Future of FMCG · Track 01
Beauty &
Personal
Care
The most disrupted category in FMCG is also the one with the most extraordinary creative frontier. The creator has become the primary experience architect. The ritual has become the product. The question is who gets to design it deliberately - and what that brief actually looks like.
What this room is asking
Three questions. Each one names something the room already knows is true but has rarely had space to examine precisely.
The hypothesis
The difference between a celebrity beauty collaboration and genuine co-authorship is the difference between Kylie Jenner's early Lip Kits and Rhode. Lip Kits were a licensing play - Kylie's name on a product category she happened to be associated with. Rhode is a product that could only exist because of Hailey Bieber's specific aesthetic obsession with a particular skin texture - the glazed, dewy, almost translucent finish she had been pursuing personally for years. The formula, the format, the shade, the applicator were all expressions of a genuine personal fixation. The brief wasn't "create a lip product for Hailey's audience." It was "create the product that Hailey has been looking for and couldn't find." That distinction is everything. The next wave of genuinely successful creator beauty products will come from creators with specific, defensible, personal aesthetic convictions - not the biggest audiences, but the most precise ones. The brands that commission those products by starting with the creator's actual obsession rather than their follower count will produce work categorically different from anything currently in celebrity beauty.
The hypothesis
The skinification of haircare is well underway - Olaplex, K18, The Ordinary's hair range. The skinification of bodycare is beginning - exfoliating acids, retinol body lotions, niacinamide in body wash. The skinification of the lip is arguably complete via Rhode. The next frontier is the scalp - not as a haircare adjacency but as a genuine skin organ deserving the same active ingredient rigour as the face. The scalp is the most neglected skin surface in most people's routines and simultaneously one of the most biologically significant ones. The brand that approaches scalp care with the same seriousness that The Ordinary brought to facial skincare - real active ingredients, clinical language, genuine science - is entering a category that doesn't yet exist at the level of sophistication the consumer is ready for. Meanwhile, the threat: any brand whose core franchise depends on the consumer believing that face, body, and hair require categorically different products is watching that logic erode in real time.
The hypothesis
Consider the shower. Most people spend between five and fifteen minutes in it - often the only uninterrupted time in their day. A genuine moment of transition: from sleep to wakefulness, from the day back to themselves. Every product designed for the shower is designed for functional performance within the shower. Nobody has designed the shower ritual itself. Aesop has done the closest thing to this for hand washing - the basin as a designed ritual space, the soap as an object worth displaying, the act of washing hands as something worth attending to. The shower is orders of magnitude larger as an opportunity and completely unoccupied at this level of intentionality. The brands that understand this - that the ritual is the asset, not the product inside it - are building something that has no direct competition, because they're answering a different brief to everyone else in the aisle.
The hypothesis
Most personal care premiumisation is packaging premiumisation - a heavier cap, a more minimal label, a matte finish - applied to a formulation that is not fundamentally different from the mass-market equivalent. The consumer is increasingly aware of this gap. The personal care premium that holds over time will be built on sensory experience rather than visual signals - the texture, the scent, the temperature, the way a product feels on skin - because these are genuinely difficult to replicate at mass scale and actually experienced during the ritual rather than observed on the shelf. This is a formulation and product design challenge before it's a packaging or marketing one. Most premiumisation briefs start at the wrong end. The question isn't "what should the bottle look like" - it's "what should the moment of using this feel like, and what needs to be true about the formula for that moment to be real."
The hypothesis
Lush has done this better than almost anyone - the product is so visibly, tangibly package-free that the commitment requires no explanation. You look at a Lush shampoo bar and immediately understand the proposition without reading anything. The next generation of genuine sustainability credibility in personal care will come from format innovation rather than material substitution. Not a plastic bottle replaced by a recycled plastic bottle - a format that makes packaging waste structurally impossible rather than merely reduced. Concentrated refills, waterless formats, compostable solid formats - all partially explored. The brand that commits fully, at scale, to a format where the commitment is self-evident in the object itself will own the sustainability conversation in personal care in a way that no claim-based approach ever will. Because you don't have to believe it. You can see it.
Three specific, emotionally grounded opportunities - each underserved, each requiring genuine design intelligence to enter.
Whitespace 01
The ritual packaging system
Not a product and instructions. A product and a designed practice - the specific sequence, the tools, the timing, the sensory cues - that makes the consumption feel worth protecting in your day. Aesop, Le Labo, Augustinus Bader command premiums no efficacy claim could justify. The brief hasn't been written at mass FMCG scale. Yet.
Whitespace 02
The scalp frontier
The most biologically significant skin surface that most people have never thought about as skin. Active ingredients, clinical rigour, the same design intelligence that The Ordinary brought to the face - applied to the scalp as its own organ. A category that doesn't yet exist at the level of sophistication the consumer is ready for.
Whitespace 03
Beauty as mental health practice
Dove's Real Beauty owned the appearance conversation for twenty years. The next cultural territory available to a major beauty brand is the relationship between physical self-care and psychological state - not "you are beautiful" but "the ritual of caring for yourself is a form of mental health practice." The research is substantial. The brand territory is almost entirely unoccupied.
A closed-door dialogue for the people writing the next brief in beauty and personal care - not reviewing the last one.
This is not a showcase of finished work or a category trends presentation. It is a structured conversation between innovation leaders, design directors, and CMOs who are navigating these specific tensions right now - in different organisations, with different constraints, arriving at different answers. The cross-organisation view is where the most useful insight lives.
Who belongs in this room
CMOs, Heads of Innovation, Design Directors, and Brand Directors with genuine authority over the product brief - not the communications around it. People who can commission the next thing, not people who approve the presentation about it.
The Signal Scan
48 hours before the session, every participant receives six prompts specific to beauty and personal care. Which tension is most live in your organisation right now? Which whitespace are you actively pursuing? Results revealed live - twelve leaders seeing the aggregated picture for the first time before anyone has spoken.
Off the record
Chatham House rules throughout. The conversations about which innovation the governance structure killed, where the sustainability gap is widest, and what the creator relationship actually produces versus what it claims to - these require honesty that the institutional context rarely allows.
Grounded in live work
The questions are built from real innovation briefs, real design challenges, and real whitespace hypotheses - not category reports. Seymourpowell's work across beauty and personal care provides the case material. The room provides the honest examination of it.
Request
a seat
We review every request individually. The people we're looking for hold genuine authority over the product brief - and are prepared to be honest about where the current model is preventing the plays they know they need to make.