With its feature areas such as the Organic Incubator or the Cosmetics Innovations Village, Natexpo is a powerful springboard for small companies. With tight promotional budgets owing to their young age, these firms benefit from exceptional visibility at low cost thanks to these spaces, and thereby get the chance to build their first commercial ties. It is also a way for them to discover the innovations on the market and share experience with other brands.
Once they are fully launched, these companies often return to the show on other, larger stand formats which reflect their brand identity and allow them to create their own layout. Year after year they continue to develop their partnerships thanks to the visits of increasing numbers of distributors and suppliers to Natexpo.
A focus on three success stories:
Omum, the brand for mothers-to-be and breast-feeding women
When Omum first exhibited at the show in 2013 in the Cosmetics Innovations Village, it was a very young brand with four products to its name… today it has 15! “The village stand is a great opportunity for firms taking their first steps in sales. It’s a good halfway solution between promoting your name, meeting buyers for the first time and presenting your range. The village is visited by a lot of visitors who come to detect the trends and get a feeling for how the market is evolving,” explains Omum’s founder Marie-Pascale Ballet. Seven years later, the brand is still an exhibitor, but on a joint stand to share certain expenses and which is larger so as to reflect the brand identity more faithfully and receive increasing numbers of visitors in optimal conditions.
“Natexpo is more than a trade show: it’s the meeting place of a whole sector. For us, it’s an opportunity, over the space of two or three days, to meet the majority of our clients, win over new resellers, and also cultivate our network in the ecosystem. Chatting with other brands, meeting new service providers, listening to trends… Well done Natexpo!”
CoZie: a loose goods dispensing system, tried and proven at Natexpo
CoZie is an eco-friendly concept based on reusable and refillable bottles subject to a €1.50 deposit return scheme. To take its initiative even further, the team was the first to develop a patented machine for the sale of cosmetics in loose format, the “Dozeuse” which is the only one of its kind in the world. In the shops fitted with the Dozeuse, customers choose between 30ml, 50ml and 100ml bottles. They then use the machine to fill their bottle with the product that they want: face cream, body cream, hand cream, etc. The machine then weighs the full bottle and prints out a label with all the legal information. When the customer has emptied the bottle, they return it to the shop, and it is sent to a washing facility where all the cosmetics hygiene standards are respected. The customer picks up another bottle in the store, and the loop starts up again!
CoZie’s participation at Natexpo, first on the Cosmetics Village and then on a larger stand, allowed visitors to discover and observe the machine in operation. In fact, the company received the Natexpo Gold Award in the Cosmetics and Raw Materials category in 2018, unleashing an even greater flow of visitors to the stand. “Natexpo was a fantastic catalyst for us to get us better known and demonstrate our filling machine,” point out the founders. “Our brand awareness in the organic world has been boosted thanks to Natexpo. Meeting more than 100 points of sale per day, potential resellers, with whom we can build person-to-person relations whilst also promoting our brand, is quite simply unique!”
Too Fruit: a brand on the up and up
The organic cosmetics brand for children Too Fruit began with a stand in the incubator at Natexpo Lyon followed by a larger stand in 2019 in Paris, thanks to it being better known.
In the words of the brand’s founder Katell Perrot, “Exhibiting in the Incubator is a way of guaranteeing the visit of many key accounts who come to discover new products. It is therefore a guarantee of visibility.” Following its participation at Natexpo, Too Fruit developed partnerships which have played a substantial role in the success of the brand in organic retail. “Today Too Fruit is a team of nine people, more than 40 product references, four new launches per year, more than 1,000 partner points of sale and more than 50% uninterrupted growth in organic over the past two years. We will be showing again at Natexpo in 2020 and we really look forward to it!”
