Volition Beauty: Brandy Hoffman and Patricia Santos

Beauty Bosses, Brandy Hoffman and Patricia Santos, bonded over their mutual passion for beauty. They wanted to build something unique in the beauty industry that gave the power back to the customer. They launched Volition Beauty, a crowd-sourced startup that enables customers to pitch their ideas and get involved in the process. Read more about this ground-breaking beauty company:

Why did you start Volition Beauty?

Patricia came from the VC world, and it was a ground-breaking time in that world as not a lot of women were in finance. She personally loved the beauty space and wanted to create something unique. Patricia and I bonded over our mutual passion for beauty while we worked together at a skincare firm.

If you look at any beauty brand, the consumer comes in at the tailed of the process. We believed that if the customer was brought back earlier in the process,  we would be able to build a brand that actually solved unique beauty problems. We peeled away everything we wanted to change and when we put everything back together, Volition was born.

Volition is a consumer-facing product development beauty brand that asks the consumer to pitch the product idea and support other’s ideas through voting on them.

Your business model is so unique. Can you tell us a bit more?

Customers know what they want, so we decided to open the innovation funnel to them. Essentially, a customer can come to submit their ideas, which then get validated by an internal product development team and a lab before being put up to a vote with other ideas. In order for an idea to develop into a product, it needs to hit three marks: feasibility, differentiation, and safety. From these three factors, the most important would be the point of differentiation. We don’t want to develop the 100th matcha product. Rather we want to cut through the noise and create products that are not out there already.

Once a product is successful, it then goes to a lab to get developed. The customer or as we call them, the “innovator” , is part of the entire process and is tasked with testing and approving the formulations. Each of the innovators becomes a face for the brand and their personal stories and experiences are posted to the site.

Are all your products clean?

All our products are clean, but we are not organic. We don’t stand for toxic chemicals. We are clean at Sephora, and we formulate all our products to EWG standards.

Picture Courtesy: Volition Beauty

Can you speak a bit more about representation and diversity in regards to your brand?

One thing I wanted to accomplish with my own company is diverse thought and diversification. The variance of opinion is so important, and we don’t interrupt this process. We are a very welcoming brand. I want someone to go to our Instagram page and see people who look like them, whether that is an openly gay woman, a working mother, or a college student.

We love this consumer-facing beauty brand. Don’t forget to check them out here: https://www.instagram.com/volitionbeauty/