The trend of scrutinizing "ingredients" is spreading beyond food to cosmetics. When a particular ingredient touted as good for the skin gained word-of-mouth attention, cosmetics makers rushed to release products bearing that ingredient's name. Yet consumers find it hard to understand why products with the same ingredient differ in their effectiveness.
WittenCompany, a beauty-tech startup, has won over consumers by tracing this to the raw materials. In an interview with the Seoul Economic Daily on the 21st, WittenCompany CEO Song Bo-kyung said, "Just as tap water, purified water and bottled water differ even though they are all water, cosmetic raw materials also vary in quality even when they share the same ingredient." Song added, "We made our cosmetics using better raw materials."
The company was able to focus on raw materials because both Song and co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Kim Seo-yul came from the Brain Science Institute at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST). Kim's own experience with atopic dermatitis also shaped the product development. Song said, "For Kim, whose atopic symptoms had worsened, we sourced and combined raw materials ourselves based on academic literature, and the skin condition improved as a result." Song added, "We became convinced that we could solve people's skin problems with the technology we had researched."
The company's flagship products are the tranexamic acid serum and the niacinamide serum under its own brand, Organicity. The products focus respectively on tranexamic acid, which suppresses the pigment production that causes melasma and blemishes, and niacinamide, which controls excess oil.
Because the company paid attention to ingredients and the raw materials behind them, it was also able to introduce "ingredient-modular skincare." It targets the fact that skin condition constantly changes even for the same person, depending on seasonal shifts, sleep quality, stress levels and hormones. Song explained, "For example, even the same moisturizing cream may be fine in summer but feel insufficiently hydrating in winter. Modular skincare means buying a product with hyaluronic acid and mixing it in."
Thanks to this differentiation, the company secured more than 60,000 reviews on its own online store without separate marketing. The company also runs an advanced customized chatbot system linked to the Cafe24 platform. It converts the qualitative data that consumers voluntarily generate into natural-language form that artificial intelligence (AI) can learn from, and uses this to respond to customer inquiries, predict repurchase timing and manage the production life cycle.
Song said, "After officially entering the Japanese beauty select shop @cosme, we also plan to run a pop-up store at a Japanese department store." Song added, "We are preparing to launch a wider range of products, including sunscreen, within the year."
