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Skin care isn’t just for the face, according to Nécessaire co-founder Randi Christiansen. Christiansen founded the company with Nécessaire co-founder Nick Axelrod in 2018 and debuted digitally first. Their original lineup of clean products — a curated assortment of body washes, body lotions and sex gels — was quite unorthodox for the beauty industry just two years ago.
“Nick and I really felt philosophically that skin doesn’t stop at the neck,” she said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast.
Christiansen saw a gap in how much money people were willing to spend on skin care for the face, as well as for their favorite matchas. “It was very clear to both of us that there was just room for what we call real ingredients in body,” Christiansen said.
Nécessaire’s now expanded product line entered Sephora.com last month, and pandemic permitting, will debut in its stores in August. The company plans to grow 300% to 400% this year, Christiansen said, in part thanks to this new relationship with Sephora.
Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity.
The original idea
“In November 2018 when we launched, it was very much a given that a brand at this time would be clean. But the thing we wanted to overlay was this strong commitment to sustainability from the beginning, and also tap into this idea of wellness. Nick and I really felt philosophically that skin doesn’t stop at the neck, and we very much felt that there was not a good solution for the neck down in terms of clean, effective skin care.”
Staying true to its DTC community despite joining big beauty retail
“We are very much DTC, and we are also very much going to maintain that sort of spirit when we go to Sephora. We joined Cassandra and Violet Grey, the Goop team and Nordstrom, but in a limited format — very little distribution, because frankly one of the things I learned from my career prior is that you have to create this sort of energy around your brand before you expand into distribution. You have to have this pulse in the marketplace, so that when you go there there’s automatically a bit of an uptick. And for us, that took a moment.”
What fresh funding means in this environment
“When you raise money, the truth is that one part of it is the money, the other part of it is friend. They sit around the table with you. They help talk about the hard decisions you make in a company’s journey. And at the end of the day, good strategy is making good decisions, and good decisions hopefully lead to good outcomes. We raised a series A with VMG, that’s correct. And we did [that] because they’re a phenomenal group of folks you want to work with with a phenomenal track record. They understand the journey of healthy growth very well.”
