The Beauty Company Using Big Data
Toun28 is a relatively new South Korean skin care brand founded by Jung Maria and Park Jun-su in 2017. What makes this brand so unique in the never-ending World of K-Beauty is that this brand is classified as a beauty and tech start up. The tech category comes in due to the fact that this brand aims to provide customised skin care products to address specific skin concerns based on the data that they collect, namely customers’ facial conditions as well as climate and environmental data. Overseas, the brand has planned to release a subscription service that will send you new products on the 28th of every month. The products each month will be customised and tailored to suit your ever-changing skin as well as the seasonal climate. The concept behind the brand is so brilliant that it was the first ever beauty startup brand that K-Beauty Giant Amorepacific (parent company of Etude House, Illiyoon, Innisfree, Iope, Laneige, Mamonde, Sulwhasoo to name a few) decided to fund.
The subscription service is unfortunately not yet available in South Africa but you can still purchase their ready-made organic cosmetics line which was created to address the most popular concerns that their data collection yielded.
Addressing the Plastic Pandemic
Another great aspect of this brand is that they realised the impact on the environment that the cosmetic industry has. To tie in with their monthly subscription service, which will be packaging intense, they came up with 100% fully recyclable packaging for their products.
We don’t just think about the environment, we act for the environment by making fully recyclable packaging
Toun28 CEO Jung Maria
After completing more than 500 tests, Toun28 created a patent-pending, fully recyclable paper packaging. This has enabled the brand to reduce the plastic used when compared to conventional cosmetic companies by around 92%. The paper packaging may not be beautiful and fancy but it encompasses the brand’s philosophy of “seeking healthy beauty to benefit both people and the environment”. The brand also says that 60 – 98% of the cost of skin care products are attributed to their containers and marketing. By removing the plastic containers, they attribute 90% of the cost to premium raw ingredients and only 10% of the costs to the packaging. They are still on their journey to make a 100%-biodegradable paper container with no plastic cap, but for now we think that their start at it is absolutely brilliant.
What do you think of the paradigm shift that Toun28 is leading in the Beauty industry?