For 78 Indie Beauty Expo (IBE) exhibiting brands, the holiday season just got merrier. They were chosen as finalists for the 2017 Best In Show Awards from a cohort of over 200 nominees selected from this year’s pool of around 400 exhibitors.
“This year’s Best In Show Awards were especially competitive because it was across three expos: LA, Dallas and NY,” says IBE co-founder Jillian Wright. “We also added new categories, like Best Ingestible, based on the trends we saw emerging in indie beauty. As competition heats up, becoming a finalist — and ultimately a winner — provides a moment for the brands to really take pride in their accomplishment. The Best In Show Awards are a way to recognize and celebrate the brands and keep their stories relevant and current.”
Since the announcement of the nominees in September, the panel of 14 Best In Show expert evaluators — including Follain founder and CEO Tara Foley, The Chalkboard Mag editor in chief Suzanne Hall and Shop LC senior beauty buyer Jeanne Tamayo — have been diligently scrubbing, spritzing and soaping with the nominated products to arrive at three finalists in each of the 26 categories. Expert evaluators appraised features such as design, efficacy, ingredients, performance, packaging and scent.
“Being a judge for IBE Best in Show has been one of my all time favorite activities,” says Tamayo, former Global Category Manager – Beauty for Whole Foods Market. “It allowed me to apply my buying skills and techniques in a completely new structure. It helped me discover a new viewpoint in reviewing…individual brand SKUs across a single category, rather than the holistic line review I usually exercise when deciding whether to enter a brand. This effectively became an innovative industry [and] category review process for me.” Insight from Best In Show expert evaluators is a benefit brands enjoy as a result of getting their products in the hands of these sought-after — and often hard to reach — editors and buyers. “The industry experts who were invited to take part [in evaluating] come from media and retail, and spent over two months with the products,” explains Wright. “Their feedback is invaluable and will help the brands grow.”
Nader Naeymi-Rad, co-founder of IBE adds, “We looked at how some other groups select winners, and we decided that just sending surveys to a few hundred people who attend a show was not the way to go; that model rewards awareness among a narrow constituency and really not much else. Best in Show brands are nominated based on a host of factors —including buyer, press and consumer feedback at the shows — but the actual evaluation to select a winner is conducted by professional beauty experts who spend over two months with only a handful of nominated products. This gives each expert the time they need to conduct an in-depth assessment of each product. It is definitely a much more labor intensive process, but, ultimately, we believe it produces a more credible decision and one that indie brand founders — who pour their hearts and soul into their products — deserve.”
The Best In Show finalists are most excited for the recognition of both the products they’ve created and the passion those creations were born out of. “We’re honored to be a finalist,” enthuses Veíse Beauty founder and formulator Angelica Caporuscio, whose Your Favorite Body Butter is a Best Face/Body Butter finalist. “Our mission in creating Veíse is to provide the cleanest beauty products and empower women everywhere. We hope Your Favorite Body Butter will help propel us towards that goal.
This year’s most nominated brand, Auckland-based Girl Undiscovered, agrees. “We were beyond excited to hear that Girl Undiscovered has been named as a finalist in not just one, but three categories,’ says the brand’s CEO and co-founder, Philipa Gebbie. “After a year of hard work and dedication, it’s like a dream come true. We are hugely passionate about taking our made-in-New Zealand and wildly beautiful product to the world, and to be recognized in this way is very humbling. We like to think we’ve captured a little of the magic from our bio-diverse, totally unique environment in our packaging, which helps tell the story of Girl Undiscovered and the journey we have gone on to take it to the world.”
See the full list of 2017 Best In Show finalists here. The winners will be announced next month before IBE LA 2018 (January 24-25). All 2017 Best In Show winners will be included in the second edition of IBE’s Best In Show collection, available for purchase on IBE’s site soon.
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