In a world bursting with gadgets for body, home, kitchen and garden, the Swedish firm Foreo has layered on even more, including at-home facial devices, tooth and tongue fixers, acne zappers and eye massagers. Foreo specializes in selling products that have never existed before, wooing consumers with a cocktail of innovation, quirkiness — and technical expertise.
The five-year-old company has also taken an unconventional route to retail, shunning distributors and working directly with stores, relying on influencers rather than traditional advertising, and reaching out to the wider medical community to promote its brightly colored sonic facial orbs, toothbrushes, tongue cleaners and, most recently, its UFO Smart Mask Treatment.
Paul Peros, Foreo’s chief executive officer, has a background in science, with a degree in physics from UCLA and managerial experience at Watergy, a water and environmental technologies firm. It’s no surprise, then, that he’s committed to keeping research and development, distribution, marketing, visual merchandising and design in-house at Foreo, and said it’s proven a winning strategy.
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“We tend to be private people and, yes, we manage our industrialization and manufacturing in-house. We really take the utmost care to make sure that our products are right for every single design. We’re very nerdy, very techy, and we engage with our customers,” he said.
“We are also very dedicated and playful at the same time, and we are trying to stay on top of a world that is spinning really, really fast and with the technology of today we can do things that were unimaginable before,” Peros added.
Once Foreo develops a product, the real work comes on the downstream, he said, with the company “selling objects that nobody has ever tried to sell — or buy — for that matter. So, for us, a lot of the work is linking it with the consumer.”
Foreo started by teaming with Huda Kattan of Huda Beauty, and relying on influencers like her — and on word of mouth — to promote the brand, which now boasts 3,000 employees in 20 offices around the world.
Over the past five years, the brand has also involved consumers in its campaigns, and has always insisted on using local language, content and influencers. Peros likes to keep things simple — and move quickly.
He recalls four years ago arriving at Heathrow Airport in London with four suitcases of products for Selfridges, and selling them from a space around the stairwell on the lower ground floor — and watching them fly out of the store.
In London, before selling at Harvey Nichols, Selfridges, and Fortnum & Mason, Foreo was working with professional skin-care experts on Harley Street in order to spread the word about its technology.
When it opened its Paris store a few years ago, Foreo ran a schedule of biweekly events and engaged with local communities, from designers to influencers to dentists and pediatricians. “Basically, we used the store opening as a platform to engage and work and learn together with consumers,” Peros said.
In addition to the Facial UFO, which aims to reduce the time it takes for a face mask to work, the company has developed a device that will allow the consumer to measure the key areas of the face, and automatically adjust the density and duration of treatment, depending on skin tone, season and geography. Peros said he likes the idea of consumers using diagnostic tools for themselves.
The future, he said, will be about beauty and tech working hand-in-hand, and believes that tech will be a catalyst for the traditional beauty brands to innovate and experiment.