THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2019 N D3When Deanna Pai lost her eyebrows to che-
motherapy in 2015, she had almost every se-
rum, gel and pencil at her disposal — she
was a beauty editor at Cosmopolitan maga-
zine — but no good solution. Her favorite
brow gel “looked awful, like watercolor on
skin,” she said, and she didn’t have the ener-
gy to try to pencil in a realistic brow.
“It’s really hard when there isn’t any hair
to guide you,” said Ms. Pai, 30, who learned
she had a rare liver cancer at 23.
What she wanted was natural-looking
stick-on replacement brows made of human
hair. The ideal was a pair that weren’t the
exact same shape, because, she said, “the
biggest giveaway of fake eyebrows is when
they’re twins instead of sisters.”
So Ms. Pai, now a freelance writer in Man-
hattan, turned to a crowdsourced company
called Volition Beauty. The start-up lets
anyone submit a product idea, which is then
put to registered users of the site for a vote.
(Volition recently raised $6 million in fund-
ing, led by Unilever Ventures.) The brows
made the cut.
After much personal testing by Ms. Pai,
who was particularly picky about the glue,
shape and color, Volition introduced Mis-
sion Brows in 2017.
Mission Brows is by far the most niche of
the 26 products Volition has created, but it
speaks to the company’s philosophy: “If
there is an audience for it, we will make it,”
said Patricia Santos, a founder.
This, Ms. Santos said, is contrary to her
years of experience in the beauty industry,
“where a lot of innovative products don’t get
made because they’re not million-dollar
products. The audience for brows is small,
but the people who need it really need it.”
Ms. Pai’s product is available only on the
Volition website, but an eye treatment gel
that’s also a primer (the idea of a makeup
artist) sold out eight times at Sephora, and
the Prismatic Luminizing Shield sunscreen
(from a beauty editor turned real estate
agent) sold out in 24 hours at its debut, then
again in the same week. (Allure magazine
was sufficiently enamored to alert its read-
ers when the sunscreen was back in stock.)
Cindy Deily, the vice president for skin-
care merchandising at Sephora, said via
email that the retailer was drawn to Volition
because of its “unique” customer focus. It
“built a brand around the idea of asking peo-
ple what they want, turning those wants,
needs, and ideas into products,” she wrote.
VOLITION ISN’T THE FIRSTbeauty company
to crowdsource. In 2015, the Glossier
founder Emily Weiss asked readers of her
Into the Gloss blog, “What’s Your Dream
Face Wash?” The answers informed Glossi-
er’s best-selling Milky Jelly Cleanser.
But Volition, based in Sausalito, Calif., is
the first to allow “innovators,” as the com-
pany calls them, to drive the idea develop-
ment — and profit from it. The percentage
one receives varies, partly based on how de-
veloped the idea is when it’s proposed. The
cosmetic chemist who already had the for-
mula for the detoxifying silt gelée mask she
proposed gets more than the innovator who
has a seedling of an idea.
The women interviewed — so far, all suc-
cessful products have come from women —
could not give figures because of agree-
ments they signed with Volition, but the
company said that one innovator will make
$100,000 this year and several others
$30,000. (Ms. Pai, who has been in remis-
sion for three years, has donated her share
to the Ulman Cancer Fund for Young
Adults, which runs a Cancer to 5K training
program that she said was key to her
recovery.)
Some 4,000 ideas have been submitted in
the last two and a half years, though as
word has spread, there are now about 100 a
week. Volition first makes sure ideas are
new and feasible. (A machine that delivers
the perfect manicure didn’t pass muster be-
cause available technology can’t yet distin-
guish between nail and skin.) About 11.5
percent make the cut.
The company’s network of chemists
helps develop the concept, then a campaign
is posted on the site. This is not a first-past-
the-post voting system. Volition software
determines a different vote threshold for
every idea, based partly on a guess of how
many voters actually will buy the product,
plus the minimum number of customers
needed to make the economics work. (Nerd
alert: The software is called Pyxis, after the
ceramic jars used in ancient Greece to store
cosmetics.)Ms. Santos and her business partner,
Brandy Hoffman, met in 2012, when they
worked at Algenist. They founded Volition
partly in reaction to their frustration with
the beauty industry’s relative slowness to
embrace diversity and inclusion.
“When people are talking about inclu-
sion, they’re only talking about foundation
shades,” Ms. Hoffman said. “It’s 2019. That
should be the bare minimum.” She is gay
and plus-size (her description) and felt
“constantly minimized at meetings.” She re-
called a team photo at one job, when she
was told, “ ‘Brandy, you should have a quote,
but you won’t be in the photo.’ ”THEY ARE PROUD THATideas roll in from a
range of beauty hounds/zealots. Volition’s
Strawberry-C Brightening Serum came
from Varika Pinnam, 20, a University of
Texas at Dallas student whose D.I.Y. experi-
ments with her sister revealed that fresh-
cut strawberries improved skin brightness
and tone.
Nastia Liukin, 29, the 2008 Olympic gold-
medal gymnast, pitched a celery-powered
moisturizer, musing that the celery juice
she had drunk daily since she was 8 might
benefit her skin as much as her mother al-
ways insisted it did her body.“This was before celery juice was super-
in and super-popular,” Ms. Liukin said, re-
ferring to when she suggested the cream.
(Celery has hydrating and anti-inflamma-
tory benefits. Volition said the vegetable’s
phytonutrients also have pore-minimizing
properties, though there are no independ-
ent studies that confirm this.)
Ms. Liukin, who discovered Volition
when she picked up the luminizing sun-
screen on one of her weekly trips to
Sephora, went through the same process as
everyone else. Unlike other innovators,
though, she had nearly a million Instagram
followers she could mobilize to vote.
(A number of influencers actually have
failed to get their products made. “You’d be
surprised who doesn’t have engagement,”
Ms. Santos said.)
Ms. Liukin likened the hands-on develop-
ment of her Celery Green Cream to refining
a gold-medal routine. “I know that sounds
cheesy,” she said. She held her breath when
her product was introduced in July. “I’m an
athlete. I’m a competitor. I want it to be
successful.”
You could say it stuck the landing: It sold
out instantly, generating a wait list of
40,000.If You Have a Great Idea,
They Could Make It Reality
LUCI GUTIÉRREZBy COURTNEY RUBINSO FAR, ALL
SUCCESSFUL
PRODUCTS HAVE
COME FROM
WOMEN.SKIN DEEPVolition Beauty, a crowdsourced start-up, depends on your input for the merchandise it creates.
The Fur SalonGIAMBATTISTA VALLI
Pink dyed mink vest with water snake inserts.
Fur origin: mink, Finland; water snake, Indonesia.