AGILE DEVELOPMENT: A NIGHTMARE OR AN OPPORTUNITY FOR THE PLAYERS OF THE BEAUTY INDUSTRY?

The world is changing at a fast pace and product cycles are getting shorter.
Brands, like their customers, require high vivacity, ready-to-go solutions with the highest levels of creativity.
How can suppliers, players of the beauty industry, rethink methodologies and organisation to keep up with this new rhythm, while remaining qualitative, innovative and audacious ?
Let’s discover Pennelli Faro’s vision of agile development in the words of CEO Sara Zanafredi.

What is agile development and why is it becoming a must in the beauty industry?
Agile development means first of all agile thinking.
Agility is a way of thinking rather than just a way to manage projects and processes.
Being agile means constantly adapting to new environments, challenges and evolving markets.
To achieve agility, one must evolve by improving and simplifying the processes that do not bring any added value to customers, selecting the right people with the right attitude and vision.
Our vision is always focused on innovation and improvement.

What are the requirements that brands ask in terms of agility?
Cosmetic brands need suppliers that work with them like partners, not just like manufacturers.
Companies investing in the most innovative formulas require a development of application brushes that evolves in parallel synergy with the study of the formula itself.
Our commitment is to work as partners, being fast and efficient in providing new ideas and solutions in a participative relationship with our clients.

The acceleration of “time to market” is now a brand requirement. Would you say it is a real consumer need?
Consumers want to be surprised. They are always looking for new trends, formulas, effects and beauty concepts.
Cosmetic brands that are the first on the market satisfying these needs, are winners. The others follow.
Information runs at full speed. Trends become global in a very short time, not only geographically but influencing different sectors as well.
Cosmetics, fashion, jewelry and food, for instance, are interrelated and contaminating each other.
Consumers are constantly exposed to new trends and look for the newest hot items on the market.

What organisation did you build-up to respond to this new requirement of agility? Design organisation? Product development organisation? Industrial organisation?
All of those three assets are focal points of our company strategy.
Pennelli Faro’s Technical R&D is fully dedicated to improving and innovating products and manufacturing processes.
Brush manufacturing is a niche business that achieves big numbers, but there is no dedicated and specific machinery industry behind it. Each manufacturer is therefore constantly experimenting to optimise the production process, making it faster and more fluid still maintaining the quality level.
We have a Survey Marketing Team constantly monitoring the market and identifying new products and formulas.
We work close to formulators to be ready, fast and quick and to propose the right applicators perfectly combined with the cutting-edge formulas and technologies.
Last but not least, we have a wide range of quickly and deeply customisable standard products that can satisfy the requirements of brands looking for ready-to-go solutions.

For you, is agility a question of team size? Small is beautiful?
Agility is an attitude and a state of mind.
Size does not count.
The mentality of our people does.
It’s a smart way of thinking and acting consequently.
People and their behaviour are the keys to creating and maintaining an agile company.
Agility also means to be open-minded, internally and externally.
We must feel forced to improve and to be challenged by external elements.

The world is becoming more and more complex, and each of our organisations need to be much more connected to the others: clients, other experts, etc... This is what we call «collective intelligence ». What is your position on this ?
We recently had an excellent experience of “collective intelligence” with our participation to the Powderful Factory by Cosmoprof.
A group of excellent companies, all of them highly specialised and each one with its profound know-how, under the superb supervision of Centdegrés and Cosmoprof-Cosmopack, gave us the opportunity to share different ways of doing things.
We strongly believe that sharing expertise undoubtedly helps to improve. Sharing experiences with companies from different fields of activity enriches even more.

Test and Learn and experimentation: how do you think organisations could implement those techniques?
Experimenting belongs to our DNA.
We are specialised in manufacturing cosmetic and fine arts brushes and do not want to put our efforts in producing anything else because that is where we have our know-how.
Only if you master it perfectly, you can then innovate and even question yourself about it, to possibly change it, adapt it, or subvert it.

What kind of projects did you achieve recently, which responded to this need of agility?
Firstly, we would like to introduce our Origami ® brush line that, as a ‘patented’ innovative product in our standard assortment, has been adapted to the Powderful project.
This collection is a user-centered concept originated from a multidisciplinary approach: the science of ergonomics and the makeup gesture.

From Origami ®, we had an intuition and moved to another big innovation in our field, our newest, patented development: FLESS ® BRUSH.
FLESS ® is the FIRST flexible make-up brush.
A tool that combines the flexibility of a sponge with the precision of a makeup brush.
FLESS ® is the cosmetic brush that completely subverts the rules of makeup brush manufacturing and that is a perfect combination of innovation and agile development, answering the needs of the beauty industry.

Elie Papiernik, Managing Partner, Creative Director and Co-Founder of Centdegrés,
Sara Zanafredi, CEO Pennelli Faro,
Sonia Cerato, Category Manager Makeup Division Quadpack and
Juan Mantilla, Design Manager, Kiko