Born from an in-house venture — Unilever Japan’s personalized shampoo Laborica
Starting out as an in-house project at Unilever Japan, Laborica is a personalized shampoo product that gets handmade in the laboratory before being sent directly to customers. It’s operated as a D2C service that realizes direct customer communication, resulting in a new way to experience shampoo.
Since July 1st this year, Unilever Japan has been selling its personalized shampoo Laborica.
Laborica’s service starts with a “hair diagnosis” on your smartphone by answering around 30 questions — covering subjects such as the length of your hair, concerns about fallen hair or scalp sunburn, etc. — then, accordingly, a shampoo and treatment are calculated as per your data and prepared by human staff members before being sent directly from the laboratory to your home. The diagnosis, which seeks to understand the user’s skin, has been supervised by Unilever’s hair consultants and users answer the questions on a 5-point slider (that also allows decimal places). From that, around 20,000 different shampoo combinations that can be made. The price of personalization? \ 6,980 yen with shipping included, and one purchase is enough for 1.5 to 2 months of usage.
Different brands of personalized shampoos have been emerging one after the other, with Function of Beauty in the US and Medulla and My Botanist in Japan. So what does Unilever Japan hope to bring to the table with Laborica? We asked Keita Uchino, who was involved in the product’s development as a researcher at the Laborica lab and is currently in charge of Laborica’s marketing and sales. According to Uchino, “shampoo and treatment products that deal with hair damage are now the mainstay and so we thought about what else we can offer as a next step. While currently there are needs in the market such as silicone-free, naturalism and environment-friendly, we thought that personalization will likely become the biggest trend in the future.”
Personalization born from an in-house venture
It was Unilever Japan’s in-house venture system that led to Laborica.
The normal shampoo development route involves testing the product thousands of times through R&D processes to decide the best mixture for the majority of customers before heading into mass production. However, in reality, even with the same type of hair, each person has their own needs in dealing with hair damage and has a different ideal in terms of hair quality.
The realization that any of the test samples that are made daily in the lab may be the perfect match for someone out there in the world was the Eureka moment for Laborica. Uchino says they realized that “a particular sample variation may be able to solve the individual needs of a particular customer, and so, in that case, it would be faster to just send the product directly to them from the lab. It was from this concept that the project began.”
After the project received the green light, Laborica was released around a year and a half later, thanks to a much faster product development period than usual.
The business model for mass-production method versus personalized products is naturally different. For regular mass-production, products are tested in the lab, produced in the factory, stocked in warehouses and distributed through wholesale or other channels to store shelves across the country, where they come into contact with consumers for the first time. For personalized products, it starts with a request from the consumer for a certain product, which is then made in the lab (or factory) and then sent directly to them. Laborica shares a similar flow to the latter.
Once an order comes in from a customer, the prescription information is sent to the lab and based on that the shampoo is made, not unlike how a chemist prepares personalized medications. While it’s common in the factories of mass-produced products for a different staff member to handle each line — whether it be material supplying, product filling or packaging — with Laborica, in order to avoid variations in quality, the same staff member handles the product from the start to finish.
Acquired data is fed back into the company
Unilever’s more traditional distribution channels have made it difficult to know what products were being bought by whom or how those products were being used. However, with Laborica’s Direct to Consumer (D2C) model, information on users and their trends can be gauged in real-time, and by region, and then fed back into product development and marketing.
Although Unilever has been conducting the usual consumer surveys in the development process, Laborica is fundamentally a service that began with a developed product which was then considered in the context of selling. In terms of recognition and publicity, Unilever has employed influencers as promoters and development partners to promote consumer adoption and be on top of the latest trends.
Through influencers, Unilever can pick up more on the real voices of consumers as well as send more individual messages to different demographics, and through this, they’re aiming to have Laborica be better understood. So far this approach seems to be working — despite the lack of a mega advertising campaign or much exposure, Unilever says that there’s been a good flow of orders making for a promising start so far.
Although Laborica is currently only sold in Japan, in the future they’re looking to expand overseas within the Unilever brand. Marketing and Sales Chief Uchino reveals that “we’re already receiving inquiries from around Asia, including from Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.”
Text: Ching Li Tor
Original text (Japanese): Jumpei Notomi
