The body-care category is still going strong.
Since the start of 2023, countless brands have introduced the category at all ends of the price spectrum. Welly, originally known for its colorful bandages, launched body care in February, while tanning brand Isle of Paradise introduced the category in May. And the many upcoming launches and expansions into body care suggest the growth will not slow in 2024. According to Circana, from January through November of this year, body skin care product sales in the prestige beauty market reached $1.1 billion, an increase of 18% year-over-year.
The latest, Nerra, will launch on Tuesday. The high-end body-care brand selling direct-to-consumer will debut with three products plus two versions of “microbiome safe” exfoliating gloves. Co-founder Teyma Touati said she had the idea for the brand when she left her home in Tunisia and moved to Dubai. Touati grew up immersed in hammam culture, where cleansing one’s body with soap was merely half the equation of cleanliness, and exfoliation was the other half.
“When I moved abroad, I stopped doing this hammam ritual. I started relying on normal showers with only body wash, and after a few weeks, I was seeing the difference in my skin texture; I was dry,” she said. “That’s when I realized like the importance of having real skin care for the body.”
She set out to educate herself on both cosmetic formulation and the business side of creating a beauty brand, eventually obtaining a Certification in Advanced Cosmetics Science from the Institute of Personal Care Science in Australia. This certification, she said, helped her to effectively communicate with the labs she selected to formulate products in France. Through that process, she met her boyfriend and now co-founder, Fares Benouhiba, who is also the founder of marketing agency EMF Media. They decided to work together to create a brand that would seek to modernize 2,000-year-old hammam rituals.
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For example, replacing the rituals’ traditionally used black soap, which can be difficult to use due to its putty-like consistency, Nerra’s first step in its four-step body-care regimen is its Pre-Exfoliating Foam ($26). The ingredients include Mediterranean olive oil and coconut oil, as well as vitamins E, A and K. It is said to help soften and protect skin in advance of exfoliation. In step two, dead skin is sloughed off with the brand’s Exfoliating Body Glove, which is offered in two versions, including one made to be gentler for sensitive skin ($28 each). Next, it is recommended that users cleanse with the Body Wash ($36), which contains skin-care ingredients like hyaluronic acid, pink clay and collagen. Finally, the Dry Body Oil ($85), featuring the brand’s signature Jasmine Wood scent crafted in Grasse, is used to hydrate. The full collection sells for $175.
To introduce people not only to the brand but to the ritual, Nerra plans to seed products to influencers, starting with 200-300 per month this year before scaling to around 2,000 a month over the course of the next year. It is not yet doing any paid partnerships. Nerra will also seek to educate potential customers through its own social media posts on Instagram and TikTok.
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“We are starting more organically and direct-to-consumer, in order to build the community and to build more insights from our customers. Then we will go into speciality retail and other channels,” Benouhiba said.
To get it off the ground, Taouti and Benouhiba raised $500,000 from friends and family, and invested $300,000 of their own money. They tapped the branding agency Numbered Studio to create Nerra’s look and feel. Numbered has also worked with brands including Les Filles En Rouje, which is Jeanne Damas’s beauty brand, and the skin-care brand Typology.
