Hear Me Raw is getting louder.
The natural skin care brand, founded by former Burt’s Bees and Bliss chief executive officer Mike Indursky and his daughter Emma, is making its first foray into retail, launching in Fred Segal this week.
The L.A.-based specialty retailer is an unorthodox choice for a beauty brand — which is exactly what Indursky wanted. “It’s about the lifestyle,” said Indursky, who launched Hear Me Raw in 2020 and said sales will hit the high seven-figure mark by the end of this year. “From a marketing point of view we think psychographics, not demographics. Fred Segal attracts cool, savvy, educated people who care about their skin, their health and the environment.”
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For the launch, Indursky created limited-edition packaging in Fred Segal’s signature red, white, blue and black for Hear Me Raw’s four products: The Brightener, The Detoxifier, The Clarifier and The Moisturizer. Like the brand’s standard packaging, each is completely refillable and reusable, a key tenet of the brand which is also driving sale. “We want our jars to last a lifetime. You don’t have to recycle glass jars — reuse them,” said Indursky, who added that 100 billion pieces of packaging materials generated by the beauty industry wind up in landfalls annually. “That’s irresponsible and unacceptable.”
Full-sized products sell for $42, while refills are $28; today, refills account for 40 percent of overall sales. “You have to incentivize consumers,” said Indursky. “People want to do what’s best for them and what’s best for the environment. If I can make it compromise free, then sustainability is not an either-or anymore.”
The brand is also expanding its lineup. In September, Good Clean Fungi Gentle Scrubbing Cleansing Balm will launch. The gel-like scrub uses four different types of mushroom to hydrate and eradicate oil, and was inspired by an article Indursky read about oyster mushrooms being used to help clean up oil spills. “They are highly enzymatic and they break up oil,” he said, “ and I thought if they break up oil spills, they should work on the face. We did some testing and they do.”
In August, the brand is introducing a special limited-edition packaging collaboration with the gamer QuarterJade, who has more than 1.1 million followers on Twitch. Indursky is producing about 10,000 units, which he expects to sell out in about a week.
That iconoclastic approach is typical of the executive, who is adjusting to life as an entrepreneur. “I’ve always been really scrappy — at Burt’s Bees and Bliss, I remember saying, ‘we throw out our own garbage here,’” he said. “But as an entrepreneur, it’s everything, The printer is broken? You fix it. Outlook is down? You fix it. There is no T in our IT department,” he joked. “Just I.”
Still, Indursky wouldn’t have it any other way. “It’s rewarding as hell,” he said, adding that Hear Me Raw hits its 2023 sales goal in April and has a sales growth rate of 200 percent. “But the wins are huge, emotionally huge.”