Adit, The Good Face Project Partner To Help Brands Determine If Their Ingredients Meet Retailers’ Standards

Adit, a service from Beauty Independent parent company Indie Beauty Media Group that connects beauty and wellness brands to leading retailers, is beefing up its data and technology by teaming up with transparency and innovation platform The Good Face Project.

Implementing The Good Face Project’s ingredient Formulator into the Adit brand profile allows brands to develop products that have clean beauty market viability, while enhancing Adit’s ability to efficiently determine where products will be a best-retail market fit. The Formulator ingredient tool is AI-powered and backed by an INCI-level ontology featuring 120,000-plus ingredients mapped across about 15 dimensions of efficacy and safety. It adjusts when regulatory, scientific and consumer sentiment changes take place, allowing for real-time input on formula design or the procurement process.“Our customers call us the Rosetta Stone of cosmetics,” says Good Face co-founder and CEO Iva Teixeira. 

IBMG co-founder Nader Naeymi-Rad realized brand founders needed a way to take greater control over and have accountability for their formulations, whether or not they are using a third-party manufacturer. “We kept hearing from founders who were told by their manufacturers that a certain ingredient is clean or a formulation is compliant, but it ends up being on a major retailer’s recently updated restrictive list,” he says. “On the other side, founders trying to self-formulate have difficulty keeping up with the changing regulations whether it’s in regard to specific ingredients or ingredient concentrations. It’s incredibly difficult to keep track of it all, especially as more retailers develop standards.” 

Adit was launched in December 2020 and, in just over a year, has helped over 60 brands launch in its retail network. There are 150 more live transitions in the pipeline currently. The service works with dozens of the world’s most sought-after retailers, including many with stringent ingredient standards such as Credo, The Detox Market, Grove Collaborative and Beauty Heroes. Since clean ingredient criteria vary from retailer to retailer, quickly and clearly identifying ingredients that are in accordance with their restrictions has been an ongoing challenge for brands and manufacturers.

Ulta’s Conscious Beauty collection specifies that a brand must be free of parabens and phthalates along ingredients from more than 25 chemical categories to be placed in the curation. In contrast, Credo’s The Dirty List contains over 2,700 specific ingredients it avoids, from elemental aluminum powder to polyethylene glycol.

The Good Face Project supports Target, Grove Collaborative, The Detox Market and other retailers in implementing their clean and sustainable beauty categories. The company has also signed on several major brands such as Vegamour and Alastin that are leveraging Good Face Formulator to drive and manage their product development pipelines. In less than 10 months, the Formulator has been used in the development of tens of thousands of products by over 800 brands and their manufacturing partners.

“Especially in the indie space, because third-party manufacturers can be developing the formulations and handling the regulatory piece of development, frequently there is an information gap,” says Teixeira. She notes technology at Good Face’s level is often cost-prohibitive for emerging brands without a service like Adit aggregating the demand and creating a portal on the brand’s behalf. Teixeira adds, “By providing access to our Formulator, Adit lowers the overall cost of creating products and of reaching retailers. This partnership is such a natural fit for both sides and is a game-changer for brands and retailers.”

“As a new brand just beginning to evaluate retail opportunities, access to the Good Face Project tool has been invaluable,” says Misty Reich, founder of travel solution skincare line 35 Thousand. “It is a once-and-done process rather than us completing the same exercise for each and every retailer we are interested in working with.” She estimates Adit’s implementation of the tool has saved her at least two weeks’ worth of work by whittling down which retailers she should pursue before she spends time and effort on outreach and assets.

During the Adit onboarding process, members are directed to a landing page on the Good Face Formulator where they can create an account and paste in their full ingredient lists. Ingredient parameters for the retailers within the Adit network are cross-referenced instantly tapping those ingredient lists. Ingredients are then highlighted green if they’re a fit for retailers or red if they’re not compliant with their standards. Flagged ingredients have an attached explanation about why they’re flagged and where they’re not compliant. There’s no additional charge to use the Formulator for Adit brands.

“Submitting my brand’s ingredients for potential retailers has been an absolute breeze. Good Face’s AI identifies each ingredient easily and highlights anything that isn’t yet in the vast database,” says Tronque Body Care founder Tanné Snowden. Snowden’s brand uses several ingredients only found in New Zealand that the Formulator didn’t have listed in its system yet. “Within 24 hours, the ingredients were identified and added to the database for future use. Adit and Good Face teams are ready to advise with any query you may have. Their innovative platform is setting the bar high.”

Strengthening Adit’s technology capabilities is an important strategy as IBMG doubles down on its digital offerings to assist the beauty community. “Our ability to interface with buyers and retailers and cross-reference data points is extremely valuable to both brands and retailers,” says Naeymi-Rad. “IBMG and Adit have laid the groundwork to become a trusted resource for buyers and retailers. We aim to continue to be invaluable to them as beauty retail evolves and partnerships like this only further strengthen that position.”

“We rely on Good Face to implement our ingredient standards and on Adit for sourcing new brands,” says Romain Gaillard, founder of The Detox Market. “To date, each has successfully helped our business in their own way, which is why from our perspective, the incorporation of Good Face into the Adit service makes perfect sense in helping us create and maintain the best clean beauty assortment filled with interesting, effective and safe products.”

While the clean beauty movement has come under fire recently, its importance is demonstrated by the growing number of retailers prioritizing clean beauty selections and laying out restrictive substance policies. A recent report from market research firm Kline predicted that retailers and brands will continue to establish stricter ingredient guidelines resulting in “cleaner, more natural, new brand entrants and product reformulations. Clean beauty claims will continue to penetrate categories, such as makeup and fragrances, dominated by conventional players.” Several recent deals like the Courtin-Clarins family holding company Famille C scooping up Ilia and Brentwood Associates making a strategic investment in Pacifica exemplify a belief in the clean beauty segment’s staying power.

Good Face doesn’t come down on either side of the clean beauty debate. The platform’s sole focus is championing better, efficient processes. “I think the term ‘clean’ will evolve,” says Teixeira. “At the end of the day, it’s all about providing the right information to the people that need it. Clean beauty is picking up on the consumer’s need to understand what is in a product, where it comes from and where it will go once we have used it. It doesn’t matter whether we agree or disagree principally with this movement, it is driven by the consumer.”