Based in Hoboken, New Jersey, and launched just this year, Pure & Mine is the latest in a string of brands using consumer surveys and digital algorithms to cash in on the personalized beauty trend.
Pure & Mine is an affordable brand—a shampoo and conditioner bundle costs $36 on the brand’s own ecommerce site. Perhaps more importantly though, the brand assumes that the customer knows best and formulates each personalized product according to consumer taste rather than DNA, nuances of climate, or some other data.
Questions & Answers
To get personalized Pure & Mine shampoo and conditioner, consumers first complete a short online survey with one question about hair texture, another about scalp type, whether or not the formulas must be vegan, and if their hair is colored.
The next question asks each consumer to choose up to 5 of the following hair goals: strengthening, celebrity shine, curl definition, lengthen, nourish roots, reduce breakage, volumize, soothe scalp, hydration, flake relief, oil control, frizz control, heat protection, prevent split-ends, deep conditioning, or damage control.
As each benefit is selected with a click, a short list of potential Pure & Mine ingredients appears. A product blended to offer heat protection, for instance, may be formulated with “clover flower and baobab seed extracts” or with “hydrolyzed quinoa and keratin protein.”
Then consumers choose from 5 fragrances or opt for fragrance-free products. And they choose the color of each product too. There are 5 pastel color options (pink, lavender, yellow, grey, or blue) and a dye-free selection. Finally consumers type in a name to be printed on the labels.
Perfection & Customization
These answers, rather than the genetic data or lifestyle details some other customization brands rely on, determine what product formulation a consumer will get. For Pure & Mine it’s more a matter of selection than recommendation.
“During our testing, we found that each person's idea of their perfect shampoo or body wash differs,” explains co-founder and CEO Hamish Patel, in a media release about the brand launch.
“One off-the-shelf product cannot cater to different hair / skin types or achieve widely varied beauty goals. So we knew, customization was the only way,” he says. (Patel mentions skin type because the brand also offers a bundle that comprise shampoo, conditioner, and a customized body wash.)
And he notes that the brand allows for any given consumer’s tastes and needs to change: “We want the products to always stay relevant to the customer, so we enable changes to their quiz responses as required.”
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Deanna Utroske, CosmeticsDesign.com Editor, covers beauty business news in the Americas region and publishes the weekly Indie Beauty Profile column, showcasing the inspiring work of entrepreneurs and innovative brands.
