Fair-Trade Marketplace Beautyologie Launches Giftable Brand WOO To Spread Its Message

When you have your hands in all parts of a business, you can’t help but learn a thing or two about its customers. As she was working on search engine optimization for Beautyologie, the fair-trade e-commerce destination she launched in 2021, Robin Tolkan-Doyle discovered people were arriving at its website on the hunt for natural ingredients such as apricot oil to address their skin concerns.

That discovery laid the foundation for WOO, an in-house brand from Beautyologie kicking off with four facial oils priced at $40 each—Apricot Oil, Blue Tansy + Apricot Oil, Argan Oil and Rosehip Oil—tackling everything from hydration to hyperpigmentation. The oils are certified fair trade by the organization Fair Trade for Life and tell stories about the contributions of different countries to skincare through their ingredients and packaging design. Appropriately, WOO stands for “world of oils.”

The brand’s apricot oil is from India, where Adivasi tribal women from the Araku Valley produce it; its argan oil is from Morocco, where women from the Akkain Ouargane cooperative produce it; and its rosehip oil is from Chile, where Mapuche and Patagones women produce it. The oils are housed in colorful flip-cap tins featuring whimsical designs spotlighting the country of origin of their signature ingredient. At 3.4 ounces, the tins adhere to Transportation Security Administration rules for liquids on airplanes.

“I started Beautyologie because of my love of travel,” says Tolkan-Doyle, the Charmed Public Relations owner who founded Beautyologie after a trip to India to explore skincare ingredient cultivation and local labor practices. “I wanted these vessels to be homages to the countries where these resources come from.”

At Beautyologie, where customers can identify products by country, she elaborates, “My mission is to gently inform shoppers about where their ingredients are coming from, who the people are that they’re sourced from, and when you buy these ingredients, how it affects people around the world. We are living in an Amazon fast-paced world where people want something quickly, and we don’t think about the whole supply chain behind products.”

While facial oils have been a staple of clean beauty for years, they continue to be popular on Beautyologie, and Tolkan-Doyle is a huge fan of them. “I don’t use moisturizers or creams,” she says. “There’s this misconception that oils are going to make you break out, which is not true, or oils are going to make you feel greasy, which is also not true. These oils are beautiful and highly moisturizing, and they’re not greasy.”

Tolkan-Doyle invested $10,000 to develop WOO and expects it will generate revenues 10X to 20X that amount in the next year. Outside of Beautyologie, she’s interested in placing the brand in shops with patrons gravitating to fair-trade products. Prior to Charmed PR, Tolkan-Doyle ran Wrap Star, a brand that sold headbands constructed to not give wearers headaches, and landed it in 200 retailers across the United States, notably Fred Segal and Henri Bendel, an experience that informs her strategy to make WOO eminently giftable.

“We are living in an Amazon fast-paced world where people want something quickly, and we don’t think about the whole supply chain behind products.”

“I’m a consumer. When you go shopping, everything looks the same. All of the oils are in the same dark brown glass bottle with a dropper, and they’re minimal and simplistic. It’s so boring. I wanted to go the opposite way,” says Tolkan-Doyle. “I want to make it eye candy, and when people come up, they realize it isn’t just eye candy.”

The No. 1 goal of WOO is to bring awareness to Beautyologie. As a small e-tailer selling small brands, it’s tough to break through the clutter, especially when Tolkan-Doyle notes brands are competing with it by advertising to drive traffic to their own sites. She hopes WOO can draw consumers to Beautyologie and increase sales for the third-party brands on its site as well as WOO.

Currently, Beautyologie sells at least 50 brands. The e-tailer expects brands on its site to follow the 10 principles of the fair-trade movement, including creating opportunities for economically disadvantaged producers and paying fair prices to those producers. Among its bestselling brands are Conscious Coconut, True Moringa and Silktáge. It operates largely on a drop-ship model.

In the last 12 months, Beautyologie’s sales have climbed 25%, its online store sessions have jumped 60%, and its total orders have risen 75%. The site’s core customers are women aged 30 to 50 years old and older, and they predominantly live in cities like New York and Los Angeles.

Tolkan-Doyle is candid that it takes time and energy to put a brand on Beautyologie’s site and constantly update it as it introduces products or changes imagery, and it’s often not worth it for the sales it yields. To make it worth it, she’s enacted a yearly fee of roughly $400 for brands to join its selection.

Glancing ahead, Tolkan-Doyle isn’t sure what the future holds for Beautyologie. She says, “WOO might be more of it, and then I will have less third-party brands on the site, maybe just a few core brands that I’ve had since the beginning that are loyal, that sell and that we can collaborate with because we have the same kind of customer.”