As skin care becomes more advanced, Skin Laundry is advancing.
The laser treatment specialist is entering Liberty of London in September, then Sephora online in January and in stores in March. Liberty will offer Skin Laundry’s services and skin-care assortment, while Sephora will stick to the topical products, which are set to roll out to 100 key doors.
“I want to be in all the major cities. I want people to have access to the Skin Laundry treatment, and I want our products to be widely distributed,” said Skin Laundry founder Yen Reis. “We’re building a brand that hopefully has longevity. Everything we do, we do it very thoughtfully.”
Skin Laundry’s push beyond its own locations began last November with Lane Crawford, where the brand has products and treatments available. Generally treatments drive around 80 percent of Skin Laundry’s business, but that percentage dips at retail environments centered upon products. Typically, Skin Laundry’s customers patronize its locations three times monthly, a figure that’s increased to four times monthly at Lane Crawford.
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“The benefit with having Skin Laundry within a department setting is the frequency of our customers and the return of our customers is really quite high, so they take advantage of that,” Reis said. “People go there with a mission to buy products, so we tend to sell more products in department stores, but they also always buy the treatment.”
Launched April 2015, Skin Laundry’s skin-care range now spans 15 products, including the best-selling SleepCycle Clean Skin Pillowcase, Restoring Night Serum and sheet masks in three five-sheet and single-sheet varieties: Hydrating Radiance Facial Treatment Mask, Rejuvenating Antiaging Facial Mask and Rejuvenating Antiaging Neck & Chest Mask. Product prices run mostly from $12 to $50.
“The pillowcase has silver ion technology that reduces bacteria and germs by 99.9 percent. Because sleeping on pillowcases that are dirty is part of the problem with teenage acne, that’s become very popular very, very quickly,” Reis said.
As it ventures into retail, Skin Laundry continues to open its own locations. The company’s plan is to reach 25 locations by the end of this year, up from 13 currently, and approximately 40 next year. The U.S. is the main geographic focus, but Reis mentioned Hong Kong, already home to three locations, Vietnam and the U.K. as well as possible destinations for additional Skin Laundry locations. In September, locations are bowing in New York’s TriBeCa neighborhood and London.
The relative affordability of a Skin Laundry treatment — on average, it costs $50 — appeals to a wide range of customers. “We have a lot of Millennials that use it at as preventative, but then we have the older generation — the Baby Boomers — that use it for reversal because what Skin Laundry does very effectively is reverse fine lines and wrinkles the more frequently you go,” Reis said.
Skin Laundry has been performing 11,000 treatments per month, a number Reis predicted will soon escalate to 15,000 per month and could hit 30,000 per month this year as locations and brand awareness spread. It’s in the process of attempting to raise roughly $10 million to support its growth after raising $3 million about a year-and-a-half ago. This year, industry sources estimate the company will generate $10 million in retail sales.
As sophisticated noninvasive skin-care services branch out from spas and doctors’ offices, Skin Laundry is poised to gain further ground at retailers willing to experiment. Inside stores, Reis reasoned, “People are going to want more. I’m not sure if they would want Botox necessarily, but maybe a milder version, something that’s not so scary or requires injections. I do think that there will be more laser treatments and other treatments that allow you to have a better effect.”