The next big beauty trend? Crowdsourcing product ideas

After more than a decade working in the beauty industry, Brandy Hoffman was disillusioned with the way a handful of conglomerates talked down to their customers and spruiked the same overpriced products making the same overhyped claims. “The beauty industry should be about empowering women, not pushing products they don’t need,” says Hoffman.

In 2015, Hoffman, previously a senior executive at a prestige skincare brand, partnered with venture capitalist Patricia Santos to create a beauty company to put consumers in the driver’s seat when it came to product development and communication.

The result is Volition Beauty, a crowdsourced beauty brand defined by innovative products brought to life by the cyber community. Volition uses social media to solicit ideas from consumers then puts them to a vote within the beauty community. The winning creators are then partnered with labs and chemists to create their dream products, which are marketed and sold on the internet.

“We don’t contrive consumer needs; we bring them to life using the power of community,” says Santos.

The central pillar of that community is the internet, through which Volition Beauty does everything from sourcing initial ideas to the final sales and marketing for products. Those products run from a celery cream created by a US Olympic gold medal gymnast, who had been drinking the green juice for years, to a turmeric skin polish devised by an Indian woman who wanted others to share her cultural beauty ritual.

As diverse as the Volition products are, the power of Instagram, in particular, is their unifying force.

If you’re considering two lip balm colours and you can only afford to launch one, you do a poll to learn who wants what and why.
— Ava Matthews, Ultra Violette

“Instagram has an enormous role with our product development and customer communication,” says Santos, whose brand is now carried by Sephora in the US, Cult Beauty in the UK and Mecca in Australia. “We are constantly monitoring social chatter, Instagram comments and hashtags and using all of that data to refine ideas that are chosen and bring them directly to the customer.”

By providing a platform for consumers to communicate directly with beauty brands, discover under-the-radar products, and even create those products themselves, Instagram has become a thriving environment for new niche brands such as Volition to take their businesses truly global – and all the way to the bank.