Nail polish startup moves commercial DIY beauty into a new category

Neha Raman,a business student at Philadelphia’s Temple University, developed the one-minute DIY nail polish kit that lets consumers blend their own shades and customize colors.

The product itself is fairly simple: a boxed set comprising 6 bottles of a nail polish base product, 18 pigment capsules, a tiny battery-operated immersion blender, and disposable mixing paddles.

Trending ​

2016 is expected to see “a surge of products which are intended to be blended.” ​And, “manufacturers will move to create DIY ingredients that make sense in the hands of consumers,” ​Cosmetics Design noted in a recent CD Buzz video​.

What Raman has done with Rungh—which means ‘colors’ in Hindi—is just that, she’s putting consumers in charge of the pigments. Customisation and control is, after all, what the DIY beauty and personal care trend is really all about.

“Driven by women’s desire to feel control over their beauty products[, the] DIY approach doesn’t cut brands out of the equation, but it will reward brands that offer consumers…intimacy and involvement in the creation process as homemade products,” ​explains Ann D'Adamo​, Senior Marketing Manager of Women’s Marketing Inc., in a recent blog post. 

DIY business ​

It’s early days for Rungh. The company is small, and there’s likely room for improvement in the product design. The demo video on the company site shows a pigment capsule not twisting open as expected, and the voiceover acknowledges that the process “can be a little messy.” ​The same could be said for business ventures.

“I kind of had to learn the ropes and teach myself different things that haven’t really come with [business] class,”​ Raman tells Temple-News.com.

Learning-by-doing and real-world product testing are invaluable for entrepreneurs and long-suffering cosmetics pros alike. To disrupt and innovate at the speed of beauty takes nerve, the willingness to experiment, and the pluck to give consumers what they want—only to discover along the way how to make it all commercially successful.