Alexis Eizinas of Silvering: Five Things You Need To Know To Succeed In The Modern Beauty Industry

Have a unique offering. It will be easier to build a business around a unique product or service offering. The internet gives potential customers an immediate way to compare your products to others — think about why they would choose to spend their money on your product. Is it better priced? Have better ingredients? Does it do something that nothing else can? Having a unique value proposition is product design 101.

As a part of our series about “Five Things You Need To Know To Succeed In The Modern Beauty Industry”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Alexis Eizinas.

Alexis is the founder of Silvering, the first North American beauty brand to provide cosmetics and haircare that is uniquely designed to amplify — never hide — the true beauty of naturally silvering hair. Leveraging over 30 years of experience in the beauty industry and her own experience trying to find beauty products that worked for her own silvering hair, Alexis has created a truly innovative and contemporary range of products. A woman who truly believes that ‘wisdom is beautiful’, Ms. Eizinas is building the brand with the mission to change the way all women see silvering hair, to see it as aspirational and chic.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

Sure! Get comfortable; my experience with beauty has been a long one! But it’s all related to how I got here.

For me, it started in the 90s as a fashion model. For 10 years, I travelled the world being part of the teams that were selling fashion and beauty products in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Working with some of the best makeup artists and hairstylists opened my eyes to the little tricks and details that can make a woman look her best. Each artist had their unique skills, and these even varied from country to country because of the cultural differences in what is considered ‘beautiful.’ You couldn’t help but learn. It was a fascinating time for me. Of course, my hair wasn’t silver then, it was short and dark brown, but the beauty tricks are universal.

When I left modelling, it was to pursue a career in industrial design. I had grown an appreciation for the beautiful structural details found in designer clothes, but I’d always been more of an object maker: building furniture and making jewellery in my spare time. If you didn’t know, Industrial Design is the practice of designing products for mass production. This includes automotive design, lighting, housewares, computers, glasses, your phone — look around you! Most of what you see is considered industrial design! There are so many directions in terms of focus that this discipline can take.

But I was drawn back to the beauty world. I found a way to work again for some of the top beauty brands in the world — but this time designing stores, fixture systems and beautiful branded displays to help launch and market products into retail spaces.

So, for 20 years more, I was living and breathing beauty — just from a different angle. Over this time, and now as a Creative Director, thousands of products crossed my desk, and yes, I ended up trying most of them so I could help better market their features and benefits.

More importantly, I saw the industry dramatically change with the development of social media. We went from a system where brands held all the power — dictating trends and telling women what they needed — to the world now, where brands are reacting to and reflecting the changing demands of the consumer. The beauty world is much more transparent, inclusive and experimental as a result. It feels like beauty is more accessible and, well, beautiful.

While I was working, I stopped dying my hair. This was a much more unusual thing to do in 2008, but I loved it. I wore my silvering hair with pride, and as someone in the beauty industry, of course, I wanted to look chic and put together at work. I was in my early 40s and was shocked at how difficult it was to find basic hair and beauty products that worked for me. Remember, everything passed over my desk, I was surrounded by products! Brow shades were too warm or cool, hair products were tinted and had ingredients that showed up on my hair. It was frustrating that the industry didn’t see my needs and was only providing what amounts to a prescription of purple shampoo.

Jump ahead 12 years. When COVID hit, the number of silvering women exploded. News articles were being written about how ‘shocking’ it was that women were keeping their COVID grey grow-outs. Shocking to an outsider, maybe, but I deeply understood how powerful it feels to walk around with this kind of symbol of authenticity — plus, there’s the bonus of not having to chase your roots anymore or burn your scalp with chemicals, and never mind the salon time! I also knew that so much grows with the grow-out. A certain self-awareness and authenticity, a sense of evolving, a new understanding of your relationship to dictated beauty standards.

What was maybe more surprising to journalists was that women in their 30s and 40s were growing out their hair. I don’t think it’s widely understood that hair starts to silver for women on average at age 35, with a ton of women skewing younger — as young as 15! Society’s perception is that silver equals old, and that’s just not true. I could see that this social view needed updating, modernizing and normalizing.

Social media silver-sister support groups popped up and grew. Of course, I joined them all! You just need to search out #silversisters or #grombre to see examples of these incredibly positive, inspiring, and encouraging women who are sharing their transformative experiences.

However, I noticed that these women were facing the same frustrating beauty challenges I had. Why is my hair yellowing? What brow product are you using? Can anyone help with this thinning? The answers were and still are all over the place, rarely rooted in science and mostly well-meaning but anecdotal. The misinformation out there is staggering. But understandably so. The reality is that a beauty industry that expects women to dye their hair has not been making products that consider them. As a result, colorful ingredients and side effects like buildup — once camouflaged by dye — are now obvious, and women are struggling to figure out what to use.

I thought that someone should do something about this. It would have to be someone who understands how silvering women feel — which is amazing — and gets the real beauty needs of these women. I was ready for a change. I also wanted to be part of the powerful emerging pro-age movement in my own way and show younger women that their silvering hair can be beautiful and chic and that dying their hair was not their only option.

I had deep industry connections, a beauty/design/modelling/marketing background and a gut conviction that I could get this right. Someone should do something about this; why not me? And that’s how Silvering was born.

I got to work meeting with labs, collaborating with cosmetic chemists, conducting market research, testing, defining and creating products around the unique characteristics of silvers. Two years later, here we are. I couldn’t be more excited about the future!

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

This might be interesting for your readers. I’ll share an expensive misstep that had to do with marketing in this contemporary beauty world.

Early in, we were looking for advice on using Meta advertising and hired a well-reputed agency run by a couple of young men. We believed that marketing is marketing — the process should apply to any product. If the team understands the platform, that is what’s important. Our eyes were opened to how challenging it really is to be unique in a world run by algorithmic data.

See, using the most repeated keywords and repeating the negative, fear-based hooks are ad methods most successfully ‘clicked’ on social platforms. If you want ads to do well, you have to contribute to the echo chamber of language like ‘go grey without looking old,’ ‘fix your grey hair,’ or ‘elegant grey hair’ — elegant? That’s just not our brand. The Meta experts were trying to use this algorithmic data to create ad language for us. But none of this was aligned with our brand! We were — and are — trying to do something quite different and change the language and perceptions around silvering hair, not repeat the old tropes!

After several attempts and explanation sessions with the agency, we realized that their methods for our brand just weren’t going to work. It was an expensive lesson, but we realized that there was an essence of the brand that we would not compromise on. It might take longer, and we’re working on ways to work with the algorithms. But we really are here to do the work to change the language and perceptions around silvering hair. It actually helped to convince us we were on the right track and solidified our conviction to be true to the positivity of our messaging.

Are you able to identify a “tipping point” in your career when you started to see success? Did you start doing anything different? Are there takeaways or lessons that others can learn from that?

We are a start-up, so our expectation was that it would take at least a year and a half to become profitable. Our social media has been organically building and, for the most part, centers around promoting brilliant silvering women, focusing on wisdom and encouraging women to see their silvering hair as nothing to hide but something to aspire to. Never fear-mongering, never talking down to our audience. We know that women who have ditched the dye are on a great journey, and if they’ve arrived, they have a brilliant sense of themselves. We speak to them as the intelligent empowered women they are.

Our ad spend is minimal while we are testing our online avenues. The response has been nothing short of incredible. 5-star reviews started trickling and then pouring in from women who were so happy to have their particular needs so well acknowledged and taken care of. Sales started picking up through word of mouth that our product absolutely does what it says.

We hit profitability in June 2023. That was our tipping point! In June, we started putting more money into social advertising, and it’s slowly paying off. Our conversion rates are much higher than the average D2C benchmarks. The reality is that for a niche brand like ours that is its own vertical in the beauty space, we just need to amp up awareness and get our fantastic products in front of our market.

If you’re going to take anything away from that, I’d say know your market. Don’t assume you know them, know them. Know your distinctive point of difference and make it crystal clear to your audience what your products will do for them — and then follow through with a great product!

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person to whom you are grateful who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

Yes, a group of particular people: my family! But the main person is my partner, Peter Diaz. Not a partner in business but in life. Starting a business is a crazy, life-changing, and, let’s face it, a risky endeavour and having someone who believes in you and is willing to share that financial risk and pick up the slack when the business needs prioritizing, that is everything.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. The global beauty industry today has grown to more than a half a trillion dollar business. Can you tell us about the innovations that you are bringing to the industry? How do you think that will help people?

Our innovations are based on really seeing and serving a market of women that has been largely ignored. We give them beauty products that help them amplify the beauty of their unique hair and, in turn, help them amplify the feeling that comes with growing out their silvers. It’s really a win-win.

Our products go beyond a prescription of purple shampoo. We just don’t need more plastic shampoo bottles!

We offer contemporary, high-quality cosmetics and haircare that leverage the unique physical characteristics of silvering hair to actually work as advertised. All of our products are clean, cruelty-free, responsibly packaged and a percentage of all profits, all the time, are given back to women through the Look Good Feel Better Foundation.

You see, silvering women have lived enough to know about the environmental impacts of their decisions, the impact of chemicals on women’s health, and the importance of community, and we want our products and our business to do better to make Silvering an easy feel-good beauty choice.

The artistic imagery we use shows chic, stylish, contemporary women with a focus on big B Beauty. We want to show all women aspirational imagery; that dying their hair is not their only beauty option and that silver does not equal ‘old’. There’s enough commercial, wholesome retirement-living imagery out there. Silvering can be chic and uniquely beautiful and — dare I say: sexy.

Can you share 3 things that most excite you about the modern beauty industry?

One, I love that there is a pro-age movement that is finally acknowledging and trying to include a valuable demographic of older women in beauty advertising. It’s going to be difficult to square the circle for most beauty brands that, on one side, are selling anti-aging creams or cosmetics and then trying to communicate that you are beautiful at any age. But we can see those muscles flexing, and we’re here for it!

Two, I love that the beauty industry is really trying to do better by lessening its impact on the environment. It is not just a show. I can tell you when I was working as a Creative Director, the biggest brands were asking for retail solutions that were more sustainably minded with new materials and less waste. They wanted to make quantifiable changes, and it was refreshing after years of quick, cheap and shiny plastic displays. Customers don’t see this, but the biggest players in the industry, like L’Oreal, Ulta, Sephora and Estee Lauder, are using their influence to lead the way to sustainable improvements. It’s inspiring.

New beauty brands like Silvering have the opportunity to start with the end in mind and can choose to make business decisions using today’s environmental best practices.

Three, I am excited to see more international beauty players! We’ve seen K and J-Beauty go from a trend to influencing new ingredients and aesthetics in the West. The world is full of unique takes on beauty, and the internet has shattered barriers to exposure and knowledge. People are beautiful. I was lucky to be exposed to global beauty during my modelling days; it’s exciting to see more emerging in the mix. It’s not just inclusive; it’s influential.

Can you share 3 things that most concern you about the industry? If you had the ability to implement 3 ways to improve the industry, what would you suggest?

Three things? I think I have three, all related. Fast-beauty, ingredient regulation and the plastic problem.

As you pointed out, the beauty industry is valuable, and businesses are quick to try and get ‘in.’ The ability to launch a new brand without research, new formulations or care is frighteningly easy. All you need is a great marketing machine and a white-label provider of off-the-shelf generic formulations and standard packaging that can be decorated with your brand. We’ve seen this with the explosion of indie and celebrity brands that flash and disappear. Social media influencers and fame from another industry can certainly help make sales, but without a new or quality product, cheaply made plastic goods are destined for landfills.

How to improve this? I hope that consumers continue to ask questions and keep being curious to learn more about how their products are made. Their hard-earned money is essentially casting votes for the kind of beauty products that will continue to be produced and the impacts, good or bad that come with them.

And then there are ingredients. Just because you CAN buy a beauty product doesn’t mean it’s safe to. But you don’t know what you don’t know. What most consumers are unaware of is that cosmetics: hair dyes, shampoos, makeup and lotions are potentially made using materials that are untested, banned in other countries or otherwise unregulated. There is a global inconsistency in what ingredients are acceptable, unhealthy or toxic. Beauty brands are surprisingly not consistently required to formulate using the safest ingredients. There is little standardization in ‘claims’ like cruelty-free, clean or healthy. It is up to the brands to do their due diligence. Rest assured, at Silvering, we do!

More consistent regulation and agreement at a global level could help. Really, what harms us as humans is the same regardless of what country we live in. It would be helpful to have an internationally recognized way to improve the oversight, transparency and safety of cosmetic products, not the country-by-country contradictions we have now.

Last is the problem with plastic. Because of my background in designing for manufacturing, I am probably more acutely aware of how temptingly inexpensive and easy to work with virgin plastic is. It is shiny. It is durable. It is lightweight. But single-use virgin plastics are also contributing to some of the biggest environmental problems we find ourselves facing. Plastics are unfortunately seen as a growth product for the oil and gas industries, microplastic leaching from landfills spoils groundwater, and the islands of plastic floating in the oceans are not getting smaller. Even brands that proudly talk about the recyclability of their single-use bottles or compacts may not know that 91% of plastics are not recycled. 91%! Most end up in the dump. It’s a really ugly side of beauty.

The plastic problem is hard. I hope that as consumers become more educated, they will make better choices. There is a beautiful effort being made by some beauty retailers to encourage the recycling of plastic cosmetic containers, and some brands themselves have send-back recycling programs. This is a great start. At Silvering, we use glass bottles and premium recycled pulp, glass and wood for our components. Where plastic is needed, like in the pumps, we use recycled plastic. We’re trying, too.

You are an expert about beauty. Can you share a few ideas that anyone can use “to feel beautiful”?

Sure! Let’s start with confidence. It’s no secret that confidence is attractive, but for women, confidence is an evolving thing. We remember how paralyzingly self-conscious being a teenager was. How this improved in our 20s was further reduced in our 30s and 40s. Makeup was fun in our teens and 20s, and as we got older, makeup helped us feel better about how we looked. The reality is we keep evolving, and the things that affect our confidence evolve, too.

But you will hear women say as they hit their 50s that they care less about what other people think. Let’s be clear: it’s not that they don’t care about beauty; it’s that they no longer ascribe to other people’s ideas of beauty. It’s a freedom. The closer we move to being our most authentic selves, the more confident and beautiful we feel. If more women could find this for themselves earlier in life, it would be magnificent.

Next is health. Feeling beautiful is so very tied to health. Most cosmetics are purchased in an effort to look healthier! Blushes, concealers, foundations, and hair products, having a healthy body that is strong, cared for and well-fed will always help us feel beautiful.

For something more pragmatic, I believe enhancing the beauty of the features we already have makes for the most impactful beauty. The makeup artists I worked with knew how to do this. Trying to change the shape of an eye, brow or face to follow a trend never looks as good as when you enhance those parts of yourself that make you look like you. Can you imagine Liza Minnelli trying to turn up her eyes? Or Anjelica Huston trying to camouflage her nose and Lauren Hutton fixing her teeth? Love what you naturally have. As women, that is not something we are programmed to do, I know, but it goes the longest way to making us feel beautiful.

Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, Can you please share “Five Things You Need To Know To Succeed In The Modern Beauty Industry”. Please share a story or an example, for each.

1. Have a unique offering. It will be easier to build a business around a unique product or service offering. The internet gives potential customers an immediate way to compare your products to others — think about why they would choose to spend their money on your product. Is it better priced? Have better ingredients? Does it do something that nothing else can? Having a unique value proposition is product design 101.

For Silvering, we created a complete product line just for silvers because nobody else was doing it. We took the stance to identify and deal with the real issues that our market was facing; hair thinning, scalp health, a new eyebrow reality, hair tone and texture — and ensured that every product was formulated to work on or with silvering hair. Our customers understand and appreciate what we are doing and love our products because they work. Finally, our market has products made just for them. We have created our niche vertical in the beauty space, and our customers love it.

2, Speak to your customers positively. Speak to your customers in a way they will appreciate and understand. It completely helps if you ARE the target market. How would you like to be spoken to? We’ve lived through a century of beauty brands that use fear and shame to get women to buy their products, solving invented problems that feed off of insecurities. It is an ugly way to sell beauty. We can do better. We are in a new world where we have the opportunity to lift each other up. Words matter.

At Silvering, for example, we avoid using the term ‘going grey’ because it’s loaded with negative connotations of fading or losing vitality. Instead, we use the term “silvering” — it’s not just our brand name; it’s a truer reflection and communication of our evolving state, of becoming more precious as we grow.

3. Have a Mission and use it. Businesses have mission statements for a reason. They help align everyone working for the company towards a goal. Silvering’s mission is “to change the way all women see silvering hair, to see it as aspirational and chic.” All social posts, web communications and brand actions are filtered through and checked against this idea. For example, our weekly quotes of the day feature wisdom shared by powerful silver-haired women; this helps to shape silvering hair as aspirational. It’s not just about our product.

4. Find meaning and purpose in what you are creating. Love what you are building and create something you can believe in. Starting a business is hard! Sometimes, it’s lonely and overwhelming, and you have to be open to putting the work into learning something new every day. It is a lot of work, and sometimes it’s not fun or glamorous. If you believe in what you are doing, it will be a motivator and easier to stick with, and good days will actually feel better than great.

With Silvering, we believe that we are helping in our small way to help women and girls see themselves and their natural evolution as something to love and aspire to. We believe that we are contributing to the ‘pro-age’ movement: the beauty movement that finally sees the value in women who are Millennials, Gen X, Boomers and beyond! Having a meaningful purpose has helped me feel not just happy on the good days but truly fulfilled.

5. Give back. I believe that running a business is a privilege. We are employers and ideally help build our communities. Maybe I’m an idealist. Giving back to your community is not mandatory, but it can make the lives of the people you serve a little bit better. Giving back can include things like sponsorships, scholarships, donations, or even as simple as coupons. If you can make it make sense with and align with your brand, even better. What’s more beautiful than that?

We donate a percentage of all profits to the Look Good Feel Better Foundation, helping women going through cancer treatment. We know that some women who have lost their hair from chemotherapy treatments will discover that their natural regrowth is more silver than they thought. We want to show them that not dying their hair is NOT a compromise; it can be chic and beautiful. Plus, our products are clean and non-irritating, working for sensitive bodies. Our partnership feels like a natural fit and a way that we can give back that we believe in.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

What a question! I’ll try and stay in my lane here.

I think it’s obvious that we are hoping to shift societal perspectives around silvering hair. But it’s not just a wish; we are doing the work.

First, by associating silvers in women with an earned wisdom that is aspirational and respected. We do that with our social posts, language and our product development lens.

And second, through representation in the beauty aisles. Our aim is to be sold in physical stores in the hair and beauty aisle. The reality is that if the beauty aisles are full of products that are made to hide silvers, the implication is that silvering hair is less-than-beautiful. And that’s just not true. The presence of silver-enhancing products and beautiful imagery in stores will help all women and girls see that silvering is a valid beauty option.

Women should not just be allowed to grow up and show up authentically but also be proud of the wisdom they are gaining through living. If we can shift this for women, even just a little bit, it’s a win.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

There is a quote that was made by Radhika Jones, also a silvering woman and the current editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair. She said, “We are not bound to continue the cultural hierarchies we inherit.” And this expresses something I think is important to real growth in society. Women and men. Everything evolves. There is absolutely no reason to keep things the way they are just because “it’s always been done that way.” We should take the time to ask why basic decisions were made. Revisit the original reasons and address them through a modern lens.

This kind of thinking was integral to my success as a designer, in management, as a creative director and now as a beauty founder. The status quo is meant to be changed for progress.

How can our readers follow you online?

They can go to our website SilveringBeauty.com. Most of our social media efforts are on Instagram @silvering_beauty, Facebook @SilveringBeauty, and of course, for a more business-focused outlook, they can follow us on LinkedIn @Silvering.

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.

Thank you! It was a very thought-provoking interview. I hope we can inspire more women to love their silvers!