Indie beauty conversation with Formula Botanica

9 Dec 2021 --- Formula Botanica - the online teaching institution for organic formulation and indie beauty entrepreneurship – is preparing to enter natural makeup formulation and launch an alumni program in 2022. We caught up with CEO Lorraine Dallmeier to look back at the pioneer’s 10 years of innovative beauty education and find out what the future holds.

What was the inspiration behind launching Formula Botanica?

My mission for the school is to teach the world to formulate, as everyone can - and in my opinion, should - formulate. I can imagine a world where formulation is as commonplace as cookery, where everyone can make their own lotions, cleansers and shampoos as and when they need them; where people are no longer totally reliant upon an industry that has made them feel inadequate for 150 years. That’s where I’d like to take the school in terms of growth. 

Click to EnlargeLorraine Dallmeier believes the art of formulation should be universal. Source: Formula Botanica.Formula Botanica was originally set up to be a one-woman side hustle, which is also the stage it was at when I bought and took over the school in 2014. Until then it had really been a small hobby business, so I instantly set about ripping apart everything in the school and building it from the ground up again with the intention of allowing it to grow. 

The school is now a well-respected global education institution with over 14,000 students in 179 countries. We’re accredited by the UK’s Open & Distance Learning Quality Council and we’ve won industry awards for the excellence of our teaching methods and materials, as well as the success of our digital outreach. 

The running of the school has changed dramatically in the last seven years as a result. I now employ about 40 staff who undertake the daily running of the school and all its courses, student support and systems. We teach nine different courses and operate our continuing professional development (CPD) membership site, the Lab at Formula Botanica.

What was missing from the mainstream beauty education market that you sought to fill with Formula Botanica?

Nothing like Formula Botanica existed on the market when the school was founded in 2012, so it wasn’t so much a case of trying to fill a gap, but more a case of bringing an entirely new skill to the world. Of course traditional cosmetic science degrees already existed, but they played a role in perpetuating the myth that only chemists can and should formulate and certainly didn’t - and still don’t - cater for people who just want to learn to formulate for themselves or to start an indie beauty brand. 

I feel we have demonstrated without a shadow of a doubt that you do not need to be a chemist to formulate your own organic skin care and hair care. The chemist myth continues to persist, no doubt upheld by many who have a century of pseudo-scientific advertising in white lab coats behind them, but I feel that we are slowly democratizing formulation and making it accessible to everyone. 

The fact that we’ve been able to educate almost 15,000 people in 179 countries in our organic formulation methods, and that so many of them have been able to successfully start their own beauty brands, means that we’re leading the global organic formulation movement and reclaiming a skill that has been around for millennia.

How does Formula Botanica strive to help beauty founders and, in doing so, answer consumer demands?

Through our award-winning courses, we teach our students how to become a formulator and then how to turn those formulations into a business. 

We want to train the next generation of indie beauty formulators and business founders to be conscious of their own environmental impact and that of the beauty industry in general. We put sustainability issues center stage at every opportunity, both in our curriculum and across our media platforms.

Formula Botanica has thousands of graduate success stories, ranging from the graduates who have raised over US$8.5m in investment funding, to the graduates who have won backing on their countries’ respective shark tanks, to the graduates who have won prestigious awards for their formulations and brands, to the graduates who receive love every day from their customers. 

Some of our graduates who launch brands aim for global domination and others purposefully stay small. We love and support all of them, but the one aspect I love most of all about our graduates is the stories they tell me about the way their formulations change their customers’ lives. We host a graduate gallery on our website where visitors can search by geographical region, so I strongly encourage everyone to visit and support their local indie beauty brand.

What did the process to launch involve from conceptualization through to commercialization?

Formula Botanica’s launch was a very organic process, as it started with demand from the market to learn how to formulate, which then morphed into the design of online courses in the early 2010s (a rarity at the time!), to the global education institution we are now. 

Click to EnlargeThe Green Beauty Conversation podcast demystifies the personal care world. Source: Formula Botanica.By capitalizing on a market demand that no one else was catering for, Formula Botanica has become a force for change in the beauty industry, not only by shaking up cosmetic science training but also as a catalyst contributing to the growth of the natural cosmetics and personal care sector which is estimated to total US$54.5bn by 2027.

We are training the next generation of indie beauty entrepreneurs who collectively form one of the most agile, on-trend and profitable sectors in the beauty market. Conscious, ethical, wellness, self care, natural, essential and sustainable beauty are dominating the market in 2021 and beyond. These are precisely the areas that Formula Botanica trains in and the sweet spot where we and our alumni’s brands operate.

With mainstream beauty watching indie brand trends closely, the knock-on effect of our work is evident in the market. Significantly, 2020 and 2021 saw a record number of Formula Botanica graduates notify the school of their beauty brand launches.

Mainstream beauty is now looking to indie beauty to lead the way on how to appeal to the conscious consumer. Investors see our graduates as worthwhile to back and to the tune of millions. This is a trend Formula Botanica feels immensely proud to have contributed to and is set to shape even more decisively in the future as we grow and extend our message and reach further.

What are the greatest challenges to achieving your vision at Formula Botanica?

My biggest challenge in achieving our mission to teach the world to formulate is being able to keep up with the organic demand and growth that we’ve experienced over past years. Formulation is a skill that any person can learn and empower themselves with and I envisage demand will continue to grow significantly over the coming years as people start to redefine beauty to focus more on wellbeing than appearance.

In 2020 I hired 25 new staff while Formula Botanica grew a further 85% during the first lockdown. We then spent most of 2021 creating and scaling our operating systems to be able to handle this growth, but the reality is that Formula Botanica is only scratching the surface of what’s possible in the world of formulation education. In short, I need more people, more systems and more time!

What are your short and long-term hopes and goals for Formula Botanica and the wider beauty and personal care industry?

Aside from my mission to teach the world to formulate, my short-term goals for Formula Botanica involve branching out into natural makeup formulation in 2022, launching an alumni program, further strengthening my incredible team and helping more people understand that everyone can and should formulate. Next year is going to be a fantastic year for all of us and I cannot wait to watch our hard work come to further fruition. 

With regards to the wider BPC industry, the biggest opportunity, as well as the biggest challenge, for the entire sector will be to embrace circularity and rethink the way that beauty formulations are packaged, delivered and consumed. I am so excited to see what the industry comes up with as I think we are capable of incredible innovation and change. With tens of billions of units of plastic cosmetic packaging manufactured each year and the average woman having a staggering 16 beauty products on her bathroom shelf, something needs to change urgently. I can’t wait to see the industry lead that conversation. 

I feel strongly that the beauty industry as we know it will look totally different in 10 years, as we will need to completely rethink the way we purchase, use and dispose of cosmetic products. I think that’s a welcome change because the beauty industry is one of the world’s most unsustainable industries. This is also why I have dedicated a large part of my Green Beauty Conversations podcast episodes in 2021 to demystifying various circular and sustainable beauty topics.

By Natasha Spencer-Jolliffe, BPC Insights Senior Journalist