Dive Brief:
- Barely a month after acquiring a personalized skin care company, custom beauty brand Function of Beauty on Monday named a new CEO, Alexandra Papazian. Papazian takes over for co-founder Zahir Dossa, who will shift to a position as executive chairman of the board.
- Papazian comes with more than 20 years of experience "building and growing top-tier global beauty brands" at L'Oréal, including Giorgio Armani, Yves Saint Laurent and Ralph Lauren. She was most recently the global president of Laura Mercier and relaunched the brand after Shiseido acquired it.
- At Function of Beauty, Papazian will focus on product innovation, expansion into new markets and channels, building out manufacturing capabilities and accelerating the company's global growth.
Dive Insight:
Function of Beauty is on the move. In early August, the personalized beauty brand acquired custom skin care company Atolla, with plans to relaunch its skin care business in Q1 next year. Late last year, the brand launched in Target stores, its first retail partnership. Now, the company has also hired a new CEO to lead it into a new phase of expansion.
"Function of Beauty continues to experience rapid growth. In the past year alone, we have launched products in two new categories, expanded into brick and mortar through our partnership with Target, and completed our acquisition of Atolla," Dossa said in a statement. "As we look to build on our momentum and move even further into personalization, we are confident that now is the right time to transition to the next generation of leadership."
Dossa praised Papazian's "deep experience" as a boon for Function of Beauty as it looks to expand on personalization in the space. From the start, Dossa has had a firm belief that the type of customization Function of Beauty offers could scale considerably beyond its hair care roots.
"It's an industry that we think could have an insane amount more specialization and personalization for any single person," Dossa told Retail Dive in 2019. "I don't think it's a niche problem. I think it's a mass market problem that wasn't able to be addressed largely from a technological perspective. And so we thought we had a technological solution to this age-old problem … that could scale and be affordable."
However, while Function of Beauty has become well-known for its custom hair care offerings, the brand isn't the only one vying for market share in the personalized beauty space. Skin care brand Proven similarly aims to make a name for itself in the beauty space by creating unique formulations for customers. In addition to the skin care space, the company has ambitions to enter the hair care, body care, color cosmetics, baby care and supplements markets. Function of Beauty already operates in three of those spaces (hair, skin and body).
"Function of Beauty is a true industry pioneer and the level of precision and sophistication at which the Company uniquely formulates and customizes each product is nothing like I've ever seen in the industry," Papazian said in a statement. "We have significant opportunities ahead to leverage Function of Beauty's unparalleled, state-of-the-art technology, software, and production capabilities to continue the Company's growth."
