Sitting in quarantine and musing at city vistas bereft of pollution, I was suddenly struck by a conversation between family members. They were discussing Fenty, the eponymous (yes, that's her last name) beauty and fashion brand of global superstar Rihanna. It had grown into a billion dollar makeup line that has taken the world of cosmetics by storm. And it all started with a simple idea: create a make-up line that caters to all skin tonnes. I was immediately struck with the question: why hadn't anyone thought of this before?

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To those readers familiar with my previous posts, it should be readily clear. The cosmetics industry was staffed with people used to doing things a certain way and catering to a market they knew well. Taking a risk was dangerous, but they also probably thought it superfluous: the cosmetics industry has been growing at a healthy rate of 5% over the past two decades, while the overall beauty industry as a whole is already worth $500+ billion dollars.

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The example of the energy company Shell also comes to mind from Peter Senge's book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization which I discussed before. Here, he talks about how Shell was one of the first to realise how deep seated 'mental models' of managers in the 1970s and 1980s were holding the company back (it was the weakest of the seven largest oil companies).

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Through different scenario planning activities, a division in the company called Group Planning worked to showcase how manager's bias was contributing to unrealistic expectations about the industry. Their work proved fruitful, and when the Oil Embargo came in 1973-4, Shell was better placed than the other oil giants to capitalise.

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"While competitors reined in their divisions and centralized control—a common response to crisis—Shell did the opposite. This gave their operating companies more room to maneuver while their competitors had less". All this was possible thanks to managers being taught to challenge their deep-seated world views about the oil industry.

 

"Shell's managers", Senge tells us "saw themselves entering a new era of supply shortages, lower growth, and price instability. Because they had come to expect the 1970s to be a decade of turbulence... they responded to the turbulence effectively. Shell had discovered the power of managing mental models."

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Had the beauty industry been aware of such insights, things would have panned out differently. Vogue's recently published on "How Fenty Beauty Changed The State Of Play In The Industry" would not have been written in the first place. 

It wouldn't have taken much scenario planning in the beauty industry - focusing on the assumptions that staff held about what trends were likely to develop - to see that their narratives about the world were flawed.

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YouTube and Instagram had over the past decade (coupled with the growth of beauty brand Sephora at around the same time) led to a massive creative industry that was bypassing the highbrow fashion industry and magazine covers. 

 

With this development in the beauty world, a new way of learning emerged that also created a new industry: the rise of online influencers (like Kim Kardashian) and a frenzy around experimenting with novel techniques and make-up colours.

 

In this environment the lack of products catered towards non-white skin tonnes was a major talking point online among influencers.

 

These influencers created new narratives about the need for change. They did this by innovating novel ways of circumventing the limitations imposed by  the beauty industry, limitations that the Vogue article above argued was the problem of the messaging coming from the industry that basically translated to “if you don’t fit an age-old Eurocentric ideal of beauty, you are not welcome". This was the "white elephant in the room of a tone-deaf business. Fenty Beauty didn’t just address this, it blew the conversation wide open".

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Rihanna's genius was realising this first, and breaking into a market with her brand Fenty. It has since spawned into a $3 billion operation. And although others had tried earlier (brands like Make Up Forever, Cover Girl, Maybelline, Revlon and L'Oréal) their products range never catered fully to darker skin tones. 

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Fenty caused a frenzy because it successfully tapped into a powerful narrative that had been brewing among many communities of women: that the beauty industry doesn't care about people with darker skin tones, and that their products weren't designed for them in mind. They didn't just create dark foundation, they created an entire line. Fenty offered them a sense that that weren't being ignored.  And all it took was a 50 shades of concealer. 

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