They focused on very few products that were high quality – they always were protective of their skin in the sun. It wasn’t in a way that [was] obsessive, they were taking care of themselves. The rituals around it inspired me.”

Growing up, Lewisham says, skin care “is what I invested in”. But it was her desire to have a baby (she gave birth to daughter Camilla in 2019) as well as a personal tragedy that prompted her to look more closely at what she put on her face, and ultimately changed the direction of her life.

“When it came to the idea around [the brand] Emma Lewisham, it started from a conversation with my doctor around lifestyle and what [products] I was using. It was a time in my life when I was considering the way that I lived,” she recalls. “I didn’t feel bulletproof. I’d lost my mum from cancer. I started to not want to take things for granted.”

The product line – in its signature purple, refillable vessels – includes the Emma Lewisham Skin Reset Serum and Supernatural Face Crème Riche, which are consistently among the bestsellers at Mecca.

Australia is the brand’s biggest market, Lewisham notes, followed by New Zealand and the UK. The formulas are engineered by scientists and physiologists taking into account the “complex physiology of your skin”, Lewisham explains, and each product undergoes biomedical-grade testing prior to hitting the shelves.

“People are wanting to live in a more aligned way, whether it’s what they eat, the way they exercise or the skincare [products] they use,” says Lewisham, who studied commerce and science at the University of Otago, before moving into business and marketing. “For me, this did put it into my psyche, [thinking] OK, I want to go down a natural path. I wanted high-performing products that were natural.”

Lewisham’s business is also a family affair: she started the brand when Camilla (known as “Milla”) was five months old, and her husband, Andrew Lewisham, serves as the company’s director and COO. “[Camilla] has only known both [versions of] Emma Lewisham – me, as her mother, and the business. It’s been around her since she was born.

“She sees the purple packaging … and she’ll say, ‘There’s mum! There’s Emma Lewisham.’ The business sense of it has been so much around her. I’m sure she can’t grasp what it all means at this point.”

However, it means a lot. The brand saw a 200 per cent increase in sales during the 12 months to April 2023, Lewisham says. It’s also one of Mecca’s best-selling brands – and the retailer’s most successful New Zealand-owned offering to date, she adds.

‘It needs to be the future of beauty’. The environment is at the forefront of skincare for New Zealand’s Emma Lewisham. Picture: Daniel Nadel for Stellar

The company went viral in March after hosting an invitation-only private concert in Sydney with Florence Welch of Florence + The Machine. (Lewisham walked down the aisle at her 2017 wedding to ‘Shake It Out’, one of the band’s most notable hits. And Welch is also counted among the skincare line’s celebrity fans.)

Footage of the performance – and Lewisham’s heartfelt address to the crowd in attendance – went viral on Instagram, leading to a huge spike in visitors to the brand’s Instagram feed (up by 40,000) in the 24 hours after.

With her huge success has come a deal with Paltrow to sell Emma Lewisham on Goop’s US e-store, not to mention a legion of famous fans including Margot Robbie, Phoebe Tonkin, Naomi Watts, Gemma Ward and Georgia Fowler, as well as brand ambassador Lara Worthington. Lewisham describes Worthington’s role as “a natural fit. We help each other from a business sense,” she tells Stellar. “It’s so much more than working together as a brand ambassador – we genuinely want to see each other succeed in business, and have a friendship.”

The environment is also of key concern to Lewisham, both as a business leader and a global citizen. She has developed a “circular and carbon-positive beauty model”, and the brand attained B Corp Certification in 2021 – meaning that it demonstrates high levels of social and environmental standards.

Skin is in! Lara Worthington for Emma Lewisham. Picture: Emma Lewisham

“The beauty industry produces 120 billion units of packaging annually,” Lewisham says. “And it goes to landfill, the majority of it – over 100 billion units of [packaging]. I thought, this doesn’t make sense, this ‘waste’ model. I wanted to rethink it, re-imagine beauty and flip it on its head. If we can create a ‘circular’ system, where products are refilled, and designed to be re-used, and brands take ownership of [waste] and see it as material that can be put back into circulation, then we could reduce [the beauty waste].”

Lewisham says her entire product line is “refillable”, which means it has “up to 75 per cent less carbon score [compared to standard products].

“We have certified all of our products as carbon positive by Toitū Envirocare. We know the carbon that is emitted for all of them, and we have reduced it as far as we can, and then we positively offset,” she explains. The brand’s pioneering climate achievements were personally endorsed by world-renowned conservationist Dr Jane Goodall.

Purple reign! Lara Worthington is the ambassador for Emma Lewisham.

It also has a “beauty circle” program with Mecca that allows customers to return empty Emma Lewisham containers so the packaging can be repurposed. “They’re cleaned, sterilised and re-used to put back into circulation,” Lewisham says of the eco initiative. “It does need to be the future of beauty. The largest emitter in the [beauty] industry for carbon is packaging. We released our IP [intellectual property] on how to become a circular beauty brand to the industry. We have brands wanting to learn from us.”

But beauty is not just skin deep for Lewisham. “I’ve always been someone who is really inquisitive and challenges things and … very determined,” she says. “I like to solve things and not accept things. If people say no, I don’t accept it as a no. That’s always been my personality.

“I’m big on community – and connecting with people who use our products, and hearing from them first-hand on the change that it’s had to their skin and lives,” she continues. “There’s nothing more important to me than our community of customers. At the end of the day, they are the reason we are here.”

Emma Lewisham is stocked exclusively at Mecca and online here.

Originally published as Meet the new ‘it’ girl of skincare, Emma Lewisham