Refillable Beauty - changing consumers habits

Today refillable solutions are complex for everyone. For suppliers and brands it requires a shift in supply-chain, for retailers it needs a shift in logistic and retail space, and we know how scarce space can be, and on the consumer side, it requires an active behaviour to bring back or refill beauty products, which is not an automatism yet in the consumers minds.

It will take years for a workable system to be implemented. Reading Atomic Habits, here are a few nuggets that we think would be beneficial for a brand to understand in order to help consumers change habits and learn a new behaviour overtime.

The author, James Clear, explains the 4 phases to implement new habits for the long run, and I’m sure this can be inspirational for our industry.

1 - Small and easy to implement

Implement small and short actions in a timely manner without changing the full routine. Small actions can have a big impact in the long run. 

=> For example: Implement refill in best selling product (product that your consumer will be more likely to re-purchase), and make it easy with online order or add the refill cartridge and full product next to the regular product. When interviewing “La Crème Libre” in France, they told us that they move to a package in-store with with full pack + 1 refill to ease first purchase and make it easier to understand for consumer, instead of selling everything separately as initially started.