The BoF Podcast | Gucci Westman and David Neville on Creating a Luxury Beauty Brand That Lasts

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Background:

Husband and wife duo Gucci Westman and David Neville’s luxury beauty label Westman Atelier has become an industry favourite, winning fans for its curated collection of cosmetics, holistic approach to beauty and strong focus on ingredients.

“We can’t really be pigeonholed. Retailers tend to segment [the brand] into luxury, makeup artistry or clean,” shared Neville. “The most important thing is the performance of the product … good products sell themselves.”

In this conversation from The Business of Beauty Global Forum 2024, Priya Rao, executive editor of The Business of Beauty, sits down with Westman and Neville to discuss how they’re building a multidimensional luxury beauty brand that lasts.

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Key insights:

• Growing up in Sweden, Westman said that the importance of high quality ingredients was instilled in her at a young age. “The Swedish lifestyle is all about value over quantity, having a slow burn and really savouring that experience. I think that really informed my ideas around what we should do and how we should do it,” she shared.
• Neville believes that a product focus is crucial to longevity. “We spent about three and a half years prior to launching in the market just developing with a singular focus on our products. That mentality has been with us all along this journey.”
• Westman highlights trust as another essential ingredient to their brand formula. “Our customer knows that she’s getting something that is clean, is going to perform, and is going to be good for her skin. I think we’ve established this sort of loyalty and trust is imperative in this kind of thing.”
• To build a brand that lasts, Westman Atelier’s strategy is to take it all one step at a time. “We think about brand-building in the literal sense of building a brand brick by brick. Every day we are building our team, building our capacity, building our assortment, introducing new products. We’re building awareness through new customer acquisition, whether that be direct to consumer or through our retail relationships,” said Neville.

Additional resources:

• How I Became… A Makeup Artist: Gucci Westman, one of the world’s top makeup artists, shares her lessons from starting out, the challenges of freelance and why beauty requires the same skills as a psychologist.
• Can Gucci Westman Build the Next Great Luxury Beauty Brand? The makeup artist’s four-year-old brand, Westman Atelier, is finding an audience alongside much larger competitors in the high-end colour space by appealing to a customer willing to invest in pricier cosmetics.