Handy personalized beauty with Kyowa’s Fracora HiMirror
In April, Japanese company Kyowa Co., Ltd. — operator of the Fracora cosmetics brand — announced a business alliance with major Taiwanese EMS company, New Kinpo Group. As a result of this partnership, Kyowa will begin exclusively selling New Kinpo Group’s smart mirror HiMirror Slide from this winter season. It will be rebranded as the “Fracora HiMirror” that recommends cosmetics via skin analyses.
Fracora is an aging care brand that started out with a collagen drink in 2004. In 2012, Fracora pioneered the new genre of “undiluted beauty care”. These are cosmetics that are 100% purely undiluted extract, and which make an easy addition to consumers’ cosmetics collections.
Kyowa first started with undiluted placenta extract and has since continued development with the concept of simply allowing users to select and pinpoint the ingredients that match their needs and with a focus on “high purity and strong experience”. Along with having expanded their undiluted beauty extracts to 14 varieties in total (as of July 14, 2020), they also currently have a lineup of supplements, beauty drinks, and health-foods.
There are around 310,000 users who routinely purchase Fracora cosmetics through subscriptions, and the demographic is broad — from 35 to 70-year-olds, with the largest segment being between 50 and 70. In terms of Kyowa’s future growth, it’s important for them to capture new members around the 40-year-old mark, and the alliance with New Kinpo Group is one means to this end.
This initiative between the two companies started four years ago, right after the release of the HiMirror beauty smart mirror, when Kyowa saw the product’s advanced technological power and reached out to the New Kinpo Group.
Customizing HiMirror Slide for the Japanese market
The developer of HiMirror Taiwanese company New Kinpo Group is an EMS (Electronics Manufacturing Services) company that handles manufacturing for major consumer electronics makers, including Dyson. They were the first in the world to develop a beauty smart mirror. On the HiMirror website, the company’s CEO Simon Shen recalls how during the development of HiMirror he noticed the way his wife was performing her daily skincare routine and came across the idea of a product that combines a mirror and a smart body scale. For New Kinpo Group, which up until then had mainly focused on consumer electronics, this became a chance to expand into the beauty field with their own original product.
HiMirror’s sales volumes show that Japan is the product’s third-largest market after the US and Taiwan. In recent years, the New Kinpo Group has also been partnering up with Japanese companies. They’ve undertaken joint-development with a firm that runs salons and spas, and they’ve also been placing HiMirror devices in the retail spaces of major drug stores.
The latest model of HiMirror that was announced at CES 2020 is HiMirror Slide, of which the selling rights in Japan are now exclusively owned by Kyowa as per the alliance. It features an attached foldable stand that allows it to be carried around, and its compact size makes it more usable in consumers’ homes.
By sliding the mirror with your finger, a command screen appears, giving the user access to such functions as skin analysis, an LED light for doing makeup, a magnifying glass, video viewing, the tracking of cosmetics usage, and control over the period of usage. Furthermore, at the CES exhibit the device was shown to have built-in support for Amazon’s Alexa, allowing it to be used as a home device that can adapt to a user’s everyday schedule — it can read out news, act as a kitchen timer, stream music and also make calls via social media platforms.
Currently, they’re tweaking the functions of HiMirror Slide for the Japanese market — it’s already being sold in the US — with the goal to release it in Japan this winter.
Aiming to capture new members through Fracora HiMirror
In July this year, beta testing of Fracora HiMirror will begin using 200 of the devices. Testers will give feedback and requests for extra functions, and then the product will be brushed up.
After the official release, Fracora HiMirror will be available even to those who aren’t Fracora members. Purchasers will be able to register products other than those they’re currently using through Fracora and will be able to receive advice on how to combine the diluted solutions and supplements with those products.
In the future, they plan to expand the functions to allow users to diagnose the status of their hair and general health and participate in 1-on-1 online counseling sessions. The idea is to evolve the product into a total beauty tool. For Kyowa, Fracora HiMirror is a way for them to increase new members, and while the pricing is still undecided, they plan to set it at a moderate level to encourage long-term usage and fulfill their aim to sell 500,000 units.
President of Kyowa Yasuji Horiuchi has said that his company is examining “how they can use the data accumulated through Fracora HiMirror in deep learning initiatives in order to raise the accuracy of the personalization. We’re then thinking of saving the user information as the user’s own personal record in the cloud and providing a service as an open platform for connecting to new customers.”
Kyowa is known for its “have-not” style of management. As Horiuchi says, “sharing wisdom is the very foundation of good product development”, and this is reflected in the way Kyowa uses the latest knowledge shared by research institutes such as universities, experts, and raw material makers when conducting their inhouse product development and manufactures products through partnerships with around 50 OEM factories both inside and outside Japan. Considering this background as well as their push towards becoming more digital-oriented, the company’s teaming-up with HiMirror seems to be a logical way forward.
Text: Ching Li Tor
Original text (Japanese): Lina Ono
