Epson America, Inc. has announced a strategic investment in Blank Beauty, a Knoxville-based tech platform specializing in on-demand, customizable CPGs. The collaboration brings together Epson’s robotics and color technology with Blank Beauty’s agile manufacturing systems to develop automated kiosks for custom beauty products in retail and e-commerce settings.
According to Rick Brookshire, Director of Robotics at Epson America, the partnership “brings a kind of consumer-based manufacturing to the retail space,” with initial applications focused on personalized nail polish. Blank Beauty’s co-founder and CEO, Charles Brandon, said the integration of Epson’s robotics and Color Vision tool allows the company “to automatically verify the color match for each product,” enhancing quality control and scalability.
In this CosmeticsDesign Q&A, Brookshire and Brandon discussed how automation, precision color technology, and retail-tainment are shaping a new model for beauty manufacturing and customer experience.
CDU: What makes the beauty and personal care space an attractive new frontier for Epson Robots, and how does this investment in Blank Beauty align with your broader strategy?
Rick Brookshire (RB): We (Epson Robots) have been helping companies throughout the world with their manufacturing for over four decades. To name a few, most of this work has been done in the Automotive, Electronics, Medical, and consumer products.
But the world of Robotics is expanding, and so is the use of Epson Robots. We have found numerous potential opportunities for our robots that bring a kind of consumer-based manufacturing to the retail space.
The beauty and personal care space is a giant market with tremendous room for growth for automating both in factories and in the retail space. Blank Beauty’s Color Matching Technology, combined with Epson’s robot automation, is the perfect match for customized single quantity personal care products that consumers desire.
We plan to expand to many additional products in the personal care space with Blank Beauty and are excited about all the new possibilities this will bring. In terms of our broader strategy for Epson, Blank Beauty and Epson share a common core technology, which is color.
Epson makes outstanding printers that print photo-quality prints with vibrant colors that last for many years. Working together with Blank Beauty will also help improve color output and color matching technologies moving forward, which will ultimately be used in applications that we haven’t even thought about yet.
CDU: Can you share how Epson’s robotics and Color Control Technology are enabling scalable, precise customization in beauty products in real time?
RB: The real magic is in the Color Control Technology from Blank Beauty. Being able to match colors using a limited color source palette allows a small workspace to be used to dispense the colors in a kiosk-sized workcell, versus having to build some giant custom machine.
Having the flexibility of the robots allows all the material handling tasks to be handled quickly and precisely in that same small space. Now that the core technologies and workcell concepts have been built and proven, the next step is to transform these technologies to handle future products (other than fingernail polish) in a very timely fashion.
CDU: With the success of the in-store kiosk pilots, how do you see Epson’s role evolving as more beauty brands look to integrate retail-tainment and on-demand manufacturing into their customer experiences?
RB: Retail-tainment is really the key word here. Today’s shoppers are looking for more than just products these days – they want an immersive, engaging experience. Giving customers the opportunity to see custom products being made right in front of their eyes helps to fulfill that full experience, including the output of a great product that customers will use over and over again.
We fully expect this trend to continue as we build more interactive kiosks with Epson Robots for the retail community.
CDU: How does this partnership with Epson accelerate Blank Beauty’s mission to make customized, on-demand beauty products more accessible in both retail and e-commerce channels?
Charles Brandon (CB): By working directly with Epson, Blank Beauty can rapidly accelerate our mission to deliver customized beauty products both online and in-store. Blank Beauty uses Epson’s Robotics Technology to create the orders for our customers in-store and automatically online, and we are about to integrate their Color Vision tool into our system.
This allows us to automatically verify the Color Match for each product we create and guarantee an improved customer experience.
By automating what was once manual, we’re able to significantly reduce production costs and pass those savings directly to our customers. This partnership helps us to make custom beauty, making high-quality, personalized products available to everyone, whether they’re shopping online or visiting a store.
CDU: What challenges did you encounter in developing the in-store kiosk for custom nail polish, and how did Epson’s automation technology help overcome those hurdles?
CB: Most startups keep their technology under wraps for years before launching. We did the opposite.
Blank Beauty chose to pilot our custom nail polish kiosks on the biggest stage possible – Walmart. This approach forced us to collect real-time feedback and rapidly iterate on the customer experience.
One of the biggest challenges was ensuring we could adapt and improve our kiosks without costly hardware replacements or disruptive store visits.
Epson’s Robotic Arm gave us the flexibility we needed, and their platform allowed us to push software and system updates remotely, saving us both time and money.
CDU: Looking ahead, how do you envision this robotic manufacturing platform expanding into other categories like foundations, lip glosses, and even skin care products?
CB: At Blank Beauty, we often joke that we are “not your average beauty company.” Our offices are filled with engineers, data scientists, and chemists.
With our partnership with Epson, we can leverage their Robotics + Color Technologies to launch new product categories faster than most companies could even dream of.
The challenge, across all categories, remains the same: how can we deliver a customized product for our customers with the best ingredients possible?
Thankfully, the flexibility of Epson’s Technology allows us to pilot new concepts and collect user feedback quickly. It may take other brands years to pilot a new product, but with the Blank Beauty Dispensing System + Color Science AI, we can mix and dispense just about every liquid cosmetic imaginable.
Nail polish is just the beginning.
