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Beauty & Cosmetics

Female-led CPG finds success

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For this installment of Package Design Matters, the company’s COO Josh Kirschbaum and Roys Laux, vice president of marketing, will speak about how the brand has survived, succeeded and transformed itself over the last three decades. They also discuss how Gilchrist & Soames’ female leadership is elevating its creative culture, how package design is ushering in a new era, and retail opportunities that are changing the way it sells its products. 
BRAND TRAVELS
Founded in London, Gilchrist & Soames’ early product line focused on home fragrance and candles. It launched its spa, bath and body collection in the U.K. in 1984 when it was purchased by Potter & Moore.
Today, Gilchrist & Soames is headquartered in Indianapolis, but its reach is international. Its core customer base is largely comprised of hotels, spas and resorts. “We service 6,000 customers across 90 countries,” Laux explains. “We are a global brand, but we draw upon that British heritage.
“In the luxury toiletries’ market, it all comes down to attention to detail,” she adds. “As we’re developing new designs and creating new products, we’re thinking about infusing that attention to detail and quality craftsmanship in everything we do. We draw upon our history to be relevant going forward.”
That history includes not only the company’s pedigree, but the pedigrees of its leadership. Kirschbaum brings over 10 years of experience in the bath, body and beauty industries to his role. “I’ve worked for large global supply chain organizations, such as Colgate Palmolive and L’Oréal,” Kirschbaum explains. “But I’ve also worked for smaller companies in cosmetics and personal care. Before coming to Gilchrist & Soames, I was the COO of NuWorld Beauty. One of its brands is the Hard Candy cosmetics line that you’ll see in every Walmart. I’m able to take that retail experience and help Roys’ team in growing our ecommerce portfolio and really touching retail customers.”
As vice president of marketing, Laux draws on over 15 years of multi-industry experience in brand strategy and management, marketing, global launch strategy, product development, lifecycle planning, and sales leadership. Laux honed her brand development, marketing and management skills at Hormel Foods and Eli Lilly & Company, and her online marketing and customer-insights skills at Angie’s List.
Although Laux is vice president of marketing, her role is more accurately described as vice president of brand management and creative. “I oversee all marketing, brand partnerships, brand development, product development, and packaging design and creative work we do,” she explains. “My long history in brand building, brand equity, and understanding customer insights helps my team effectively deliver against the motivators and drivers of our customers in what’s really a specialty piece of the marketplace. Our primary customers are hospitality customers, we service four- and five-star hotels, and we put beautiful bath and body products in their bathrooms for their guests’ use. Gilchrist & Soames is much different from your everyday beauty company.”
COMMON CHALLENGE, SPECIALIZED EXPERTISE
But brand challenges and opportunities aren’t necessarily exclusive to the company. “What’s been interesting, especially in the beauty space, is there’s a big trend toward niche brands,” Laux opines. “A lot of innovation is coming out of small brands. It’s not just the big players that are coming forward with new designs, ingredients or packaging. This is great because we all have to raise our game so that we are relevant.”
This includes a strong commitment to building internal expertise. “Almost all of our operations happen here in the Midwest,” Laux says. “We actually have our primary design team based right here, rather than outsourcing to agencies. We found that developing an internal design team gives us the opportunity to be specialized, which is important because the hospitality amenities world has unique design challenges. We’ve found that there are a lot of little things that we wouldn’t think about every day if we were just designing for the consumer audience.”
The package design for Gilchrist & Soame’s BeeKind might simply look like a modern, layered design, but it’s more than that. “These varnishes are really fun,” Laux says. “The design might be black-on-black, but each features a different pattern in the varnish. Housekeeping loves the patterns because it’s easy to identify each product. This is helpful because that product might go into a hotel in Italy, Asia or the U.S. Not everyone in these different countries will have the same language skills, but everybody can spot a plaid versus a hound’s-tooth pattern.”
THE FRUITS OF (CREATIVE) FREEDOM
Laux has found that the design team is most successful when they are encouraged to tap into their creativity and innovate. “The best work comes out of our design team when we provide them with some background and baseline information of the objectives for a new collection, some trends that we would like to tap into, and potentially which hospitality accounts we expect to be users of that collection,” she says. “We then challenge them to bring in new ideas so they’re not trying to design an answer.”
The cultural drive to enable designers to do their best work cuts across departments. “Operations partners very closely with Roys’ design team,” Kirschbaum remarks. “Our production lines are very much designed around flexibility and making sure they’re not stifling that creativity. We’ve made smart equipment decisions.”
The operational flexibility enables Gilchrist & Soames to start with clean-sheet package designs versus iterative designs for new products. Essential for pushing the envelope in the hospitality business, Laux says, because “our industry has enough restrictions already, based on the way customers use products and price considerations. We are a luxury brand that needs to remember that the hotelier is giving our products away. Any way our team can creatively deliver that luxury experience really needs to move the needle.”
DELIVERING THE LOOK AND TOUCH OF LUXURY
The innovation challenge becomes ever more complex as Gilchrist & Soames’ business outside of hospitality grows into direct-to-consumer sales generated by its website and Amazon. “There’s a lot of gifting that happens in our direct-to-consumer space,” Laux explains. “Imagine, you’ve gone on a wonderful girls’ trip and you’ve experienced our products in that hotel bathroom, and there’s some nostalgia attached. You might want to help those girlfriends remember that experience, and what better way to do that than when they take their shower to feel like they’re back in that ritzy hotel.”
For these customers, it’s not necessary to create a visual identity separate from the branding developed for the hotelier. Instead, it’s important to make the item giftable. The gift packaging uses the color gray and hints at the luxurious experience with the satin ribbon and high-end, smooth paperboard.
Texture is used in many of Gilchrist & Soames’ designs to convey product messages. “Because we (as consumers) are using gels in showers so often, specialty soaps have become covetable as a gift,” Laux notes. “Because the soaps inside this package have many natural ingredients, we wanted to make sure that the packaging really aligns with that feeling of a natural product. That’s where this nicely textured burlap gift box comes in.”
RESPONSIBILITY TO THE GREATER GOOD
Oatmeal soap, Kirschbaum notes, also represents Gilchrist & Soames’ commitment to socially responsible products. “We’ve been at the forefront in that area,” he says. “It may not be something that we publicize, but it’s definitely part of our culture. We don’t do animal testing and there are no animal by-products.”
As further evidence of Kirschbaum’s passion for social responsibility, Laux notes that Kirschbaum’s work includes  an “ultimate do-gooder example.” Kirschbaum explains, “At my last job, I turned the entire corporate headquarters into a solar-powered facility. The company was also recycling everything possible—glass, plastic, corrugate, bottles.”
A similar approach to waste is in place at Gilchrist & Soames. As a luxury goods manufacturer, products with small packaging flaws are diverted away from its main distribution channel. These products are then donated to large, well-known nonprofits like Goodwill and the Red Cross. These products are also sent to a local battered women’s and children’s shelter.
Could this be a reflection of the company’s female leadership?
CULTURAL IMPACT OF FEMALE LEADERS
“Kathie DeVoe, our CEO, really sets the culture,” Kirschbaum explains. “And to speak to Roys’ credit, she’s taught us that it’s OK every now and again to have a luxury experience. She has brought in great company team-building activities, which have really incorporated the luxury experiences that we are trying to create for our customers.”
Roys adds, “Some of the events feature things that are meaningful to our business that you don’t experience every day. A recent example is a nose-and-fragrance training for the entire staff so we can all learn a little bit about that piece of our business, and how fragrance can have such a positive impact on somebody’s overall experience when they’re using our products.
“And the CEO and I, we love beauty products, love brands, love luxury,” she adds. “And it’s fun to bring that little bit of joy. What’s really fun for me now is receiving pictures of our products from friends who are traveling for business or holiday. We have dipped a toe in social media, and have grown that with our online business. We also see a lot of opportunities to tie that in more closely with our hotelier business.” 

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