With clean beauty proving to be a significant growth category for Grove Collaborative, it is now launching a private-label accessible luxury skin-care brand in the category to accelerate its revamped beauty positioning.
On Tuesday, the natural household and personal care e-commerce site debuted clean and sustainable skin-care brand Superbloom. It is selling the new line exclusively through Grove Collaborative’s beauty section, Grove Beauty, which it recently renamed from Roven Beauty to increase brand recognition. The company is launching Superbloom with a collection of 10 skin-care products ranging from $17-$44, and two “core regimens” for hydration and skin clarity.
Revealed after more than one year of planning, Superbloom is Grove Collaborative’s second private-label brand in the beauty and personal care category. It follows sustainable personal care brand Peach, which launched in October 2020. Grove Beauty also sells limited-edition tools including a facial roller under the Roven brand name.
“The role of beauty and personal care in our own brand portfolio is to build the category expansion in white spaces, where we think we can deliver a better product that connects with our consumer,” said Luana Bumachar, Grove Collaborative’s vice president of owned brands and innovation.
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The Grove Beauty section operates as a separate tab on the Grove Collaborative site, and underwent the rename from Roven Beauty in November 2020. Grove had originally launched Roven Beauty online in October 2019 and opened a Roven physical location in L.A. in the same month, which closed in the first quarter of 2020. The name was changed to Grove Beauty after the company conducted market research and found that customers were having trouble recognizing the connection between the two brands. Grove Beauty is “easier for the consumer to understand,” said Bumachar, who characterized Grove Collaborative and Grove Beauty as “siblings.”
“By getting the siblings together, it would be an easy consumer journey for the people that buy at Grove or Grove Beauty,” she said.
The expected customer demographic for Superbloom is women ages 28-40, who are active on social media and enthusiastic about developing a skin-care regimen. The new line provides a masstige option in Grove Beauty’s lineup. Branded with more of a focus on accessible clean brands than the prestige-oriented Roven, Grove Beauty features products at a range of price points including those by premium clean beauty labels Indie Lee, Pai and RMS Beauty, as well as affordable labels like Acure and Burt’s Bees. The e-tailer is also creating content for entry-level clean beauty customers.
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“We are moving from ‘free-from’ to ‘full of good,’” said Bumachar, who noted that “free-from” messaging is now “kind of table stakes in clean beauty.” Superbloom’s branding takes the “nature and science” approach stating that products “combat everyday aggressors” — including indoor and outdoor pollution, blue light, UV light, and dry conditions — via the use of plant-based ingredients.
As a certified B Corp, Grove Collaborative is emphasizing in its marketing both the clean and sustainability standards achieved by Superbloom. These include its EWG-verified formulas with no synthetic fragrances, parabens, phthalates and silicones; its products that are cruelty-free, vegan and Leaping Bunny certified; and its 85% plastic-free packaging, including recyclable glass bottles and jars, FSC-certified paperboard cartons and no-VOC UV ink.
While personal care brand Peach is 100% plastic-free, Superbloom still uses plastic pumps and caps, as aluminum caps available affect product efficacy, said Bumachar.
Started with a focus on clean and sustainable home care, Grove Collaborative is now worth $1.32 billion after closing its latest fundraising round of $125 million in December 2020. It experienced an overall growth rate of 4500% since 2016. Beauty and personal care has been a key growth category, making up over 30% of its total sales and growing by 301% in the first three quarters of 2020. Grove Collaborative’s overall compound annual growth rate for 2020 was 160%.
“It’s really important for us, with this line, to also help the consumer to navigate skin care,” said Bumachar. “One of the roles of this brand is to help people to understand how can they have better skin in a very complicated and fragmented market.” The brand will offer customers a quiz to find products, where they fill in their skin type, lifestyle and skin concerns to receive recommendations.
As for the future of the company’s expansion into private-label beauty, it will be debuting new categories for its Peach brand this year.
According to Bumachar, clean and sustainable are both high priorities for Grove’s customers.
“I would hope that more brands like Superbloom will be launched in this market, because we need a wake-up call for the beauty industry. The consumer is ahead of many brands. And my hope is that consumers will be the ones asking for it, and brands will have to just obey,” said Bumachar.
