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The next big thing in beauty is to kill the next big thing

And Rising

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April 28, 2021 | 6 min read

Meet Fiils, a sustainable, refillable beauty brand and the latest addition to And Rising’s portfolio

Meet Fiils, a sustainable, refillable beauty brand and the latest addition to And Rising’s portfolio.

Following its recent investment round, Fiils is gearing up to shape a different future for personal care. As i-D reported: “the beauty industry has a sustainability problem — that’s not up for debate”. After years of witnessing the problem of single-use plastic, Fiils has a simple idea to put change ahead of trends.

Today, around 75% of the UK says it wants to engage in small actions to consume more consciously. Meanwhile, about £15bn a year in sales of beauty and personal care (plus over £9bn in cosmetics) has grown up on a different model: more is more. Former global artist for Nars, all-round beauty expert and founder of Fiils, Anna Priadka describes herself as “not the sort of person that needs loads of stuff to be happy”. The lack of match between the industry and this personal outlook drove her first to imagine Fiils. Today, Fiils is the first brand to offer premium hair, hand, and body products delivered in refillable formats with an experience that trades you up, not down.

As the environmental crisis rages, the extent to which a brand can respond is not straightforward. During the past decade, fans accused brands of woke-washing where they expected radical transparency. And for every positive-impact idea that successfully navigates its way into the mainstream (Oatly and Impossible are promising IPO at valuations greater than $10bn in 2021), many others get stuck as niche propositions.

Scariest of all, CSR pioneers discovered that breakthrough programmes they created were also used as a cover to protect the status quo. Finding an investable strategy to ‘do well by doing good' with a level of truth remains a difficult task.

And Rising's fund philosophy requires positive-impact brands to tackle the inherent tensions between consumption and sustainability rather than gloss over them. Fiils lives up to three traits common in such ventures. First, it treats environmental concern at the business model level and not just the marketing mix (important as that is to behaviour change). Second, Fiils makes the very best, most usable products that provide an upgrade to your current brand (one of the biggest mistakes sustainable brands make is to assume sustainability alone is a right to win). Third, Fiils respects that its audience has more agency in the world than buying another beauty product; encouraging people to cut back on consumption is step number one. Fiils wants to open the door for people to develop a different kind of relationship with its brand.

Sustainability problems are overwhelming in number. Fiils focuses on the area where the most pain is felt: the single-use plastic bottle. This focus gives it a significant advantage. Plastics leads the pack of the changes people want to make (46% of the UK actively seeking ways to reduce plastic). Yet only 14% of plastic bottles are currently recycled, despite what those on-bottle kitemarks lead you to believe. In contrast, the LCA Centre found that the purchase of refillable products creates 70% less CO2 emissions, uses 60% less energy and 45% less water than if you bought a brand-new bottle.

Fiils started by designing its bottles beautifully, such that people treasure them and consider them ‘shelfie worthy’. The next priority for Fiils has been carefully curating product ‘bundles’ that fit seamlessly into people’s routines. Fiils’ products are natural, organic, cruelty-free, vegan, and contain no “nasties” (things like parabens or toxins). The rest of the journey has to be just as easy and sustainable. The delivery box itself is entirely recyclable (no bubble wrap or inserts), and the refillable pouches can also be returned to Fiils using a free send-back bag enclosed.

Fiils requires your involvement, re-wiring energy spent shopping into sustainable action instead. A user doesn’t just ‘buy’ Fiils; it plays an active role in the re-filling cycle. Currently, a multi-billion dollar industry accretes most of its value by treating its customers as passive subjects and addicting them to the “new”. Just like social media addiction, scrolling to the next thing becomes the only value. Most beauty “innovations” are simply remixes of what’s already available, wrapped in mass marketing to keep people’s attention on new news.

Fiils is building an approach for a generation significantly more conscious of where they spend their time and money. This trendline mirrors the fashion industry, where attitudes towards buying second-hand have reversed over the past 18 months. New brands make being eco-friendly stylish and aspirational, rather than the hemp-wearing days of putting your worthiness on display. A generation that grew up with Depop and Airbnb are happy to reuse what’s available. For them, second-hand is the opposite of second-division. Aspirational brands like Fiils make refillable ‘bougie’, not budget.

Stepping back, the most significant opportunity for Fiils isn’t a new product or product format but a different kind of relationship with its audience. And Rising’s initial research showed that people feel a more lasting emotional connection to a brand from refilling a bottle than they do from buying one new. The act of replenishing is innate to our humanity and appeals to the side of us that isn’t het-up about what’s next but what’s right. Marketing’s role will be crucial in supporting this approach, where beauty ads are designed to incite selfish, extrinsic behaviours that ultimately make us feel bad. Over many years, people will no doubt go on a journey with their Fiils bottles.

As Fiils quickly builds a community around its product, it will need to think carefully about what innovation to introduce and how to widen the ecosystem in which its users can take part. For now, it has a solid core from which to scale and a large, wide-open, addressable market to go after. Fiils is a convenient, conscious beauty brand with no compromise on quality or style. Self-care and planet-care can finally go hand-in-hand.

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