Full disclosure – I’ve been trying to put together a Beauty Business News and failing (lack of will power) but this is the week, I am determined. However, REN’s final confirmation that the Unilever owned business will close has now published and I thought it deserved a post of its own. Everyone’s had their say on how and why this happened – some accurate and some not – but the closure has been written in the stars for at least a year or more (and of course, it happened just as I set foot in Prague without access to my laptop).
Whenever a big corporation (or venture capitals) takes over a brand, the parameters change immediately. You will find often that ingredient cheapen – the labels will read the same but the quality of the contents are likely to change. While every brand has a mission to make a profit, the corps and the VCs can’t take view on long term gain – they want the money as soon as possible and they want it from every viable direction. REN, which is 25 years old, started with a good heart – the original founders, Rob Calcraft and Antony Buck, went with the story of creating ‘clean’ skin care for Antony’s pregnant wife after she developed reactions to her usual skin care. I’m aways sceptical about back stories – how many times have we heard ‘I developed this skin cream/oil/serum at home in my kitchen because I couldn’t find anything for my sensitive skin’? Millions – these stories are ten a penny and with such a wealth of skin care available, it’s almost inconceivable that nothing could be found for sensitive or dry skin because they almost always end up with the same ingredients as existing products with perhaps one headline ingredient that’s different. However, they worked and lived their brand – they had one of the very best formulators in the UK and they put all of their heart and creativity into their products, growing slowly but surely. They nurtured it for 15 years before Unilever destroyed it in ten.
At the time, there was no keywording, ranking or hashtags to clue them into what products would tickle the fancy of consumers but ‘clean’ drove them to the newly emerging category of consumer who wanted a ‘healthier’ beauty routine. Pretty soon, because the timing was right and other brands could see how ‘clean’ was a driving force for REN, other brands started calling their products ‘clean’. As we know, clean has no clear definition in beauty but it was a word that highlighted other ways to make products, ingredients to avoid or use less off and showed how to be a more conscious consumer.
After the Unilever acquisition in 2015, ‘clean’ was driven harder and more forcefully with global consciousness raised toward recycling, skin healthy ingredients and brands’ commitment to the world at large (I’m fairly sure that REN used to do beach clean days and so on…) the marketing soon took over the reality. The brand became better in its own advertising than it was in reality. With their pledge to become Zero Waste by the end of 2021 (meaning everything had to be recycled, recyclable or reusable) the brand had to invest in aluminium tubes (I know, there’s controversy over aluminium now) that cost a fortune as well as expensive componentry – not to mention vegan ink and so on. So, they’re spending more on packaging and altruism than the products can sustain which doesn’t suit the finances of the corporation they now belong to and of course, up went the prices to a point that the original consumers were priced out. Even finding a new customer base became problematic because of pricing.
The clues started to emerge when their CEO left to work for a soft toy company. At the same time, REN was being discounted heavily especially at Christmas time and Black Friday rather than retain their exclusivity and uniqueness. A new CEO emerged and very soon left. There were redundancies. The CEO of the entire Unilever Prestige Division left. REN became a brand that was visibly under pressure to perform – brands forget that those of us who work day in and day out in beauty can read between the lines. You are only heavily discounting because you have to rely on sales at volume but this discounting stops consumer buying in between times because they know a better deal will come. That self-defeating marketing behaviour doesn’t allow for brands to own their prestige – they look desperate and as it turns out, they were.
Some of the nicest people I know worked at REN – they were the ones keeping the heart of the brand alive but you can only battle so long against pressure and insistence to sell, sell, sell at any price and that price proved to be too much. Unilever did not make this decision overnight – this has been coming since the last CEO left because there was, as we now know, no good reason to stay. And maybe even before that – because it was an odd choice right from the get go.
I am really sad that Unilever couldn’t find a way to save the EverCalm part of the brand – the nonsense of a ‘consultation’ where all views were ‘taken into account’ was performative and pointless. I am pretty sure that during the consultation, there would be very, very few, ‘yes, please put us out of a job’ opinions. I also fail to see how a brand like Kate Somerville (Unilever owned) did not shut before REN but can only assume that REN had more debt so had to go first. There was no option to sell REN to another corp – I think – because Unilever didn’t want to reveal the debt. I don’t know for a fact but it’s my inclination.
All that said, REN has just revealed a new SPF to help those who are sensitive to other SPFs. I can imagine that there was only one run at the factory for this so it will be here today and gone tomorrow, with a focus on capturing whatever revenue that they can in the last throws of the brand. Trust me, it’s a lovely SPF priced at £36 but already discounted to £28 HERE just in case you fancy trying it. Full closure of the brand will be around November/December I think.
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