Juicing it: Joos founder on creating superfood skincare brand

CosmeticsDesign spoke with Andrew Glass, co-founder of Joos, about the concept behind the brand, where it fits into the botanical beauty segment and what it means for skincare more broadly.

Can you tell me a little bit about the concept behind your brand?

Joos Cosmetics is really all about promoting not only a healthy lifestyle but skin health in general. Each product for the brand is really designed to help bring your skin to its most healthy state.

We're not a brand that really promises perfect skin, but we are a brand that promises healthy skin. That's really the goal with each of our products.

Where did the kind of concept for the design of the brand come from?

My partner and I love getting fresh-pressed juices together. We both own a few other different beauty companies, so we've been in this space for a while.

The idea came about when we were just sitting down and having a couple of drinks. We were like “wow, this tastes amazing, these bottles are super cute, but we haven't really seen a brand that delivers that kind of nutrients to your skin.”​

That's kind of where the idea came about. Then we just started designing the bottles to really look like a real juice beverage, obviously, that you can't drink. Then we started looking at the bottles and we were like “wow, we love the nutrition panel that these juices come with.”​ That's how we developed our skin-trition panel, which we trademarked and it's on the back of every bottle.

How has communicating skin information similar to communication with foods helped or hindered your brand in communicating the botanical aspect to your consumer?

The first impressions of the brand are that we are a very clean skincare brand. That comes across even before you start reading the details of every product, that's something we wanted to do.

What sets us apart, besides botanicals, is we're using a lot of superfoods in our product. We use a cold extraction method with our lab to be able to really extract the whole plant, fruit or vegetable’s nutrition that typically gets lost in a traditional heat method. We're able to use a lot of unique ingredients that you may not see in a lot of other beauty brands.

How are you measuring success with this brand outside of sales?

For us, building a DTC business is really important. For a couple of the other brands that I've developed, we went straight into gaining strong retail partnerships. But I think everyone's learned with COVID that building a strong B2C business is important.

We're looking at not only sales but customer retention. We're talking with our customers, we have an in-house trainer who spends a lot of time answering questions, and we even do Skype calls with customers to make sure they're getting the best experience to be informative with them on what the product is and what it does.

What do you think other cosmetics professionals can kind of learn from this brand?

They can learn to think out of the box. Typically, for us, it's important to push the lab into thinking outside of the box and creating new raw materials that haven't been processed for skincare before. I don’t worry about creating a unique ingredient story because everything on the shelf is the same ingredient list over and over just in different packaging.

What's the next step for this brand?

We still have a lot of development going on to build out our assortment. We first launched our full-size juice bottles. Now we're coming out with a whole line of juice shots, which are little mini two-ounce bottles of a more concentrated formula. They’re really cute. They look like little juice shots, and they're very potent. That's something we're going to be focusing on for the extension of the line.

Is there anything else that you want to add or anything important that we missed?

Sustainability is important for us. All the bottles are easy to recycle. We use as few components as possible. Our bottles are completely customized. Our caps are aluminum and we built in a little stopper to make them airtight when you screw on the cap to help preserve the formula, but it's all one piece. Sustainability is going to be important to us and it's something we'll be able to invest in more as we grow.