by Michael Lorence (https://linktr.ee/melorence1) and Emerson Bossi (bossiwriter.com/)
Personal care and cosmetic products are born from a visionary's idea. When this idea is set into paper, it becomes a concept brief. Experienced chemists can achieve optimal results when formulating concept briefs due to their knowledge, ultimately resulting in better final products.
Flex Cosmetics simplifies the conceptualization process by creating a comprehensive product brief for you. During the process, the visionary is asked several key questions related to the product development to ensure maximum accuracy.
What is a Concept Brief
A concept brief summarizes a product's goals, texture, claims, price range, target market, and more. A cohesive and detailed concept brief is vital to efficiently communicate ideas between chemist and visionary, avoiding incorrect specs.
Reverse engineering is also another essential part of concept briefing. It's used to isolate the individual elements of another product's formula, allowing for modifications and the creation of new products.
Educating yourself about reverse engineering can help make a better concept brief. If you wish to learn more about a product's aspects, check our reverse engineering article detailing all the moving parts of product development.
Common Issues and Challenges
When building a concept brief, two of the most common issues are poor conceptual documentation and failure to reproduce key characteristics.
A well-built concept brief must be thoroughly detailed, ensuring that any qualified chemist can reproduce it. The process eliminates the risk of manufacturing products with incorrect specs and guarantees reproducibility.
How to Build an Effective Concept Brief
To build a refined concept brief, the visionary and chemist must collaborate to explore every single aspect of the product. Understanding what makes a product is as important as understanding who it's made for, how the packaging impacts their experience, and how to get the product to shelves efficiently.
Let's review the most vital steps when drafting a concept brief and how they can aid in product development.
Marketing and Logistics
Marketing is at the heart of every successful cosmetic launch. Understanding which avenues generate the highest exposure for the product is essential for success. For instance, many potential customers follow Instagram influencers that advertise cosmetics, so partnering up with them can lead to larger audiences.
To succeed, you must have a clear marketing message, understand the target audience, and plan the product's logistics where it has the highest popularity. In addition, having a good display and presentation so the customer can personally experience the fragrance and texture in malls or stores can significantly impact sales.
Company Philosophy and Sustainability
Sustainability is vital for several cosmetic consumers nowadays. It leads to a broader audience and lessens cosmetics' impact on the environment. So opting for a cruelty-free, clean, organic, and natural production path can boost product sales.
Target Audience
Understanding your target audience's age, purpose, and demographic is essential when building a powerful presentation that sticks. For example, a younger audience might look for preventive care cosmetics, while older customers look for cosmetics that can repair damage or mitigate the effects of age.
Packaging
When marketing cosmetics, the packaging is as crucial as the cosmetic itself. First, we have the secondary package, the exterior packaging. Its goal is to protect the product during transportation and display information to customers. Some brands also invest in the visual impact of the secondary package and use it as part of their store window presentation.
The primary package is the one that houses the cosmetic. It takes the form of bottles, sprays, and pots. Their function is to incentivize the customer to interact with the product, protect it from degradation and damage, create brand awareness, list ingredients, and provide accurate information about the product and its applications.
Message and Benefits
The ideal product should deliver its message fast and efficiently through its packaging, name, and message. A customer should be able to tell your product's goal at a glance. Properly outlining its fragrance, active elements, and unique characteristics can make or break a product.
Pricing and Distribution
A proper concept brief has all the information needed to set a product's pricing. Once the price is defined, it becomes easier to envision where to sell it. Usual places for selling are supermarkets, specialized stores, pharmacies, or e-commerces.
Most products can be sold in pharmacies and supermarkets and still find great success, provided that their price tag isn't prohibitive. If the distribution is an issue, some retail chains are willing to cover the distribution of products in exchange for a bigger cut in sales.
However, if you intend to sell a specialized high-end cosmetic product, signing a contract with large cosmetic stores like Credo and Sephora puts your product in front of a much wealthier audience.
How Can Flex Cosmetics Help
Flex Cosmetics has the experience and resources to act in every step of the formulation, conceptualization, and production process. As a result, we can help the visionary flesh out their idea, brief, prototype, test, and manufacture the product.
If you need extra help fleshing out your idea before sitting down with our experts, we'll gladly offer a copy of our concept brief form to help you understand our process and be better prepared for the meeting.
With us, you can turn an idea into a carefully optimized and thoroughly tested product, ready to be sold in stores.
Closing Thoughts
A concept brief serves as a bridge between visionary and chemist. You can build a complete product by combining the visionary’s ideas, goals, and aspirations with the chemist's technical prowess, knowledge, and development experience.
Building a concept brief alone is quite challenging, requires a lot of time, resources and there's no guarantee that the results will be satisfactory. So contact Flex Cosmetics today, and ensure that your product's concept brief is carefully optimized and thoroughly documented.