Do you have a great idea for a beauty product? Well don't let it lay dormant in the crevices of your mind, jump online and submit that suggestion to Volition, a collaborative incubator for the beauty industry.
Based in California, Volition is the first of its kind to act as an accelerator for product ideas submitted by the general public. If voted through to development users can then begin to make a profit, although the percentage received will vary depending on how far along in development the product was when proposed.
So far, most of Volition's successful products have come from women, according to The New York Times. These include Mission Brows, natural-looking stick-on replacement eyebrows, submitted by beauty editor Deanna Pai who lost hers to chemotherapy in 2015; a celery-powered moisturiser submitted by Olympic gold-medal gymnast Nastia Liukin; and a Strawberry-C Brightening Serum from University of Texas student Varika Pinnam.
The New York Times reports that some 4,000 ideas have been submitted to Volition in the last two and a half years and as the business has become more well known, sometimes 100 per week come through.
The company has a network of chemists who help develop the successful concepts, after which a campaign is posted on the site. To get there however, software determines a different vote threshold for every idea which is, "...based partly on a guess of how many voters actually will buy the product, plus the minimum number of customers needed to make the economics work," reads the NYT article.
In 2017, Volition founders Brandy Hoffman and Patricia Santos announced they would be launching a selection of skincare products into Sephora under the same name, including the aforementioned Strawberry-C Brightening Serum. When speaking of the launch and what the brand stood for, Hoffman told Forbes, "I feed off the fact that we challenge what our industry accepts as 'business as usual'.
"I was once told by a boss, 'Beauty is a marketing industry and that’s the most important part.' I remember thinking, “Aren’t we making a product and shouldn’t that be the number one priority?” Our priorities are different and I love where we’re headed."
