Empire of the Supergoop SPF

LONDON — Supergoop is working to take its user-friendly SPF products global, and is clearing various regulatory hurdles to do so.

The company specializes in SPF products that blend into its range of makeup, body care and skin products, aiming to avoid sunscreen that is sticky, tacky or messy.

In 2022, the brand reached $250 million in sales, a 65 percent year-on-year increase, and now is eyeing expansion in the U.K., Europe and Middle East with stockists Space NK and Sephora.

“Sunscreen is regulated differently in pretty much every part of the world. The complexity of doing this, whether it’s how you do your packaging or how you register your formulas, you have to build a lot of expertise and infrastructure,” Amanda Baldwin, chief executive officer of Supergoop, told WWD Beauty Inc. The brand’s expansion has been slow to date, but the company is now ready to pick up the pace.

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Canada and Australia are most regulated by government agencies; meanwhile Europe has the highest standards in terms of ingredients.

“We actually look to the EU in terms of one of the bellwethers of how you think about ingredient choices,” said Baldwin.

Supergoop has been in the U.K. market since 2020, right before the pandemic hit, and it launched in Sephora throughout Europe in March this year, already beating expectations that were put in place.

Baldwin attributes success to the brand’s differentiated formulas.

Baldwin sat down with her team making a list of why consumers don’t like sunscreen, among the list was: “it leaves a white cast, it smells funny and it’s sticky.”

“You have to tell people, you can’t just put a product on a shelf, no matter how beautiful it is,” she added, explaining the brand’s marketing strategy started off with a couple of big pop-ups in Paris, media campaigns and a sit-down dinner in London.

Baldwin is a marketer by background, she previously served as chief marketing officer and senior vice president on the operating team at L Catterton, a private equity firm; vice president for retail development on Dior beauty’s marketing team and a marketing director at Clinique.

While Supergoop is expanding digitally and internationally, plans for a brick-and-mortar store aren’t in the cards for now, but it’s not something they’re ruling out just yet.

Baldwin joked that on her visit to Covent Garden, where beauty brands such as Chanel, Diptyque, Dior and Molton Brown have set up shop, the idea of a Supergoop store would be one she’s considering in the future.

The Asian market is the brand’s most educated when it comes to understanding the importance of wearing sunscreen; meanwhile in Europe, the question of “am I going to get a tan?” still resides.

Baldwin said the U.S.’s attitude to sunscreen and Supergoop has dramatically shifted in the last seven years. 

“It really is not just about the beach or a sunny day; even when it’s cold and rainy out, you are getting the same amount of UVA damage as you would otherwise. It’s what causes skin cancer and 90 percent signs of aging. Skin cancer is obviously something that we don’t talk a lot about because we don’t believe in scaring people into something, but it’s certainly an underlying mission,” she said.