Janelle N. Asumang
September 27, 2022
To all of my cosmetic industry colleagues in product development, I invite you to step out of the lab and onto the stage.
I know, there are plenty of you who would rather not. You may not like the spotlight, but you deserve to be acknowledged and applauded for your resilience, resourcefulness, dedication, and — above all — patience.
Over the past 15 years, I have met with countless R&D professionals to present my cosmetic ingredient du jour, its corresponding performance data, and prototypes. It wasn’t until I began this role at Alchemy, however, that I actually understood the breadth and magnitude of yours.
Your interactions with me as an ingredient rep were just one stop in a complex and arduous process. You sift through a pile of potential ingredients, chasing down technical and regulatory collateral for each one (fingers crossed that you have a responsive and helpful sales rep!).
You manage product and timeline expectations with your internal (read: management) and external customers. All in the hope that your formulation passes stability at the 3-month mark and your contract manufacturer can scale up production without issue.
How does it all get done? There are two common answers. For some, they rely on a person — a project manager or product veteran — with the institutional knowledge to keep things moving. Others rely on software — rigid, sluggish, and outdated software that was built to address the specific needs of entirely different industries.
“It’s clumsy and far from intuitive.”
“It’s so slow.”
“We need help!”
You juggle multiple activities conducted through cumbersome, disconnected software that drains your energy, stalls your process, wastes your time, and leaves you frustrated. You’ve bent your product development to fit the limits of your software simply because there hasn’t been a better option up to this point.
It’s time to expect more from your software. You deserve a platform that helps you make better products faster. One that accelerates your processes instead of constraining them.
The good news is that software vendors are listening. Industry cloud platforms, built to meet the needs and challenges of a single industry, are popping up everywhere from cooking to cosmetics.
But these solutions can’t impose themselves on potential customers. We must prove that we understand your challenges well enough to solve them.
Then all it takes is for you to believe things could actually work better and find the courage to learn how.
