Beauty & Personal Care Collaboration Takeaways

The Global Wellness Collaborations bring industry leaders together in meaningful dialogue to share ideas and best practices for navigating the COVID-19 crisis around a specific industry segment.

Topic: Beauty & Personal Care
Date of Discussion:  April 7, 2020
Countries/Regions Represented: Brazil, Canada, Fiji, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Mexico, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Qatar, UAE, UK, and US

• The spas in France will open again because there is a need for physical touch. However, we are not very optimistic that we will be the first to open after the confinement. In October or later, they may be able to provide treatments.

• In the meantime, the hope is to open earlier to sell retail.

• Brazil may be able to open sooner than other countries. The concern is that our therapists may be afraid of touching the clients. Protocols will need to be addressed, such as the use of aprons, gloves and masks.

• Dubai is on complete lockdown. We have to submit permits every day if we need to go out and identify exactly where we’re going and for how long we will be out. The salons are doing great work with trying to motivate their clients through Instagram predominantly.

• We need to find alternative routes of motivating clients. Keeping loyalty and giving them an add-on rather than a discount helps. As for clinics, we have a big healthcare city in Dubai. I saw a video today on the aspects of hygiene and sanitation cleansing. They have achieved a lot, and the video was pretty impressive.

• Even though we are using social distancing in Sweden, we can still eat out. Beauty shops are open. So hopefully, while our financial numbers will go down, it probably will not be as bad as the rest of the world.

• In India, we are emphasizing the April Wellness Moonshot: A World Free of Preventable Disease. We are emphasizing that we are going to experience a changing world order. Who will be the future leaders in the world for wellness, meditation and yoga?

• This month’s Wellness Moonshot theme is related to breathing. I think this should be a wake-up call. This will springboard our new leadership in the group, in the country, and in the world. So, at this time, we have a program on breathing.

• In California, we are at the forefront of the shelter in place and the closing of nonessential businesses. We’ve already worked a bit with Amazon, but we transferred some more inventory to Amazon so that we would be able to ship directly to customers.

• Even if shelter in place does get lifted in California, which currently is set for May 4, how will this pandemic continue to progress? Will I be comfortable enough to open my doors back up? Is it going to be safe for my employees, my team and clients? What kind of measures can we put into place?

• Thai citizens are not allowed back in the country until mid-June.

• I have lived in Japan for 10 years, and I admire the country a lot. It’s been very unstable in terms of the way in which the government has handled it now. I’m sure part of that was trying to hold on to the dream of the Olympics. Last weekend, there were a considerable amount of people on the streets, so it’s not fully locked down.

• About a million people left Bangkok to go back to the villages that their families came from, which was seen as a real problem. So, the government then put in place 350 military roadblocks across the country to try to slow down and stop people traveling between different districts. The whole city shuts down at 10 o’clock at night till four o’clock in the morning.

• The cosmetics industry went through the floor because you couldn’t literally go out to major parts of China. You couldn’t go to the shopping mall, so you couldn’t go and buy cosmetics or skin-care products, but online sales were going through the roof.

• When the pandemic started in Mexico, they closed all of their stores. They transformed luxury product companies in one week to manufacturing face masks. They are selling more right now than they were before with their products. The secretary of health said that maybe the peak of COVID-19 in Mexico may be the last week of May or the first of June. So that was quite a bit of a shock.

• Hotels have been provided some indications about how to operate from the World Health Organization. They will need to implement prevention measures and all the indications that are given by the law and by the World Health Organization.

• Our management task force has put together a team, so we are ready when it’s time to reopen. We are working through this process in several stages. The first step is the opening that we consider may be in a couple of weeks and then, a second phase of re-adaptation to normal. Our vendors and disease specialists will put together and create new standards for our industry to protect the staff and customers.

• Heat plays an important part in prevention and treatment for saunas. We will need protocols in place for infection control, staff and for screening clients.

• The do-it-yourself (DIY) movement seems to be obviously huge right now.

• There has been a huge increase in social media presence.

• We have brands that have really pulled together different products and bundles that are more about cleansing, antimicrobial, antibacterial, and antiviral things that people can do in their own homes.

• Many people will shift to self-care in the aftermath of this and a post-pandemic economy.

• Social media, Zoom and our own platform help us to provide consultations, work with psychological and physical therapists, and interact with each other. Laughing is also included.

• After speaking with numerous partners, we launched an e-commerce store within 10 days. Our products include massage guns, sleep lamps, vitamin packs, beauty products and all sorts of cool things we’re sourcing. We’re thinking through every product imaginable that makes sense for our brand and to create virtual classes.

• Treatments at home is the biggest marketing trend right now.

• Keeping a light-hearted connection with the consumer is the key because there’s bad news everywhere.

• There has been a lot of requests for recommendations, so I have been doing a lot of articles, videos and interviews on everything wellness. Most people are interested in personal hygiene care.

• The importance of self-care and self-esteem is an opportunity to calm the nervous system. The skin is the biggest organ that can help to calm our minds.

• The marketing team and education team were really focused on putting programs together that we could run while we were closed.

• Furloughed for us means that we’re guaranteeing people jobs, but it’s basically a layoff that allows the employees to get full unemployment and whatever else is being offered.

• In terms of what we’re doing, we’re pushing a little bit more of social media, and I am trying to work through my own hurdle, which was being in front of the camera and talking to the audience. Doing presentations on home care; what we can do to take care of our skin; and being physically, mentally, and emotionally well.

• We do have clients that are contacting us saying, they are running out of skin care. So, I’m just kind of fulfilling those orders as they come. But ultimately, we’re keeping communication open, as we are completely closed.

• We have vendors that have been doing amazing work, and some are actually shifting because they’re using their raw materials to make hand sanitizers.

• This is what COVID-19 means to the beauty industry. What they really said to me was, can you please just do the same thing that you’re going to do.

• People will still want to, in some way, beautify and make themselves look more presentable. We actually had the discussion, and so I just want to reflect on this as I look at the screen.

• The major part of wellness is how we present ourselves. I think that’s part of the overall wellness that we want to have.

• The desire to look our best and to look groomed, that is why the beauty bubble is so huge.

• Crisis actually means opportunity. The Greek meaning is to sift through and get rid of what’s not necessary. And in getting rid of what’s not necessary, it creates a new opportunity to think differently, to create new pathways to think about new and different things.

• The women in postpartum who have their hair and makeup done suffer far less postpartum depression than women who do not.

• Beauty belongs to what the Greeks call the three great transcendentals: beauty, truth and goodness. Beauty comes from the arts, and that is to beautify the world. It’s an aesthetic. We are hardwired for that. The truth of beauty is that it has to do with science, which is the original transcendental. And the third is goodness, which is the spiritual traditions, the perennial traditions of spirituality, religion and so forth. The truth, the beauty and the goodness. And that, for me, is a fundamental premise of our culture.

• I’m working for a client on an environmentally green Professional Derm spa skin-care line. And I just think this is fantastic because people are hungry for self-soothing. I think self-care and self-nurturing is going to be key as we go forward.

• I’m able to now lift the team’s heads, look ahead, and say okay, how do we want to support our communities at this time, through education with products?

• A mask for breathing would absolutely be suitable for service providers or individual consumers, but thinking, you know, if there’s something in particular that we can do to help spas for when they reopen.

• I also just read about the Chinese symbols. What I heard was that this crisis is made up of two Chinese symbols. The first one is danger and the second one is opportunity.

• Because we are a medical device company, we can still manufacture and ship. We’re not shut down, but we had to go to a skeleton crew and most of our folks are working from home. So, we focused on retail and home care, which we’ve done to some extent, but we’ve had to get creative with that also. We have shifted our focus to marketing and education, primarily education.

• Now even more so because we’re talking about educating people on the stress response and what that does to the skin as well as the body, and what it does to overall health, we find people are very responsive to that.

• I do think we’re going to see an even greater shift towards proactive wellness. We see a lot of interest in that. Now, we have a lot of people coming to us, even government officials, asking us about the effect on immunity and inflammation, that sort of thing.

• I think there’s a greater focus on people wanting to know that they are doing everything they can to stay strong and healthy for their body’s defense mechanisms to work properly.

• Of course, beauty is not just beautifying yourself, but it is mentally how a woman has to be strong.

• When I was supplying product online and providing training, all these problems were a really big headache for me, but now there is no choice, and so I see this as a silver lining.

• As for innovation, I think there’s definitely an opportunity here.