Skincare company Saint Crewe started with a “no.”
Erin Piper, a mother of two, brought her 9-year-old daughter along to a store while she was purchasing beauty products, but some advanced skincare caught the eye of the girl. It was an easy no from Piper, due to the dangers of anti-aging ingredients like retinol for children, but she could see other moms around the store saying “yes,” with shopping baskets filled to the top with skincare products for their children.
Piper has a social work practice in Baton Rouge. Seeing a need for skincare products safe for young skin, she teamed up with Laura-Lucia Carothers, her friend’s sister and a former executive at Skinceuticals, to launch the clinically tested, luxury skincare brand in March of last year. She said Saint Crewe is intended for college-age adults — though it’s not harmful if children get their fingers into it.
“It’s the social worker in me,” Piper said. “I don’t want a young girl or a young boy that worried about their appearance at such a young age. On the flip side, you want to give them something that’s safe to do with their friends, if that’s all the craze.”
Young girls have taken a large interest in skincare in recent years, largely due to the popularity of the products on social media and “get ready with me”-style videos where content creators take viewers through their beauty routines. U.S. teens spend a collective $1.7 billion each year on skincare and make up 10% of the beauty consumer market, according to Boston Consulting Group.
Piper runs a small team of three full-time employees, with other part-time hire in sales and consulting. She declined to share the company’s first-year revenue.
In just a year, the brand has inked partnerships with well-known beauty company Revolve and trendy women’s clothing retailer Anthropologie and is available online on the Saint Crewe site. Saint Crewe has developed an ambassador program geared toward college students to promote the brand and also has a scholarship. The program awarded $2,000 to three college students who have displayed resilience after facing a challenge.
They’re just getting started, Piper says, aiming to stock with more retailers and eventually expand internationally in the future.
In this week’s Talking Business, Piper discusses the skincare market, growing her brand and running a business in Louisiana.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How would you describe the market at the time of launch?
This is a really saturated market, as we all know. When I had this idea, I knew I needed to get to market quick because it was exploding, and I knew I would not be the only one who had this idea and who had the ability to get products to market. We got to market in a little less than 18 months, which is sort of unheard of. We launched with four SKUs. It’s a very simplified line. I wanted to really focus on quality over quantity and really get those ingredients exactly right.
I’d love to hear the story behind the name.
You’re probably thinking Mardi Gras krewe. Saint is part of my mother’s maiden name. Her maiden name is St. Clair, and I’ve always loved the maiden name St. Clair. I took Saint from that, and then Crewe is actually the last name of the protagonist in one of my favorite books is a child, “The Little Princess.” She embodies resilience and kindness and generosity and grit and all of the things that I teach in my practice and in the way I aim to parent my children.
Revolve and Anthropologie are such big names. Given that your company is so young, how did you go about cultivating those relationships with those brands?
Revolve reached out to us. They just reached out to me on Instagram because they saw the saw the line and loved the way it looked, and we immediately signed on with them very quickly. We reached out to Anthropologie and they pretty quickly reached back out and said “sold.”
I’ve been lucky because the line really speaks for itself. People go to our Instagram and they sort of see — I hate the word vibe — but they see the vibe and they love it.
What are some of the largest challenges you’ve faced?
We’re a small company. We don’t have a huge marketing budget and we can’t go spend thousands upon thousands of dollars to get the marketing out there, to get the messaging out there, to do these huge, beautiful in-person activations that these brands are doing. We’ve had to come up with some really creative ways to get our messaging out there. That’s why I think we’re so proud of the ambassador program because that’s been such a great way to get content out there. These girls are loving receiving products and being able to make videos. It’s a culture now.
What’s kept you here, and do you plan on keeping the business and yourself here in Baton Rouge for the long run?
That’s always the plan. This is my home. I’m Louisiana through and through, and I love this place. There’s a lot of things that we have going for us, and there’s a lot of things that we don’t have going for us. There’s so much potential here. My hope is that we continue to move forward as a state in a way that makes people want to stay here. Because it makes me very sad knowing that we’ve got these brilliant kids coming out of high school, and people are leaving for a multitude of reasons.
How can the state improve to make things easier for business owners and founders to start and grow their businesses?
Educate the kids that are growing up in the state. Here’s the thing, if you give them a great education, they’re going to stay here. Then business owners like us have the pick of the litter to hire from, and then I’m able to give these kids a great job, and then they’re able to stay here and provide for their families.
Is that what inspired the scholarship?
Oh, absolutely. I’m a social worker first through and through, and I’ve always been interested in educating kids, always, and that’s been something that I’ve been interested in and been a part of way before the Saint Crewe scholarship. We have to help these kids break those barriers and be able to get to school.
