”For hair, there’s never been more action”

Eleni & Chris’ co-founder Christinah Nicolaisen on why the indie brands will stay — and why we should embrace it. Plus: First speakers announced for the next Beauty Innovation Talks.

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Where next?

Every Friday, we release a new episode of our Weekly podcast. The topic ranges from coming EU regulations and innovation in design to the latest from the beauty industry, including How to innovate the communication. The first time I joined, we talked about innovation in beauty — what else? — and I stated the industry’s problem with micro trends:

”There is a problem for the beauty industry regarding TikTok and other platforms with the beauty trends only going faster and faster. One week from another, the makeup or beauty trend can be completely different. /…/ It is a problem that is also very hard to solve for the industry, when the trends are only moving faster and faster, while the development of the products, for obvious reasons, can’t go faster and faster”.

Fast-forward almost a year and today, though we haven’t seen TikTok Shopping launching in the Nordics yet, there are few signs of things slowing down. It has never been easier to become viral — and it has never been more challenging for brands to handle it. Not the least for indie brands, it’s tough to catch up on the latest. During a three-day-long visit to Oslo, I met Christinah Nicolaisen, the co-founder of haircare brand Eleni & Chris, who has followed this development for almost a decade. Disrupted supply chains and longer lead times, ”double what it was pre-pandemic” she says in this week’s Insight piece, have forced beauty brands like them to follow macro trends even closer. On the other hand, she continues, the brand has also managed to turn it into an advantage.

— It has added an element of creativity to the industry — we more often go through all our processes and see if we can find smarter solutions that make some processes faster and better.

And, more importantly, the passion remains:

 — It’s very exciting for hair — it’s never been more interesting.

Read the full story below.

What’s also exciting is the countdown to the next Beauty Innovation Talks, now only two weeks away. We’re thrilled to partner up with Revieve and a curated list of speakers — where the first ones are announced later in this email — for an afternoon on the latest development in beauty tech.

See you in Stockholm on October 25!

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SCANDINAVIAN MIND x REVIEVE

How to unlock the full potential of beauty and wellness: AI, AR, and beyond

In the shift towards a consumer-centric approach for beauty and wellness brands, new technologies are more important than ever. We speak to Miikka Mäkiö, Senior Vice President of EMEA at Revieve, about how to utilise the power of AI, AR, and cutting-edge technologies like Gen AI.

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EVENT

Here are the first speakers announced for Beauty Innovation Talks

Welcome to an afternoon of insights and panel discussions about Beauty Tech.

Grev Turegatan 30
Stockholm 25 October 2023
15.00—17.00
RSVP and read more here

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INSIGHTS

Christinah Nicolaisen: ”For hair, there’s never been more action”

By JOHAN MAGNUSSON

According to the Scandinavian beauty entrepreneur, we have only seen the beginning of indie brands — and we should be excited to see them continue to evolve.

Grown up in a small town of 400 people in the middle of nowhere in the north of Norway, Christinah Nicolaisen had cloudberries — ”the Scandinavian gold”, which only grows on the Arctic fauna — in her DNA. After realising that even the Vikings brought tons of it on their journeys and used it for sea sickness and fever, she started to wonder, ’What’s up with this berry?’

— Back then, my mother had been in the hair industry for 30 years, but we had never had our own products. We realised that cloudberries were used in cosmetics but not on an active level and my mother said, ’If they’re good for the inside, for the Vikings, they must be good for the outside, for hair and skin.’

There were no clinical studies available on cloudberries, so the mother-and-daughter duo had to do everything themselves. They sent berries to a laboratory in England.