Amid the daily hustle and bustle, taking a moment to coat her skin with a body care product has always been a welcome reprieve for Lauren McDonald, a retail consultant and former senior director of store operations at Ulta Beauty, whether she’s on the road for her job or dealing with the demands of parenthood at home.
“Body care was my earliest form of meditation,” she says. “We are all looking to bring a little bit more mindfulness into our life and be a little bit more present. It’s this idea of a small luxury. Nobody is going to see your back typically throughout the day, but that’s where you put on body care, and it’s just for you, it’s for nobody else.”
To offer that small luxury to a broader audience than herself, McDonald has launched the fragrance-centered minimalist body care brand PurelyYou with body cream in three scents—Become, Embody and Unfold—priced at $38 each for a 6.8-oz. jar, plus a $72 set with the trio. The brand rests on three pillars: clean formulas designed for the body that are good enough for the face, scents to evoke moods, and rituals of self-connection.
PurelyYou arrives as body care is shifting from a lowly commodity category to an in-demand premium good, at least among well-heeled gen Z and millennial shoppers desiring body care that delivers on facial skincare results and fragrance experiences. PurelyYou’s body cream is stacked with ingredients for hydration and skin barrier protection, including vitamins B and E, green tea extract, argan and jojoba oils, gotu kola and shea butter.
In the third quarter, body care along with sun care were the fastest-growing slices of prestige skincare, outpacing the segment’s 1% sales gain from last year, according to market research firm Circana. In the same quarter, prestige fragrance sales rose 7%, continuing strong momentum that’s seen four consecutive years of growth.
“When I was at Ulta Beauty, body care was a nascent category. It wasn’t a huge focus for us from a strategy perspective,” says McDonald, whose stint at Ulta stretched from 2016 to 2020. “In the last couple of years, I’ve loved seeing body care come to the forefront as a leader in the beauty industry. A big part of it is driven by fragrance.”
Perfecting the bespoke fragrances was the hardest part of PurelyYou’s two-and-a-half-year formulation process. McDonald scouted 35 fragrance houses before selecting two undisclosed companies to partner with. Become is uplifting and fresh, and contains notes of rose, mandarin and sandalwood. Embody is grounding and warm, and its notes feature vanilla, bergamot and amber. Unfold has a sensual and reflective scent, with notes of lavender, white jasmine and almond.
McDonald started PurelyYou with body cream because it has a universal appeal, is used throughout the year and fuels frequent purchases. “I reach for it over and over, so it made sense to launch with it,” she says. “It was also a vehicle for me to bring the fragrances to market and test them out.”
“I’ve loved seeing body care come to the forefront as a leader in the beauty industry.”
The brand will next expand its body care repertoire to products such as body oil, body scrub and body wash. Collaborations are integral to its merchandise strategy as well.
In keeping with its brand name, McDonald envisions PurelyYou’s core consumers as clean lifestyle seekers, a group representing a large swath of Americans. In a recent survey of 5,300 consumers in the United States, market intelligence firm Numerator estimates nearly three-quarters call a clean lifestyle important to them, with 57% reporting it’s important for them to incorporate clean beauty. PurelyYou is partnering with health and wellness influencers to spread the word to clean lifestyle consumers.
On its website, PurelyYou has a section sharing its ingredient safety framework, which aligns with the International Fragrance Association’s ingredient risk assessments and Credo’s clean beauty standard. Under trade protection rules, fragrance ingredients don’t have to be divulged, but Credo stipulates that brands have to categorize the sources of their fragrance ingredients, like whether they’re naturally derived or synthetic, although they don’t have to specify exact ingredients.
“I believe in clean beauty and think it’s where the market is heading, but it’s an unregulated term, and there’s no governing body setting standards,” she says. “Everybody wants to be clean, but there’s no consistent definition. I felt Credo had the most rigor.”
Out of the gate, PurelyYou is drilling into two main distribution channels: direct-to-consumer and TikTok Shop. Local clean beauty stores are a target, too, and McDonald is approaching stores in the Chicago area, where she’s based. She projects PurelyYou could earn back the money she invested to build it in roughly six months. She didn’t reveal the amount. The steepest investments she made were into product and fragrance development and inventory.
McDonald imagines that PurelyYou’s customer is shopping for brands like OSEA and Ouai at retailers like Sephora and Nordstrom, and bigger retail could enter its distribution within a year or so. However, McDonald’s tenure at Ulta Beauty taught her that thriving at a large chain is extremely challenging for a new brand. It requires established brand awareness, loyal customers, robust backend procedures and a substantive in-stock assortment.
“What we would experience at Ulta is there would be a lot of buzz around a brand, and it would be great to put ‘sold out’ on your website, but that doesn’t work at retail,” says McDonald. “You really need to be able to have solid inventory control and management and have inventory to sell because sold out is never a good thing at retail, and inventory is costly.”
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