States going gaga for ‘gooey’
A LEGION of ‘gooey’ fans is helping to push a Gold Coast skincare product range into the prime US market, with doctors especially keen to spread the word.
Burleigh Heads-based MooGoo Skin Care recently opened a distribution facility in Huntington Beach, California, to help push its products into the lucrative market.
Data and market research firm Statista projects the skin care market will be worth $19 billion ($26 billion) by 2023.
MooGoo founder Craig Jones said while early signs are positive, the company is taking a “steady approach” to the market, which is notoriously hard to crack.
“We are aiming to build up brand awareness through good products helping people and hope that eventually stores will approach us,” he said.
“So it’s hard to project where we will go in the next year or so.
“Sales could stay at around the $400,000 mark or increase to millions, which of course would be excellent. We do get at least one doctor a day in the US asking for samples of our products, so we are making headway.”
He said the US facility, which is staffed by two employees, was needed to keep pace with demand and to ship products in a timely manner.
“We had a lot of online customers in the United States and we were finding it took a long time for products to arrive there, and airfreight was expensive,” he said.
“We needed a fast and less expensive option for our friends in the States.”
Mr Jones started MooGoo after developing a cream in his Gold Coast kitchen after searching for a natural product to help his mother with her psoriasis.
The company’s name comes from the cream used by farmers to heal the udders of dairy cows, which contains allantoin and was the starting point for MooGoo’s range of products.
Mr Jones said the US market is difficult because large department stores are often reluctant to stock new brands.
“We have a very loyal following of ‘MooGooers’ in America but it is a market that is dominated by a few large chains of mega stores – it’s very difficult to become established as large chains often don’t want to listen to smaller brands they haven’t heard of.
“That said, we are stocked in some retail outlets, but it is mainly online purchasing at the moment.”
He said the company is being conservative with its marketing spend as demand can be hard to predict.
“With the USA, it is impossible to forecast as from our experience, it’s all up to the big chain stores and products ‘going viral’,” he said.
“We’ve seen other Australian brands head into the US market with huge marketing spends and expensive brand ambassadors, but they have pulled out because they haven’t been able to get quick traction and sell lots of product.”
The US is not the only market where MooGoo is making headway. The company has recently had four of its products made available through the National Health Service in the UK.
“Our Irritable Skin Balm for eczema prone skin, our Scalp Cream for scalp problems, in particular with young children, and also our Skin Milk Udder Cream, which is commonly used as an emollient following radiation treatment are all on the NHS.”