Oddity, the tech-based parent company of Il Makiage, today launched its new wellness- positioned hair and skin care brand, SpoiledChild, complete with a 17-piece collection. Here, Beauty News caught up with Oddity co-founder Oran Holtzman and the SpoiledChild team to learn more about the brand’s strategy as a multi-category wellness brand, how the brand plans to market its wares, and more.

BeautyNews: Tell us a bit about Oddity’s background.

Oran Holtzman: Oddity launched in 2018 and was co-founded by me and my sister, Shiran Holtzman Erel. The company is based in New York City with an R&D center in Tel Aviv. We recently received a $130 million funding round. We are 100 percent DTC; over 95 percent of our revenue is generated online. Last year, we did close to $270 million in revenue, doubling the business from the previous year. Our tech data and deep online capabilities are key to our growth.  Il Makiage and SpoiledChild share the Oddity tech team, but no other staff.

BN: What differentiates Il Makiage and SpoiledChild?

OH: Unlike other beauty companies, we have a great beauty product but also tech products. None of us came from beauty at this company and this allowed us to disrupt. Our 250-person team is comprised of former consultants and bankers, and we run the company like a tech company. Our tech team is the largest team in the company with 80 engineers, data scientists and computer vision experts.

We found a gap between brands and consumers specifically on education. It works well in store but not online. So we developed algorithms and machine learning to address this. We have more than one billion data points, more than any other beauty company.

The tools we built led us to believe in 2019 that in just a few years beauty shopping would be 50 percent online. In 2019, we leveraged our platform technology to disrupt more subcategories in beauty. We have 25 million users today. Our strategy is to launch new brands every 18 months. We are working on our third brand and now, after two years of working on SpoiledChild.

BN: Why multi-category wellness?

Suzanne Fitzpatrick, SpoiledChild Co-GM: We’re starting with hair and skin products and are going for that holistic wellness solution across categories all in a patented, refillable, sustainable design. Overall, the wellness category has huge consumer pain points that can be solved online with AI and we validated this with our data. Consumers are just overwhelmed. We say, tell us about you and we’ll tell you what you need. We take that profile into account, and not just for skin or hair or supplements. We’ll do it across the consumer’s wellness needs and offer a solution powered by SpoiledBrain. (SpoiledChild is powered by AI called SpoiledBrain, the proprietary machine-learning algorithm that selects the product or sequence of products that each consumer needs.) SpoiledChild sets itself apart from competing skin and hair care brands with its emphasis on 100 percent data-driven product development.

BN: How is the brand being marketed?

Andrea Gustafson (SpoiledChild Creative Director): We’re rethinking the attitude toward wellness. Our brand is set up to appeal to an age range of 25 to 55. We’re inspired by the new generation. They don’t fit in time, nothing to them is linear. They’ve got a modular mentality and they reorder their lives like they do their profiles. They love coffee in pods and fashion in capsule collections. They’re obsessed with control. They don’t agree with traditional milestones in life. The key here is that the anti-aging industry is not speaking to them at all.

SpoiledChild is building a community; we’re launching a brand, but also a lifestyle. Our social campaign leverages user-generated content and it’s the first to blend native content with brand design. It’s inspired by the mentality that age is an old idea.

BN: How will the user experience on site work?

Karen Sun (SpoiledChild Senior Director of Product & New Ventures): Our hero products are featured center stage and we introduce the user to SpoiledBrain for personalized product matching. We highlight the unique capsule refill concept, how it works, how you use the product. Last, we have content made by dermatologists and influencers.

BN: Can you talk about the proprietary program used to house the videos on your site

Laura Sluyter (SpoiledChild Co-GM): The videos on our site are hosted on Kenzza, which is our proprietary content commerce platform. We developed the platform in-house; it’s actually now patented. Kenzza closes the gap between consumers simply looking at a product in a catalog or on a site and not having any idea what it does. We realized about beauty wellness as a category that consumers are so engaged online but in a social media way. They understand how products work, but if you just put a photo of a product in front of them, they don’t understand it. Kenzza lives on SpoiledChild’s site and lets the consumers understand products deeply.  It lets them see how real consumers feel about them. It lets them see how it works for people with different skin and hair concerns.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]