Active Concepts: Multifunctional beauty and pet care synergy
07 Mar 2024 | Active Concepts
Meg Mullins, technical marketing professional at Active Concepts, joins Personal Care Insights to discuss the personal care supplier’s commitment to multifunctional beauty and why it is motivated to explore the pet care sector. Learn more about the overlap between personal and pet care and how the company plans to bridge a gap it sees in the market.
Hello, Meg.
Welcome to Personal Care Insights interview.
My name is Vina Patel, senior journalist at Personal Care Insights, and today we will be discussing what's upcoming for Active Concepts this year while reflecting on their product launches from last year.
Thank you so much for joining me today, Meg.
Can you please introduce yourself?
Of course, thanks for having me, Vena.
I'm so excited to be here.
So my name is Meg Mullins.
I am a technical marketing professional here at Active Concepts, and we at Active Concepts are all about specializing in natural extracts, active ingredients powered by nature.
In addition, we have some natural antimicrobials as.
So let's discuss what we're up to next.
I'm excited.
Yes, so nice to have you today.
So tell me, what is upcoming for Active Concepts this year considering last year's focus on multifunctional beauty and exploration of ingredients like pomegranate and lichen.
Yes, so multifunctional ingredients are so important.
We at Active Concepts, we always love to develop products that have interesting stories, have interesting origins, sustainability profiles, but at the same time, what we're seeing now.
What's always been important is multifunctional products, but now consumers and brands are now kind of wanting more targeted activity, targeted delivery, more of this, enhanced benefit for a specific category of performance.
So this is what we're kind of exploring more this year.
Mhm.
And for this year, is Active Concepts still going to prioritize multifunctional beauty products, and if so, why?
We always will, I think, prioritize multifunctional beauty products.
It's just something that the market will always demand, and especially adaptive concepts, multifunctional beauty can mean a lot of different things.
It can mean having enhanced, efficacy, benefits on the skin, cellular levels.
We also think, you know, at the same time, multifunctional products need to have really specific , kind of strength and power.
So at the same time, while they still are multifunctional, they still have that added addition of being very targeted and being very, concentrated, if you will.
Mhm.
And so what motivated Active concepts to explore on another topic, pet, the pet care sector, and what unique opportunities or challenges does it present in the beauty industry?
Yeah, so pet care, this was something that was totally new to us that we just started to get into, and I think what really brought us into the pet care space was realizing that we need to listen to consumers, right, because there's so many brands and consumers that Focus on taking care of themselves with a lot of emphasis on natural ingredients and safe products, but this same level of care and attention is also being directed towards their other members of their family, right?
So their furry friends, and what we've seen is a lot of people who traditionally are developing products for people.
Are now kind of branching into this pet care space, and what we've noticed is this really huge intersection between what we can provide from a personal care side has an insane amount of overlap between the pet care space.
So this was kind of a gap in the market that we saw, and we really wanted to address that to provide people not only Safe products for their pet care formulations, but also ones that are going to be natural and not have any synthetic preservation systems.
It's so many factors that are kind of leading the personal care space to also encompass the pet care space too.
And how does Active Concepts, approach developing products for the pet care market, and what role does it aim to play in shaping the intersection between pet care and beauty in the future?
Definitely.
So at Active Concepts, we have a lot of, you know, we discussed this before, multifunctional, multi-benefit products.
When we're developing products, we always will first have in mind, of course, humans, but what we've noticed is the same kind of benefits are still important for pets' safety, doing toxicology, assessments and making sure things are not going to be harmful for people or their pets.
And just the same level of care and attention that we give to developing our ingredients for humans.
This is kind of how we're able to draw that connection to the pet care space, knowing that when things are efficacious at a certain percentage, testing them, in cellular models to ensure that nothing is irritating, irritating to the skin, these are all things that really Kind of add up together to give us this sense of pet care and what it really means to have safe pet care ingredients that are not only natural and sustainable, but also ones that are going to provide those benefits to our pets like soothing their skin underneath their coat, kind of, taking care of any odors that may happen because pets sometimes can be a little bit stinky, right?
So a lot of these interesting benefits that People kind of look for for their own products, really connect really strongly to the pet care space.
Huh, and what about like, sorry, just to add on this wasn't in our script, but vegan, for instance, vegan ingredients like.
In a way, they wouldn't be tested on animals because maybe I would imagine that this is aimed for humans and, and pets, so.
Right, definitely.
So all of our ingredients, all of our products at Active Concepts and at Active microtechnologies, that's where our natural preservation systems are.
None of these are going to be tested on animals.
We have a very strict policy against that.
But what we do do is actual human trials.
So sometimes we'll get volunteers from the community to see how a hair product smooths frizz or reduces, you know, oiliness or shine.
A lot of these benefits that we see for humans, in addition to that safety and toxicology profile that we always do.
This is how we're able to connect that in addition to having vegan ingredients too.
You don't want to apply something that's a non-vegan origin to an animal.
That's kind of like feeding a pig bacon.
That would be a little bit wrong.
So we definitely don't, emphasize that.
We want to always focus on those vegan, natural, sustainable products.
So it was great to hear your insights.
Thank you so much again, Meg.
Thank you so much for sharing.
Thank you so much for having me.
I had so much fun sharing a little bit about, you know, what we've been up to and kind of what's to come.
