Prose: Made for You + for the Planet
By offering customized and made-to-order products, Prose is leading the charge in offering inclusive hair care for consumers while pioneering a new production and distribution model that’s sustainable for the environment.
Beauty is a $200b industry that has seen quite a bit of change over the years. In many ways it’s been for the better. Brands are churning out new product and offering up more thoughtful ingredients at an exponential rate.
However, in doing so, the industry has gone full speed ahead in a problematic direction. We’ve created a paradox of choice, making the beauty landscape harder and harder to navigate for the consumer. With the limitless options, we’ve also forgotten about the individual, segmenting people based on gender, age or race.
When we see the toll it’s taken on our planet, it’s devastating. The beauty industry is operating under a model where innovation is being driven by the need for brands to secure shelf space in store and jump on trends, rather than solve problems for the consumer. Product is thrown out to make way for novelty at the expense of the environment.
We at Prose are on a mission to transform the beauty industry from head-to-toe in favor of the people and the planet. It’s time to move from vision and promises to action.
Why We Started Prose
The way beauty products are made today no longer works for consumers or for the environment. This was the impetus for Prose: hair care that’s customized and freshly bottled for each individual consumer. Here’s why…
As brands attempt to satisfy everyone at once, today’s consumers are bombarded with options that are hyper-segmented. This leads to an excess of finished product that is discarded to make room for the latest and greatest.
It wasn’t always this way. The origin of the beauty industry was the apothecary, selling made-to-order items based on unique consultations with their customers. Centuries later, the Industrial Revolution introduced upfront mass production, gradually giving way to the current state of producing more at all costs.
Taking a cue from the fast fashion model, beauty brands are now pushing new product so quickly that consumers have grown accustomed to a “use and throw away” mindset.. This overabundance of supply, most of which is made of single-use plastic, is almost never recycled.
From Production to Distribution, the Prose model is natively more sustainable
At Prose, we’re leveraging lean, flexible, and data-driven manufacturing capabilities to subvert today’s status quo. Our model is natively sustainable. First, no products are made until they’ve been sold. Period. And how could they be? It’s not until someone completes our online consultation that we know which ingredients will work for their specific needs. Second, everything’s bottled-to-order, shipped from our Brooklyn lab, and set to arrive within five days. No stores. No shelves. No rush. And perhaps most importantly, no waste.
Our sustainability efforts don’t stop at production! Our online distribution model is also greener. This may seem counterintuitive, but according to environmental analyses of digital versus traditional shopping conducted at MIT and Carnegie Mellon , even with packaging and delivery costs, e-commerce can reduce the carbon footprint of a purchase by 50%, especially when “rush delivery” is not offered.
We’re not perfect. Not yet. But we’re certainly trying to get there.
It Doesn’t Stop There: We’re embedding circular thinking into our development processes
The steps we’ve taken to-date are only part of the plan. Our mission is to become a carbon-neutral brand by the end of 2020. Everything we use must come from recycled and recyclable materials. To do that, we’re embedding circular thinking into our development processes. What does this mean?
- Rethinking how we design our packaging, boxes, and collateral, so that we use less plastic or no plastic at all. We’re exploring ways to leverage compostable materials and reusable pumps.
- Driving more efficiencies in our supply chain, focusing on local sourcing, and working with external partners to ensure that we offer a recycling experience that is as seamless as our shopping experience.
- Leveraging data science and technology to use only the ingredients that each customer needs. Sometimes, that means telling a customer they don’tneed a product at checkout.
- Adapt the way we communicate with our customers, moving from email to text for communication as much as we can (Because, yes, sending an email is estimated to add about 50g of CO2 equivalent (gCO2e) to the atmosphere, while a text is only 0.014g).
We expect our roadmap to continue evolving as we do more to protect the environment and invest in new solutions across the value chain — from production to distribution. We know that implementing a circular economy will take time, but we have a distinct advantage in getting there faster with our made-to-order model.
This systematic change can’t happen in a vacuum. Our partners and customers will need to accept certain concessions we’re likely to make at Prose — pumps that dispense a bit less product, no rush delivery options, and packaging made of recycled materials.
Luckily, we’re confident that many beauty consumers are just as eager to change the industry as we are.
