WelleCo founder Andrea Horwood is back in business

“I think of this category as a first-aid/beauty hybrid,” she explains. “It straddles both worlds. These are possibly the purest therapeutic oils on the planet. They’re ingredients we’ve overlooked because they’ve been such a part of our culture and history. But no one realises what we’ve been smelling – what we’ve been buying and using in products – doesn’t come from Australia. The difference is phenomenal.”

Horwood’s team include farmers and a business partner, former Fortescue chief executive Nev Power. The brand was born from a feasibility study that was done for the growers.

“How these oils had been formulated in consumer products to date weren’t playing to their strengths” she says. “Our WA-grown blue mallee has 84 per cent cineole compared to the commonly used Eucalyptus globulus which typically only contains 60 per cent.

“Educating consumers and communicating this kind of information is so important for beauty and wellness brands now. Not just because you’ve got to be out there creating content to support this. But because we’re in the midst of a consumer-led revolution. Everyone’s now demanding transparency.”

Consumers today are a radically different breed to what Horwood first encountered when she moved out of publishing and into make-up in 2003, as chief operating officer of Becca Cosmetics. Managing a capital raise and launching the brand into the UK and US markets alongside founder Rebecca Morrice Williams (who sold it in 2016 to Lauder for more than $US200 million), Horwood learnt what goes in to creating a cult product. “The care and attention Rebecca put into those formulas taught me that to create a successful beauty brand, at the end of the day, it all comes down to the product.”

Horwood left in 2005 and went on to revolutionise the sunscreen sector with her first products being a high SPF sun-care range – Invisible Zinc – which used micronised particles of zinc to block UV rays, rather than the chemical-laden filters other sunscreens were using.

“I was contacted by the research scientist in particle technology in the Engineering Department at UWA [University of Western Australia], who’d found a way to reduce zinc oxide down until it was invisible to the naked eye,” she explains.

“When they told me about the benefits of a physical UV natural zinc oxide protection, versus chemicals, that was compelling to me. I never had this master plan to change sunscreens. But I learnt that to communicate this message, we needed to enlist celebrity faces to get the message out there quickly. That’s what you needed to do back in that era. We were a small independent brand going up against conglomerates like Johnson & Johnson in supermarkets.”

Hence, a series of celebrities were signed to front it including Jerry Hall, Georgia Jagger, Megan Gale and Elle Macpherson. Eight thousand pharmacy stockists, supermarkets and department stores later, Invisible Zinc sold to Valeant Pharmaceuticals in 2011 for a five time multiple of revenue (the transaction amount is contractually undisclosed).

In 2013, the wellness boom kicked off (a report by the Global Wellness Institute said the market grew 10.6 per cent to $US3.72 trillion from then to 2015) with everyone obsessing over kale, barre classes, Sarah Wilson’s I Quit Sugar program, vegan diets, and gut health.

That year, Horwood co-founded ingestible beauty company WelleCo with business partner Elle Macpherson, formulating Super Elixir, the Rolls-Royce of daily greens powders of which a 300 gram caddy would cost you $145.

The brand generated about 80 per cent of its sales through online channels, so Horwood wrapped her head around ecommerce, studying online tutorials and user-generated content. WelleCo still offered physical merchandising and in-store advice.

“This was when beauty consumers began to demand transparency,” she says. “We’d spend so much time answering people’s questions around the origin of one our sweeteners and how it was extracted. Customers are well-informed now. They want a high level of detail.”

Horwood departed as chief executive of WelleCo in 2019 after a share dispute that has since been resolved, but witnessing this demand for radical transparency – as well as sustainability – stayed with her.

“One thing I [still] feel strongly about, is that I won’t bring a consumer product to market unless it’s absolutely necessary,” she insists.

“The world doesn’t need another serum. There must be a compelling argument to bring another packaged consumer good into the world. Is it good for people? Is there a tangible benefit? Is there an important reason for being, and does it already exist? Or does it need to exist?

“The market is saturated. Everyone’s now an influencer – a content creator – and when you combine that with contract manufacturing, anyone can bring a product to market,” she says. “We’re living in an age of consumerism. There’s so much noise out there right now. And when there’s a lot of noise, consumers become brutal in their edit of what they’re looking for and what they’ll support.”

“With Etto, we’re building a solid brand, something we want to be the next Vegemite,” Horwood surmises of this churn-and-burn mentality versus the long-game plan they’re playing. “It’s funny. When a beauty brand does well, all the difficulties are forgotten, and often you’re perceived as this overnight success. But sometimes it just gets down to grit and determination to make something work.”