Interview with Finnish Beautytech company, Revieve

This time for our NIH Tokyo “Meet our Members” series, we have with us Revieve, a Finnish beautytech company. The company was established in 2016 and started its activities in Japan in spring 2021.

But what comes to your mind when you hear the words “beautytech”?

We have learned that beautytech can be largely categorized into 2 segments:

One segment consists of the B2C beauty appliances, such as high-performance hair dryers or face steamers, which the consumers directly use.

The other segment has apps and tools based on the latest technologies (including AI, big data, or AR solutions), which allow people to select, try on, and purchase beauty products through different devices and panels. Revieve’s solution fits in the latter, providing a more personalized consumer experience in the beauty industry.

We sat down with Yusuke Mori, Revieve’s Head of Japan Region, to find out more about their offering and future plans for Japan.

Personalized Digital Consumer Experience in the Beauty Industry

NIH: Thank you for your time today!

First of all, could you tell us about Revieve’s business and vision?

Mori: Our vision is to become the beauty platform upon which beauty brands and retailers build stronger customer relationships

To break it down a bit, beauty has three pillars: skincare, health, and wellness. Your skin condition is always related to your physical condition, which cannot be siloed from your overall wellness and mental wellbeing.

For this reason, beauty products are, or at least should be, personal in nature, which is why we focus on personalized experiences. For example, the condition of someone’s skin depends not only on their age and gender, but also on various factors such as their lifestyle, physical and mental wellbeing, the climate they live in, and many other factors. Therefore, it is natural that each one of us has different needs for skincare as well.

But with so many skincare products on the market, it is not always easy to find the right one for you. This is where Revieve provides a solution by creating a platform to help consumers find the right products for them and enables them to further pursue beauty goals and improve their overall health.

Our product lineup clearly reflects our vision. In addition to our Skincare, Makeup, Nutrition, and Suncare Advisor products, we are currently exploring other verticals such as Haircare.

Take a look here how the Skincare Advisor works:

Japan: High Market Fit?

NIH: Revieve was established in Finland, and has offices in the US and Spain. How did you get started in Japan?

Mori:

One of the reasons why our founder, Sampo Parkkinen, started the company was because he had his own challenges in choosing the right skincare products. And since he was living in the US at that time, he also set up a base in the US along with Finland. In 2021, we started operating in Japan and Taiwan as well. APAC is a region where we will continue to expand our business.

Sampo has a special connection to Japan, as he has been working with a leading Japanese beauty and wellness brand in the global market since the beginning of Revieve’s journey.

In fact, we feel that there is a strong affinity between Revieve’s vision and the mindset of Japanese consumers. For Japanese consumers, skincare is all about how to improve your natural skin. Even for makeup, natural looking looks are preferred. The concept of inner beauty is also quite widespread. Revieve’s vision of skincare, health care, and wellness being interconnected is similar to the attitudes of the Japanese people towards skincare.

In some other markets, beautytech mainly refers to virtual makeup, but in Japan, I feel that people are more aware of using technology to improve their natural skin condition.

For example, people in Japan are interested in what kind of information our platform is using to determine the “healthiness” of the skin, or how nutritional knowledge is used for developing our technology. But in other markets, usually, the main topic of discussion is how gamification can be used to stimulate purchasing, or how our platform can make products attractive in the virtual environment.

The Japanese cosmetics industry has always emphasized R&D, which makes the industry quite close to life science. This makes the market even more appealing for us.

Finding Win-Win Partners

NIH: What are your main activities in Japan at the moment?

Mori: At the moment we are focusing on 2 things. Firstly we are searching for companies to collaborate with, and secondly, we want to raise the awareness of Revieve among the beauty brands and retailers.

We have some exciting projects coming up that we cannot disclose yet, but some of our recent announcements are a partnership with GLC Inc and our advisory board additions that bring Masanobu Katoh and Dr. Akira Date, Ph.D to our company to better guide our Japan expansion.

GLC is the developer of Smart Mirror, a large touch panel display that can be used in various situations, such as in remote customer service.

For GLC, adding Revieve’s technology as a module to their Smart Mirrors makes it easier to approach customers in novel ways. For Revieve, GLC’s expertise in e-commerce, BOPIS (buy online, pickup in store), and omnichannel commerce are attractive for our future business development. We are pleased to have a mutually complementary win-win relationship.

Revieve’s Competitiveness

NIH: There are similar solutions to Revieve both in Japan and other parts of the world. What are your strengths and competitive advantages?

Mori: I believe we have 3 unique aspects:

First, Revieve provides a white-label solution, therefore our technology can be used by any brand or company as a platform solution.

Second, we are a neutral player in the beauty industry. Some of the major brands have developed similar platforms on their own, but in fact, the fundamental technology which analyzes the skin and accumulates the data (called computer vision) can be commonized. What Revieve provides is this commonizable part, which is necessary for all similar platforms. The parts beyond this commonizable part can be customized by building on top of it, which then makes the platform unique to the client brand. In Revieve’s platform, all consumer data is anonymized, which eliminates concerns about handling personal data.

The third point is the reliability of our computer vision. We have dermatologists as members of our executive board, and we have put significant efforts into R&D. For example, we have conducted tens of experiments to see how dermatologists’ diagnoses match or differ from Revieve’s skin diagnosis, and publish reports and articles on the trends in the beautytech industry.

NIH: Do you have any plans to promote R&D in Japan focusing on Japanese people’s skin and beauty?

Mori: Yes, we are looking into this opportunity as well.

Differences in Business Culture: Japan and Finland

NIH: This is your first experience working for a Finnish (or Nordic) company.

Do you feel any differences in business culture compared to your previous working environments?

Mori: Compared to my past experiences at US and Indian companies, my colleagues at Revieve place more importance on teamwork and have a culture of listening to others’ opinions. In that sense, I feel that Revieve’s culture is somewhat similar to Japan.

But although both Finland and Japan value teamwork, I feel there is a big difference in the structure of the team: in Finland, employees are all equal and teammates have a flat relationship, whereas, in Japan, teams are constructed vertically and havehierarchical relationships. My flat relationship with the management team in Helsinki enables us to communicate smoothly and make quick decisions.

Another difference between Finland and Japan may be the diversity of the employees. Finnish startups are often called “born global” and aim to expand their businesses to the world from the very beginning, so it is common to have a wide range of nationalities among their employees. At Revieve, Finnish nationals consist actually only about 25% of the employees, the rest 75% are from different nationalities — I think this is particularly high.

NIH: Please tell us about your future plans.

Mori: Right now the most important thing to work on is to raise Revieve’s brand recognition. We also need to create a good partner ecosystem to tap into. Localization and R&D activities for Japan are also on the table. Since we have many goals to work towards, I am interested in meeting as many potential partners as possible, who share our values and are interested in our technology.

NIH: Thank you very much for your time today! We are looking forward to hearing about your next steps in Japan.

ノルディックイノベーションハウス東京は、北欧５カ国のスタートアップ、スケールアップ、成長企業の日本進出を支援するコミュニティプラットフォームです。強力なコミュニティとネットワークを生かして、北欧企業と日本のステークホルダーを繋いでいきます。

Nordic Innovation House Tokyo is a community platform accelerating high-quality Nordic startups, scale-ups, and growth companies to Japan. Via our strong community and network, we connect Nordic companies into the right ecosystem stakeholders.

本記事の日本語版はこちら.

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