- How do you describe Chemberry in 3 words? And why?
Transparent: On Chemberry, we aim to give customers easy access to product information from 33,000+ personal care ingredients by collecting different sources of raw material suppliers and certification bodies into one open platform.
Comprehensive: Currently, we are one of the largest databases for personal care ingredients and we have a market coverage of over 90%. Since Chemberry doesn’t have any listing fees, we also allow small and niche suppliers to display their products on Chemberry, thus giving them additional visibility and customer access.
Customer-centric: The idea of Chemberry was born out of over 50 expert interviews and is continually evolving as we converse daily with our clients to better understand their needs and translate it into our product. Using this mindset and approach of product development within the team, we are constantly improving Chemberry and are able to release new features quarterly to help to make the work for personal care brands and suppliers more efficient.
- What does customer-centricity mean and why is being a customer-centric company more important than ever?
Customers are the core of every business; they are our greatest asset and therefore need full dedication. Customer-centricity means to keep the customer as the focus and to create all services and products around his or her needs in order to deliver a positive experience.
With today’s social media presence, 24/7 availability of information just one mouse click away, and new companies arising every minute, it is harder than ever to have satisfied and loyal customers. Customers are seeking great experiences and want to be listened to. So if you are not creating a remarkable customer experience around your brand every day, it gets difficult to build a long-term relationship.
One of our team’s core values is to be customer-centric, by which we mean we listen and learn from our users. We build up relationships based on the customer’s individual needs, or to say in the words of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos: “We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”
- How are you different from key competitors and what is Chemberry’s vision?
Chemberry has a unique approach of addressing users’ pain points by offering a lean, open and comprehensive personal care platform. By focusing on getting the user on our platform when there is awareness of a certain trend or product, we make it super simple to stay on our platform until a buyer finds the right ingredient.
Currently, users are able to search, find and compare ingredients, but we are working hard on allowing direct transactions over our platform. To come closer to this industry-disrupting goal, we are seeking partnerships with companies where we see a symbiosis to expand our offering and are open for collaborations. With Chemberry, we aim to build an ecosystem that brings together all sorts of stakeholders that are relevant to create great beauty products.
Also, our vision is to create more transparency about sustainability. We’ve just started this initiative and allowing a transparent and sustainable value chain has become one of our key drivers. Last but not least, we see ourselves as the next generation of Chemfluencers with the goal of marketing our product and all the insights that we can offer on our blog and campaigns in a fresh and appealing way.
- With this amount of information available on your platform, how do you ensure the quality of your information?
With a total of 35,000+ consumer care ingredients from 500+ suppliers, 1.5 weekly blog posts and 15,000+ monthly users relying on our information, quality assurance is a high-priority for Chemberry. To tackle the quality of information on Chemberry, we’ve developed a chemical algorithm (called a crawler) that directly compiles the right data from relevant sources; in parallel, we work closely together with chemical experts who screen the product information on our index daily.
Furthermore, we’ve developed our sophisticated product editor where suppliers can directly edit their products online. This should not take longer than 5 minutes per product and it gives suppliers the opportunity to better market their products and differentiate themselves. After a company has edited and verified their information, they are marked as “Verified”, which gives an additional signal of validity to users.
Technology has a lot of advantages when it comes to transparency and real-time information, but we are also fully aware that it is a big responsibility to become and continue to be a credible information provider.
- As digitalization transforms many other industries, how do you think it is disrupting the chemical ingredient space? How will this further evolve?
Digitalization is relatively new in the chemical industry but is being adopted at a respectable rate. We believe Chemberry is an important digital industry initiative because it was born out of the chemical industry (it was developed as part of a Clariant digital transformation project) and it also aims to modernize the chemical industry collectively. Chemberry can only grow through collaboration with its partners and contributors and is actively seeking co-investment and collaboration partners.
We want those involved in the industry to feel empowered to influence this digitalization journey in the chemical industry. If an outsider such as Amazon or Alibaba were to grow in this field, the main stakeholders of the industry would likely have little say and would also potentially face huge business losses. Digital initiatives created by the chemical industry are also important because we see a change in customer behaviours. Customer experience was and is the success criteria of so many great products and services today, for example with the iPhone or Uber. People are now accustomed to these seamless experiences and also have high expectations across all touchpoints, including chemical sourcing. If we don’t act now and bring other chemical industry partners up to speed through an ecosystem approach, we risk being disrupted by external players while losing direct contact with our customer base.
- At in-Cosmetics Global 2020, you will have for the first time a unique company presence with your own booth. How else do you combine your traditional and digital marketing activities?
Going back to our value of customer-centricity, even though we are a digital company, it’s important for us at Chemberry to forge and maintain real relationships with the people behind the organizations that use our product. These face-to-face meetings at trade show events are an opportunity to show Chemberry’s human side and give a personal touch. We aim to provide an exceptional experience by engaging with our customer base in a way that leaves a lasting impression. In the last few years, we visited all the relevant trade shows to directly connect with our customers and execute our global approach. Also, we love the myriad of learning opportunities that shows give, such as seminars about sustainability or new market trends. Still, we try to approach the In-Cosmetics Show a bit differently and we will definitely have some surprises there – so make sure to stop by our booth 🙂
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