Three Ships Beauty, a Canadian natural skincare brand, is looking to continue to expand in Canada and in the United States market, including the goal of signing retailers such as Sephora. The brand will also be adding new collections due to demands and will be enhancing its retail and e-commerce experiences.
The brand has recently been provided 3.5 million dollars, a fund from BDC Capital’s new Thrive Venture Fund with participation from strategic and angel investors, which will help the brand meet its goals.
“This is huge for Three Ships Beauty. Thanks to this funding from Thrive, we can expand our market reach and build more awareness around the products people already love. And with the right team in place, there is no limit to what we can achieve together,” says Connie Lo, co-founder of Three Ships Beauty.
About the brand
Launched in 2020, Three Ships Beauty is a natural skincare brand dedicated to using products with science-backed, plant ingredients without any fillers or chemicals. In addition, all of its packaging is 100 per cent made out of recycled materials.
The brand relaunched in 2020 as it was originally open under a different name.
“Before Three Ships Beauty launched in July of 2020, we were actually operating the company under a different name, which was New Body. Back then, our brand language was much different, it was much more cheeky and we would use a lot of tropical imagery and tropical language within our products,” says Laura Burget, co-founder of Three Ships Beauty.
After noticing its demographic was a bit older than what they thought, which is around the millennial demographic instead of teens to mid-twenties, the brand changed: “So that led us to changing a lot of our messaging and also our product development to make sure that we appeal to this slightly older demographic,” says Burget. “The brand changed its name, product names, website, brand voice, and imagery – everything has changed.”
Connie Lo and Laura Burget, co-founders of Three Ships Beauty, has received several skincare awards and was listed in the Forbes 30 under 30 as a leader in the clean beauty industry in 2022.
“We have a constant line of communication open with our consumers. Our level of differentiation is in our obsessive vetting of natural ingredients, ensuring our products are gentle and effective for sensitive skin. By ensuring that we don’t have common irritants or synthetic in our products, we are finding it leads to a lot of customers with sensitive skin finally finding a brand that doesn’t irritate their skin, doesn’t cause them to have rashes or have adverse events from using these new products. So I think that is a huge differentiator for us, is how gentle, yet effective, all of our products are,” says Burget.
Consumers can find a variety of products to match their skin needs such as toners, serums, creams, and masks. If a consumer is unsure of what products they need, Three Ships Beauty’s website provides a skin quiz that will guide you to the right product, making online shopping easier and faster. Currently, the brand has 23 skin care products with more coming later, such as body products.
Three Ships Beauty’s products can be found in retail stores across Canada and in the United States, such as Whole Foods, Indigo, and Hudson Bay.
Funding impact
The funding for Three Ships Beauty will allow the company to grow its operations further, improve its retail and e-commerce channels, and will provide them the opportunity to spread more awareness about the brand and its products.
Currently the brand has a full-time team of 12, including its warehouse, but will now be able to hire more staff within the next two years.
“We have been able to get to this point with just those 12 full-time workers, but hiring more senior leadership is a huge goal for us for the next two years. And then of course, we will continue to invest in retail marketing and online marketing. I would say around 40 to 50 per cent of our fundraisers will be going into marketing,” says Lo.
Next stages for the Canadian market
From a retail perspective, Burget says the brand will continue to sell and grow at its existing retailers and will be hiring someone to continue to grow new retail distributions.
“The strategy we are thinking of is breaking out the Canadian retail landscape by the different types of retailers that our consumers are shopping at. For example, having a different strategy for dermatology clinics versus the natural beauty retailers and then having different forms of communication according to each type of retailer, so I am really excited about this new strategy,” says Burget.
Lo says when it comes down to its e-commerce strategy, “it all comes down to hiring.” Most of the brand’s marketing, such as email and SMS marketing, have been completed externally. However, Burget and Lo say as the brand is continuously growing, they are going to be hiring someone for an internal position. The brand will also be placing more focus on its website and will be hiring in-house roles for ad and media buying.
“The website is something that we haven’t had one team member responsible for and we haven’t done much in terms of website optimization. So we have actually sent out an offer to a full-time hire that comes over to us from Shopify and is going to be managing our website,” says Lo. “So the money we received has really placed us in a position to allow us to hire more people.”
As for expanding into retailers, Burget says the goal would be to land Sephora in Canada as “there is so much alignment between our customers and their shoppers.” The brand does not have any plans to open a standalone store as Burget says there are still lots of opportunities for them to partner with other reputable retailers. Outside of Canada, the brand will also continue to expand across the US.
“In five years, we want to be the clear leader within the natural beauty industry and in particular, help to set the new standard within natural beauty. We believed that there needs to be a legal definition and we want to be the brand leading the charge.
