A natural beauty: Why Aussie skincare brand Jurlique is big in Asia

Ask any beauty insider and they’ll tell you that natural skincare – where products are infused with ingredients found in nature rather than a lab – is trending.The global market for natural and organic cosmetics is projected to reach US$37.44 billion by 2032, with a compound annual growth rate of about 7.19 per cent from 2024 to 2032, according to Zion Market Research.  For Australian cosmetics company Jurlique, natural skincare is nothing new. The retailer has been making face oils, serums, cleansers, mists and moisturisers with ingredients grown on its biodynamic farm in the Adelaide Hills since it was founded in 1985. But the rising demand for ‘clean’ and ‘plant-based’ beauty products, particularly among millennials and Gen Z, has presented the business with a golden opportunity to introduce itself to the next generation of customers. In March, Jurlique invited a bevy of content creators to visit its farm for the launch of its Herbal Recovery range, which uses powerful botanicals – Holy Basil, Iris Root, Echinacea and Black Elderflower – to target early signs of ageing. This is just one example of the brand’s recent efforts to amplify its longstanding commitment to natural skincare, from the launch of a new formulation charter in 2022 to its B Corp certification in February to a new store concept centred on storytelling.“We do all the right things, but we forgot to talk about it in the past. This is one of the main development points we have,” Jurlique’s CEO Loïc Réthoré told Inside Retail. The right man for the jobRéthoré joined Jurlique in March last year, after 12 years in various leadership roles at Nespresso Oceania, and shorter stints heading up Dyson in Japan and DFS in Hong Kong. Born in France, his first job after university was as a product manager for L’Oréal in Tokyo, where he became fluent in Japanese. In some ways, this makes Réthoré the perfect CEO for Jurlique, which was acquired by the Japanese cosmetics company Pola Orbis Holdings in 2011 and has a strong presence in Asia. China is the brand’s top market, followed by Australia, Hong Kong and then Japan. It sells both direct-to-consumer through a mix of online and stand-alone stores and via retail partners, including department stores and pharmacies. Réthoré attributes Asian consumers’ affinity for Jurlique to its core range of rose-based products. The brand is known for its rose mist and hand cream and in 2013, it commissioned rose breeder George Thomson to create the Jurlique Rose, a proprietary hybrid flower that reportedly improves the skin barrier function. Jurlique has also created products that are specifically geared towards Asian skin types and environments. “Last year, we released the Rare Rose oil, which is a dry face oil, which is perfect for Asian skin,” Réthoré explained. “When you are in Guangdong, for example, in summer, you want a dry oil.”Beyond his deep understanding of the Asian retail market, Réthoré believes his experience using CRM (customer relationship management) to drive customer retention and acquisition at Nespresso was a major factor in his appointment. “Pola Orbis is a very CRM-centric company and that resonates with my background at Nespresso, which is all about CRM. It’s a word that’s in every textbook now, but whether you have experience in CRM is also very important,” he said. “Do you know what drives a customer to buy your product? What are the triggers? And when you know the triggers, how do you dial them up? How do you upgrade a new customer who just joined to a loyal customer? What is the customer journey for that?”Being able to answer these questions will be key to growing Jurlique’s millennial customer base in the years ahead, a top priority for the business as it continues to recover from Covid. “We experienced a bump in online sales [during the pandemic], obviously, because people were staying at home, but we are still very experiential and sensorial. A lot of people like to interact with us in bricks-and-mortar, so we suffered from that,” Réthoré said. “But we are back.” So far this year, the brand is seeing double-digit growth in most markets, including China. Annual revenue, he said, is roughly US$60 million globally. From seed to skinJurlique’s bet on millennials makes a lot of sense, given their preference for sustainable and ethical products. In a 2019 survey of 4500 18-34-year-olds in China, France, Germany, the UK and the US by global consulting firm AlixPartners, 72 per cent of respondents said it was important to purchase healthy or clean personal care products.“We find that the values of our brand really resonate with millennials,” Réthoré said. “We are all about naturality, sustainability, being conscious and well-being oriented, and it’s not only skincare products, we have rituals with our products that we suggest our customers to follow.”The brand has been working with content creators for some time and it recently formalised its social media strategy, as evidenced by the influencer trip it hosted earlier this year. But it’s not enough to communicate on social media alone, especially as the advertising around natural skincare becomes increasingly noisy.“Content creation, whether it’s a post on Instagram or Tiktok, it’s very fast. It’s the current communication style, but I think the combination of that with more long-form content, where there’s more depth, is also important,” Réthoré said.That’s where initiatives like the brand’s new formulation charter comes in. Launched in 2022, the formulation charter requires all new products to be made with 98 per cent natural origin ingredients, no synthetic ingredients and green manufacturing processes among several other provisions. It follows the EU’s regulations on cosmetics, which are the strictest in the world, and blacklists an additional 1500 disputed ingredients. It also calls for the selection of effective ingredients and studies on Jurlique’s farm-grown ingredients. “The formulation charter, we believe, is key,” Réthoré said. “It goes beyond industry standards in many ways. It is the base of all our innovation.” Together with the brand’s recent B Corp certification, it’s a powerful external signal to consumers that Jurlique is serious about natural skincare and its environmental impact. “We say, ‘from seed to skin’. We have full ownership of the value chain and we’re very proud of it because we know what’s in the product,” Réthoré said. Of course, the retailer’s biggest point of difference is its 42-acre biodynamic farm where it grows and harvests the botanical ingredients in its products without pesticides or fertiliser. Finding ways to “bring the farm to consumers” is one of the chief executive’s major areas of focus right now. Jurlique is about to roll out a new store concept centred on storytelling, and farm manager Cherie Hutchinson is increasingly playing the role of a brand ambassador.The hardest part is selecting which stories to tell, Réthoré said. “There are so many messages…we need to have the most impactful one in front of consumers.”This story first appeared in the May 2024 issue of Inside Retail Asia magazine.