How Fayshell aims to disrupt the skincare sector with affordable facials

A clever idea to create a gym membership for the face is driving the success of Australian beauty startup Fayshell.

The post How Fayshell aims to disrupt the skincare sector with affordable facials appeared first on Inside Retail Australia.

Katelin Gregg is the co-founder and director of Fayshell, a disruptor in the beauty industry that offers a bespoke boutique gym experience for your skin, without the taboo associated with in-clinic treatments and unnecessary mark-up of take-home retail. 

Gregg co-founded Fayshell with her best friend Ella James in 2022 and they have just celebrated the business’ first anniversary and the opening of their second location in Sydney’s Neutral Bay, in addition to the original Bondi location.

Inside Retail: What industry were you in before retail?

Katelin Gregg: For the past four years, we have been running a podcast called Cosmechix, which educates Millennials on cosmetic enhancement skincare, where we interviewed the top beauty experts on things like skincare, facials, breast augmentation, fillers – everything in the cosmetic enhancement realm. 

I think of it now as a research period for us, because we saw both sides of the market. We were talking with the supply side, the top experts, and we found that whether we were speaking to a plastic surgeon, or a dermatologist, or a skin therapist about anti-ageing or preventative ageing, there was a common theme of looking after your skin and looking after it regularly.

IR: Why was Fayshell Created? 

KG: When we spoke to our audience, and how we felt as consumers ourselves, it wasn’t that accessible to look after your skin regularly because facials fell into this luxury category. If you ask someone how often they get a facial, the common response will be once or twice a year. It’s like a ‘treat yourself’ or something you do if you get a voucher. whereas we would constantly receive information around thinking of facials as more for skin health, rather than relaxation. We saw this as an opportunity to make facials more accessible. 

We wanted to create a business concept that made it affordable, time efficient, and completely customised, so people can enjoy facials regularly. We all go and get our hair and nails done frequently, but it felt like there wasn’t a business model out there that facilitated regular monthly facials.

Ella and I are best friends and we met at college. Ella’s background is in startups and she was working in a tech startup for the past three years. 

She had that exposure of working in that startup environment which we’ve very much been in this past year.  

IR: Where did your retail career start?

KG: I come from the beauty industry. I grew up with my parents having a medical distribution company. They sold all the products that doctors use. The filler that the cosmetic injector injects, my dad would import it and sell it. I started working with him when I finished school – that’s what led me to start the podcast because I was meeting all these incredible doctors and experts daily, so I wanted to leverage that and create some sort of educational podcast. Ella and I had always dreamed of having a business together and for the past five years, were constantly coming up with so many ideas. Fayshell is the one that stuck.

IR: How do you choose which brands to retail in-clinic and online?

KG: Part of the research process was doing the podcast, as we had interviewed a lot of these brands. We interviewed Terri [Vinson Jones], the founder of Synergie Skin on the podcast years before we launched Fayshell. It was a no-brainer to stock Synergie products, purely because we believed in what Terri stood for,  and we had personally used all of the products. We retail about five or six ranges, typically skin clinics only sell one or two. That’s because we take an unbiased approach and want to make sure that we have products that suit everyone. I think a common misconception in the beauty industry is that a good product that works on one person is going to do the same for everyone. Really what works for someone is going to have a completely different result for someone else. 

Products are so important. It’s like if you go to the gym and see a PT, but you’re eating poorly every single day, you’re going to limit the results. The same applies to your skin. You can come and see us in the clinic and do the monthly treatments, but if you’re going home and you’re using over-the-counter products that aren’t healthy for your skin, it’s going to limit the results we can achieve. 

IR: What differentiates Fayshell?

KG: At Fayshell we don’t have a treatment menu, everything is customised. The consumer is more focused on the results they want to get rather than picking the treatment. We leave that decision to the experts who are trained in skin treatments and products. 

IR: How has the business evolved since opening the first Fayshell location?

KG: We were originally going to have one flat facial membership with no different tiers. We started to realise that there were two core markets – the first being somebody who has good skin and wants to maintain that, versus somebody who either has problematic skin or really wants to invest in preventative ageing with more advanced treatments. 

We launched with a basic and the advanced offering. Our most common [treatment] in the clinic is the advanced offering, and that gives our clients access to advanced peels, herbal peels, skin needling, all things that are going to drive really strong change in the skin. The basic will also drive cellular change but focuses more on hydration and adding a bit of a glow to the skin. It’s really good pre-event.

As the business grew, we saw people wanting to work on the neck and decolletage areas. Given that demand, we launched the ultimate membership, and that includes everything in the basic and advanced tiers, but for the neck and decolletage as well. 

More recently, we’re bringing out a new membership tier that’s not officially out yet, but it’s called the level-up of membership. That’s for more problematic skin that requires two facials a month so we see them every two weeks, rather than once a month. 

IR: What is Fayshell’s marketing approach?

KG: I run all of Fayshell’s marketing and I manage all of our agencies. 

Having our own podcast was really helpful. Because we were able to launch with a pre-existing audience and credibility in this space. Abbie Chatfield has been really good for our brand. A lot of clients that come through say they saw us on her page. She’s been coming to us since the start of 2023. Like a lot of things in marketing, it’s really hard to track.

We invite a lot of media and creators through – for us, there’s a benefit of getting on their social pages and getting their content from a different perspective. 

We spent a lot of time designing our clinic build because it was part of our marketing budget. We wanted to create an experience that encourages people to share on socials. In the beauty industry, social media is one of the best ways to share experiences. Word of mouth also spreads faster if you can get on everyone’s social pages.

We do a lot of in-clinic events, with a lot of big media attending. Our partners, for example, Hydropeptide, or Synergie, will do a clinic takeover day, where they come in and we treat their clients with all of their products. We do a lot of our in-house guerilla marketing where we go and do stunts and try to capture TikTok content to go viral and create brand awareness.

The post How Fayshell aims to disrupt the skincare sector with affordable facials appeared first on Inside Retail Australia.