EXCLUSIVE: Glow Recipe Aims Wide With New Serum Launch
Glow Recipe is doubling down on a new skin care concern — and new consumers.
The brand, known for its playful, fruit-focused approach to ingredients, is targeting skin firming with its Pomegranate Peptide Firming Serum, which will debut on Sephora’s website on Monday for $45, before rolling out to stores and global partners in September.
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It’s the seventh serum in Glow Recipe’s arsenal, which include the Watermelon Glow Niacinamide Dew Drops. That stock keeping unit alone is projected to hit $42 million in retail sales this year. The brand is a Gen Z heavyweight — #GlowRecipe has more than 1.3 billion views on TikTok — but with the introduction of a new franchise, the cofounders and co-chief executive officers Christine Chang and Sarah Lee are hoping to widen their consumer base. The brand is anticipating Pomegranate Peptide Firming Serum to reach $15 million in retail sales for its first year on the market.
“A lot of our innovation starts with meeting a need that our customers speak to on social media or emails. We listen to that feedback loop and have an open dialogue with them,” said Chang. “We’re speaking to firming, lifting, smoothing skin care for everyone. We don’t want to say this skin care is for a certain age demographic. Whether you’re in your 20s looking for prevention, or smoothness in your 30s and 40s, we’re comprehensively addressing this with this blend of ingredients.”
Those ingredients include hyaluronic acid, squalane, polypeptides and pomegranate enzymes and seed oil. “We get a lot of requests when we ask what food should we use,” Chang said. “But it’s driven by the science. When it comes to smoothing, firming and lifting, what would be truly synergistic? In the case of pomegranate, it’s antioxidant-rich.”
Lee added, “Peptides have been around for a long time, but our challenge to our chemist partners are how we can make sure that it’s the most modern and most relevant technology for the specific audience that we’re targeting. The very beginning of product development is where we spend a lot of time, and that always triggers ideas for social media and 360-degree activations, because we know the formula is powerful but gentle.”
Communication around the launch will focus on ingredients and benefits without focusing on aging. “When we speak about firming and lifting, we don’t want it to be just about anti-aging. It’s not a word we want to use as a brand,” Lee said. “With model imagery, for example, we have models in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s.”
It’s also part of the brand’s overarching strategy for balancing new products with the core of the business. “We always remind new customers of Dew Drops, and when we launch a new serum, we always say you can cocktail or double-layer them because we do test them to work together,” Lee said. “Anyone that’s joining the Glow community doesn’t always have just one skin concern. You can have a skin care wardrobe and be able to mix and match. We’re always bringing that message back to our core in a very natural way.”
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