This week, Business Sweden has invited international beauty buyers and journalists to a hotel in Stockholm for the first-ever S-Beauty Matchmaking Days. To set the tone, I took the stage together with The Swedish Institute’s Kajsa Guterstam during the opening breakfast to present their brand-new communication material for the Swedish beauty industry. Here’s a roundup.
Kajsa Guterstam: There is a new era for global beauty, and it’s moving fast. Driven by social media trends, of course, as many sectors are, and increased competition from emerging markets. Sweden is not alone here. Swedish consumers are sustainability-aware and inspired by innovation. They’re not bound by loyalty but move fast from one brand to another to find innovative and trustworthy products. What also stands out is the high demand for transparency and authenticity. That’s something that is really remarkable and stands out for Swedish consumers. Swedish brands are resilient and sustainable in their production throughout the value chain, including recyclable packaging. If you can’t present that, the demanding and savvy end consumer will move to another brand.
Johan Magnusson: We now have a modern end consumer who’s digital first, making it super important, of course, to have a proper e-commerce. You know all that. In Sweden, they’re mobile-first. Sweden is a world leader for mobile wallet usage: More than seventy per cent. Seventy per cent of online retail purchases are from mobile, and fifty per cent of brick-and-mortar retail is from mobile. Thirty years ago, we invented Bluetooth in Sweden, and we continue to drive IT and computer innovation, which also means our end consumer is really, really savvy, online first, or in this case, mobile first. We also have huge online retail players who’ve now gone into physical retail, which creates a huge business opportunity. For local brands, it can create the perfect test bed in Sweden. We have a quite wealthy end consumer, and if a brand starts with Sweden and fails, they have a societal safety net. You can be an entrepreneur one time and fail, a second time and fail, and the third time you might succeed and start to export to other markets. That, to export, is an obvious key to success for many brands.
– In the communication material that we’ve created, we’ve barely mentioned ‘sustainable.’ For the Swedish audience, it’s a bare minimum. It’s the least we expect from our brands. Again, this makes it very good for local brands: if they can stand the Swedish end consumers’ really high pressure on brands to act sustainably, they can have an easier time when exporting to other markets.
– We don’t talk about ‘clean beauty.’ It’s huge in the US, quite big in the UK, and across Europe. For us, clean beauty is clean water and clean nature, and the right to have access to nature. It’s something we take for granted. Instead, in the communication material, we’ve chosen to go for conscious. And I would personally recommend brands to use conscious, given that clean beauty as a term will also be forbidden by the EU in the next few years.
– I often get asked by people who hear that I’ve written the communication material what surprised me the most. For the last five years, we’ve had 2,5x the growth as the super hyped K-beauty. So Swedish beauty has seen one of the highest export growth rates in the world.
Kajsa Guterstam: Regarding policies and responsible industry driving change and innovation, it’s obviously a very regulated industry, and Sweden has moved ahead of several of the frameworks. But we are also very dependent on the EU here. Things are happening fast now: as mentioned, ‘clean’ will be forbidden, and a lot of other things are linked to the EU’s Green Deal. That comes back to producer responsibility and packaging and transparency. It’s also being pushed by the industry to happen because that is something that makes the brands position themselves at the forefront.
– That also pushes innovation, because if you have that strong legislation, you also need to be at the very forefront of innovation and come up with ideas that match strong legislation.
Johan Magnusson: Swedish beauty is also about groundbreaking material science. Not least in the shape of cellulose. We’re the second most forested country in Europe. We don’t buy that many magazines anymore, so the forest companies need to find new ways to make money. So, they turn to beauty and packaging. We’re on the way to creating an entire ecosystem with universities, startups, and beauty brands working together to create biodegradable alternatives to fossil-based packaging and ingredients generating microplastics.
– FineCell is one great example of a cellulose innovation. Another one is called Blue Ocean Closures. They’re commercially running, have their own factory, and what’s extra interesting about them is the price parity. If you go for a more sustainable option, it’s often more expensive. But after the recent issues with the global oil supply, Blue Ocean Closures’ bio-based lids and caps are now a cheaper option than virgin plastic. This, to my knowledge, is quite unique.
– We also have Meadow, which is also very much commercially available. They’re providing a pre-fill innovation made of aluminium. The conventional refill solutions need to be refilled three or four times by an end consumer to become a better option sustainability-wise, and the production of it also creates new waste streams. So it’s perhaps not the best long-term solution. The long-term solution might be an aluminium version that you can easily convert into your current packaging application.
– We also have beauty tech and innovation. Foreo has obviously gained a world reputation. Skinome creates skincare products that you put in a refrigerator, which means that they can minimise the usage of preservatives. BAM Technology is a world-unique patented innovation for nails and hair growth around local release of calcium and silicate. to the body. And Ellure is one startup to watch given the end consumer’s future increased demand for customisation. They’re using AI, AR and all the other buzzwords you can ever imagine to create customisation, also for retail solutions.
– We also have responsible production, meaning that foreign brands now come to Sweden to get the ‘Made in Sweden’ stamp from the factories. We have great production as well as an entire ecosystem. Unoro Nordic, for instance, have slashed its water consumption by more than half over the last five years.
Words: Johan Magnusson, hello@beauty-innovation.com