Dominic Symes Follows In His Cosmetic Chemist Father’s Footsteps With The Launch Of SkinEscens

At 49-years-old, South African cosmetic chemist Paul Symes died after suffering a massive heart attack, leaving behind two sons and thriving beauty company Justine, which would go on to be acquired by Avon.

More than three decades later, Dominic Symes is carrying on his family’s legacy by launching SkinEscens at the age his father passed away. To bring the skincare brand to market, Symes, a veteran advertising and marketing executive who moved 17 years ago to Southern California from Johannesburg, teamed up with Veronica Devine, the elder Symes’ former partner at Justine.

“I’ve always had this thought in the back of my mind that I wanted to develop my own skincare line. About two years ago, when I was working for a digital advertising agency, I came home and said to my wife, ‘It’s been bugging me for a long time. I really should start the line,’” recalls Symes. “I ended up calling Veronica, told her what I wanted to do, and she said, ‘I’m in.’ A few days later, I flew to South Africa, and that’s when we started developing the brand.”

SkinEscens’s initial four prestige products – Sensorial Botanical Cleanser, Rejuvenating Facial Powder, Intense Hydrating Gel and Age-Defying Serum – took a year to perfect. The range combines plant-based ingredients such as leaf juice from the bulbine frutescens, a succulent native to South Africa, with peptides and hyaluronic acids, and is meant to comprehensively address many of women’s skincare needs.

“I’ve always had this thought in the back of my mind that I wanted to develop my own skincare line. About two years ago, when I was working for a digital advertising agency, I came home and said to my wife, ‘It’s been bugging me for a long time. I really should start the line.'”

“In the luxury sector, women are using seven to nine products. Are they all really necessary from a skincare point of view? No, they are absolutely not. What’s most important is the efficacy of the products and consistency of use,” says Symes. “Our four products have the objective of decluttering skincare regimens and minimizing a woman’s routine to only a few minutes a day. We wanted every single one of our products to be a hero product.”

Versatile products, notably the Rejuvenating Facial Powder that acts as a cleanser, exfoliator and mask, support SkinEscens’s promise to streamline skin maintenance. The Intense Hydrating Gel contains hyaluronic acids of low and high molecular weights to operate on different layers of the skin. The Sensorial Botanical Cleanser provides a warming sensation during the application process to enliven the face while removing impurities, and the Age-Defying Serum caps off the skincare system with a complexion-boosting blend of fruit and seed oils, and peptides.

Varying in size from .7 to 2.7 ounces, the products are priced between $65 and $140. SkinEscens’s straightforward white and silver bottles with substantial font underscore its message of simplicity and ease. “We made the type big so a woman isn’t going to struggle to find the correct products,” notes Symes. The target customer is a woman in her thirties and above, but he mentions the brand is discovering surprising traction from younger consumers. Millennials are especially drawn to the Rejuvenating Facial Powder and Sensorial Botanical Cleanser.

“In the luxury sector, women are using seven to nine products. Are they all really necessary from a skincare point of view? No, they are absolutely not. What’s most important is the efficacy of the products and consistency of use. Our four products have the objective of decluttering skincare regimens.”

SkinEscens is sticking to a direct-to-consumer model at the beginning. The brand is available on its own website and Amazon. Playing to Symes’ strength in marketing and advertising, it’s concentrating heavily on paid social media efforts to grow recognition and revenues. Over about a week, SkinEscens reached 115,000 people and generated 250,000 impressions through those efforts, and propelled 2,300 unique visitors to its site, where they spend an average of two minutes.

Symes points out that SkinEscens’s Amazon presence gives it a global presence, and its products can be bought in 52 countries with relatively low shipping fees. “If I shipped a product to South Africa, and the product was let’s say $100, it would cost the customer $100 in shipping,” he details. “If I do it through Amazon, they may have to wait a lengthy amount of time – it’s probably two weeks – but they won’t pay more than $15 for shipping.”

SkinEscens’s early hurdle is common for skincare startups: most customers aren’t familiar with it. “Veronica is very, very well-known in South Africa. She’s almost like the Oprah of South Africa, but, in America, nobody knows who Veronica is,” says Symes. “The main challenge for us is awareness and credibility. We feel very, very confident about the efficacy of the products, but we are a new entity. Now, we have to develop a fan base and critical mass.”