7.9 billion units of plastic is produced for the cosmetics industry in the U.S.: Common Heir Founder

Angela Ubias and Cary Lin, Common Heir Founders, join Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Christoforous and Kristin Myers to discuss sustainability in the beauty industry.

Video transcript

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Our next guests are taking skin care out of the plastic bottle. Common Heir's products are designed with the environment in mind. And joining us now are the co-founders Angela Ubias and Cary Lin. Welcome to you both.

I know you started this business during the pandemic remotely. Cary, how were you able to pull that off and take the business to scale? Because I know you just launched your first products a couple of weeks ago.

CARY LIN: Yeah, thank you so much. It's an honor to be here. Angela and I didn't intend to start a sustainable beauty brand during a once in a lifetime pandemic. And what that was like was-- well, we met each other just one time prior to starting this company together.

We were put in touch by a mutual friend in the industry who learned what we were up to and thought that it would be a great idea to marry my experience in brand marketing with Angela's experience building eight plus years of clean and indie beauty brands. And we were in unique positions really to look ahead at the pipeline of what was coming down and saw that everything was essentially the same, which is liquid in plastic lotion bottles over and over again.

And so we started down this mission to try to get rid of plastic in beauty products. In the US alone, 7.9 billion units of rigid plastic are produced for the cosmetics industry alone with no end in sight. So we decided right before the pandemic to start working together.

And so we've met mostly remotely building this company, building a global supply chain remotely, which was incredibly challenging to do. And of course, bootstrapping our way until we were able to get enough traction to fund the business and bring it to market. So all of those things, you know, I don't know that there is a difference between building for us during the pandemic and during peacetime. Because that's all we've really known.

We've mostly relied on our partnership, our communication together, and faith that what we are working on on the other side of the pandemic-- which is sustainability, environmental conscious products-- would be something that people would really care about on the other end of this.

KRISTIN MYERS: So I want to come to you now, Angela. Because you guys haven't been around for too long, and yet, I was just looking at some of the reviews and they are incredibly good. I don't know if it's because of I'm over 30 now, but all my friends and I have been talking a lot about skin care. I'm not sure if that has increased throughout the pandemic.

Starting in a pandemic, what have you been hearing from some of your users? What was the growth like for you guys?

ANGELA UBIAS: Yeah, so I think skin care as a category overall during the pandemic-- because we were all forced to be on Zoom and have all of these video calls-- became top of mind for everyone. And that is certainly what we are hearing from our customers. And I think that's why our consumers are just so excited to get their hands on a really innovative active.

And we saw a lot of uptick, not necessarily in color cosmetics but certainly in skin care and in actives and masking and those sort of self care rituals at home.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Cary, I'm going to guess that trying to come up with a skincare brand that it has low impact on the environment might actually be more expensive to do or maybe we'd see more mainstream cosmetics and skin care companies doing it. What, if anything, does just trying to be environmentally conscious do to the price of the products?

CARY LIN: That's a really great question. So I think that with new technology it always takes a little bit of time for it to work its way down sort of the cost curve. So what we wanted to do was to be at the most cutting-edge, innovative end of that spectrum as possible, which did mean being very selective about where our ingredients and our sourcing was coming from.

Where that additional documentation would reside, which does tend to increase the costs of some of our materials a little bit. And the types of dissolvable vegan capsules that we're using here, there's only a few specific manufacturing lines in the world that can actually create this. And so getting them to partner with us when we were coming to them with just an idea and being very picky-- more so than they had ever worked before with any other set of brands about what we wanted to go into them and how we wanted to do our testing-- did absolutely mean that Angela and I knew we couldn't bootstrap this out of our kitchens on our own. That we did definitely have to invest in R&D and innovation.

But our hope is that as a brand responding to this massive consumer demand for better products without plastic that would be conscientious about where things would end up, we hope that by responding to that demand we can get the industry to kick-start a lot of that investment in R&D that's really needed to disrupt the beauty industry and bring it to the next level. And we hope to start seeing costs and a lot of these prices come down from there.

But our goal was always to make it affordable within the prestige price range. And we're always trying to make sure that we can make it as accessible as possible without compromising on our values and where things come from.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Angela, really quick. I know you're direct-to-consumer now, but I'd imagine you're talking to some retailers, brick and mortar and otherwise. What can you share with us?

ANGELA UBIAS: Well, I can share a bit of really exciting news. In Common Heir's infancy last year, we were actually part of the Credo for Change mentorship program. And that is coming completely full circle now, and we will be one of the first brands from that program to be carried in Credo stores nationwide and online starting May 18.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: That is certainly exciting news. Angela Ubias and Cary Lin, co-founders of Common Heir. Thanks so much for being with us. Best of luck to you both.