Personalised clean beauty: CEO of Singapore bespoke skin care start-up sees global potential

Yours uses computer vision and machine learning technology combined with inputs from a lifestyle and environment questionnaire to offer a personalised four-piece beauty kit at $129

Navneet Kaur and Shivam Sharma, both former early-stage Uber employees’, founded the company in 2018.  According to Kaur, the brand sold out within the first few weeks of its launch in March.

“This was a strong validation for us and showed us this is a real problem that consumers, not just in Asia but worldwide, faced. The best part is that it was organic. We weren’t spending marketing dollars yet, it was just through word-of-mouth. This proved to us that the consumer pain-point we were trying to solve was resonating with consumers.”​

The personalised ‘clean++’ brand recently raised $3.5m in funding to scale up its business. Investors included Surge, Global Founders Capital, Kindred Ventures, and an undisclosed celebrity fund.

“We want to build a brand out of Asia and we’re trying to expand as quickly as possible. We are focused on starting in Singapore very strongly so we can expand throughout the Asian market,”​ said Kaur.

Interest in Indonesia and Vietnam

Kaur told CosmeticsDesign-Asia ​that South East Asian countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam would be “interesting” ​for the company.

“Indonesia has a huge population size and the consumers have high spending power. Vietnam, on the other hand, has a lot of potential in terms of spending power which is slowly growing, as well as in terms of talent. The economic growth of Vietnam is very interesting to me.”​

Additionally, she believes the firm’s Swiss-manufactured products will resonate with these consumers.

“Our entire formula is designed and bottled in Switzerland. For us, it’s ​really about bringing the purity of the Swiss natural ingredients. The quality of the product itself is what really sets us apart. This is what Asian consumers will love to have. Swiss-made skin care was something that was aspirational and I believe that is something of value in Asia.”​

Kaur highlighted that the company’s eventual goal is to expand outside of Asia and into markets like the US.

“We are starting small but we have ambitions to go global. We are seeing traction on our website from abroad and we believe personalised skin care is definitely a need across the world.”​

Aside from expansion, the company plans to invest heavily in research and development to improve its computer vision and machine learning technology, as well as its products.

“Products are the core of our company. Every formula that is developed goes through an extensive safety and efficacy assessment which takes months to gather. Our algorithm was designed to bring the expertise of formulation scientists, skin experts and dermatologists through a tech platform.”​

The company also plans to use the funding to extend its product range. It currently has four products including a day cream, night cream, face serum and an eye serum. In the next two to three months, the range will expand to include cleanser, toner and sunscreen.

Kaur said the skin care category offers “huge”​ potential for the foreseeable future, however, the company is not ruling out expanding into colour cosmetics.

“The biggest gap in the market I see is clean makeup. We can leverage the same technology to deliver personalised makeup. That’s in the pipeline, but definitely not in the next 12 months.”​