New Zealand Brand Tronque To Launch Luxury Body Care Products At Neiman Marcus And Saks Fifth Avenue

Auckland, New Zealand-based Tronque is building a prestige beauty presence in the United States with launches at Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus.

The luxury body care brand will be soon be available on Saks’ and Neiman Marcus’s websites, and it will roll out to 43 Saks locations and 37 Neiman Marcus locations in the new year. Tronque will be the first New Zealand beauty brand to debut at both department store retailers.

“These have been stores that I’ve deeply admire, the way that they curate their products and the brands that they have are truly the best of the best, and they are some of the toughest stores to get into,” says Tanné Snowden, who introduced Tronque in November 2021. “I thought this would be a goal in two to three years time and to achieve it in less than a year makes me feel as if we’re on the right track and that they understand the ethos.”

Preceding Saks and Neiman Marcus, Tronque entered Canadian aesthetics concept Formula Fig, American social commerce platform Flip and Kiwi department store Smith & Caughey. The brand is stocked at plastic surgeons’ and dermatologists’ offices as well. Tronque has partnered with Adit, the retail matchmaking service owned by Beauty Independent parent company Indie Beauty Media Group, to help it reach retailers.

Currently, retail constitutes roughly 40% of Tronque’s sales. The remainder is from direct-to-consumer distribution. Tronque plans to travel to Australia in 2023 and is looking to grow its retail network in Europe and the U.S. “We don’t really want to be anywhere and everywhere,” says Snowden. “We would rather be sought out from the consumer and have them to come to us. We are a niche brand, and we don’t think if we’re on every single shelf everywhere that it’s going to work.”

The idea for Tronque occurred to Snowden as she was recovering from her second endometriosis surgery. The surgery left her with five massive scars and a mission to educate herself about what she put on her body. She started her self-education on Google and learned about the prevalence of endocrine disruptors in beauty products. Next, she turned her attention to her bathroom cabinet to eliminate products that had 10 ingredients she identified in her research as questionable.

“I went through every single ingredient list of every single product. I had to throw away 53 and was only left with three,” she recounts. “That was a huge shifting point in my life where I thought, ‘Have I been harming myself? Has my beauty routine been driving these endometriosis symptoms?’”

The answer to Snowden’s questions is tricky. While some analysis has linked the likelihood of developing endometriosis to endocrine-disrupting chemicals such as parabens and benzophenones used in beauty products, the evidence is mixed. Michelle Wong, the cosmetic chemist behind educational content destination Lab Muffin Beauty Science, mentions, for example, that parabens have been relied on for hundreds of years, and human studies haven’t clearly connected them to health effects. She writes, “Parabens are mildly estrogenic, but compared to a lot of the other estrogens we encounter in everyday life like by eating tofu they are really mild.”

Still, in her kitchen, Snowden began making the sorts of products she thought should be in her bathroom cabinet with raw ingredients from New Zealand, her home country. She aimed to create natural, active formulas that were safe to apply and effective at diminishing scars. She says, “It was very evident what ingredients were working and what weren’t.”

After teaming up with cosmetic chemists to perfect Tronque’s formulations, Snowden released the brand with three products: Scar Concentrate, Exfoliating Refining Serum and Firming Butter. A Vitamin C Body Oil and Body Contour Massager joined the lineup last month. Tronque is the latest brand to break into the hot body care category. Nécessaire, Nakery Beauty, Kate McLeod and Gente are brands playing in the category, too.

According to market data firm The NPD Group, U.S. prestige body skincare sales hit $819.3 million in the last 12 months and jumped 36% from January to September. “The face is always first and the body is usually forgotten about, a leftover, but we are all about celebrating it and looking after it just as you should your face,” says Snowden, adding, “There’s such a gap in the market because there’s so much to explore. There are so many issues specifically for the skin of the body, and it’s really about taking those issues and finding products that will solve them and giving people a better experience.”

Tronque’s prices range from $70 to $120. Snowden says the steep prices are due to high-performance ingredients such as mamaku extract, kiwifruit seed oil, red seaweed and Manuka leaf. She sources select ingredients from outside New Zealand, but tries to stick to botanicals and minerals from New Zealand when possible. New Zealand ingredient supplier Organic Bioactives assists Tronque with sourcing ingredients.

“We have some of the most incredible ingredients in New Zealand, they’re bioactive, they’re sourced locally, sustainable and include some of the most beautiful algae and native plants that most beauty brands don’t really know about,” says Snowden. “We’re really lucky to include those ingredients because they work so well, they’re so different, and they just have so many benefits to them. It definitely sets us apart on a world stage.”

Scar Concentrate is Tronque’s bestseller. Before-and-after photos have been a powerful marketing tool for the brand, particularly in Scar Concentrate’s case. “You can’t really argue with that proof,” says Snowden. “Before-and-after photos have just completely changed the game and the way that we sell.”

Tronque’s average customer is aged between 30 and 40 years old and can typically afford to dole out $100 or more on luxury body care products. “They’re the buyers who walk into our retailers and also online who buy two or three products at a time,” says Snowden. “They’ve said that they’ve finally found products that actually do what they say.”