Blending beauty, tech
NEARLY a decade after Sabrina Tan started one of Singapore’s most successful home-grown skincare companies, the feisty 43-year-old shows no signs of slowing down.
Her label, Skin Inc, is already an international brand with a cult following of fashion insiders, but the company has not stopped developing new products – including some driven by big data – and expanding.
“Time flies – in the blink of an eye, 10 years have already passed. I haven’t felt it because it seems there is something new and different happening every year,” says Tan, who launched the brand in 2007.
Skin Inc is known for its range of customisable serums and was born out of Tan’s frustration with a lack of personalised skincare solutions available off the shelf.
“Our skin is as unique as our fingerprints. The beauty industry wasn’t sophisticated enough to customise that oneto-one experience,” she says.
The mother of two, who has sensitive, eczema-prone skin, also saw her children suffer painful flare-ups. In addition, she had to go to great lengths to identify the right skincare products for herself.
“I had to do a 10-step skincare routine before stepping out of the house – not for vanity’s sake but because if I didn’t, my skin would flare up,” she says.
“We are smart, educated women but we often don’t know what works for our skin. There’s a lot of trial and error involved, which I found very inefficient.”
Tan began her career in IT – she has marketed computers at IBM and Hewlett-Packard, software at Symantec and data storage at EMC Corp.
As a time-starved working mother she also wanted a fussfree skincare routine which yielded results. So she married her IT expertise with research and technology from Japan.
“It’s just natural for [people from the tech industry] to problem-solve and look for solutions,” Tan says.
Skin Inc is best known for its range of serum, each of which contains a main active ingredient. The ingredients are encapsulated in seaweed globules – which burst when applied on skin – to keep them fresh and effective.
“The idea for this came from my experience working in IT and data security – if an email is precious and has good data or is classified, you want to encrypt it. That gave me the idea of ‘encrypting’ the ingredients,” says Tan.
Customers fill out a digital questionnaire – called a “skin check” – about their lifestyle habits and skin condition. The serum can then be blended together into combinations which suit each customer’s skin needs. “That was the ‘aha’ moment and the way we differentiated ourselves, to allow people to customise their own serum,” Tan adds.
From a single store in Central in Singapore that opened in 2007, the brand now has a presence in more than 100 cities in Asia, Europe and the United States.
Asia makes up the bulk of its sales at 59 percent, followed by North America at 24 percent.
Skin Inc also became the first Singapore skincare brand to be stocked internationally at beauty retailer Sephora in 2013.
The company has quadrupled its revenue since 2013, with sales from e-commerce contributing 30 percent of its total business.
Tan is pushing ahead with ramping up the company’s international presence.
Its global footprint includes Canada, the United States, Spain, Germany, Italy, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Australia.
There are plans to expand its presence in the US both online and through brick-and-mortar retailers.
South Korean actress Son Yejin, managed by Spackman Media, is now the face of Skin Inc – its first ever “brand evangelist”.