A Point of Difference

So it's goodbye to REN, one of the original clean skincare brands. Why?

So Ren is closing. I lazily posted on my Stories, taking a snapshot from the Unilever account with the announcement and wasn’t prepared for the outcry of broken heart emojis that followed. Everyone loves Ren. I guess, just not enough to buy enough of their products?

Comments have been rolling in… Everything from the… “This makes me so sad!” “That’s so bizarre!” to the more analytical, “That’s Unilever for you.. buy brands, they don’t perform, they get rid of them. It’s a simple formula. It’s sad to see the big companies unsupportive when they have the resources to build brands that needed the injection of cash.”

It reminds me of that time not so long ago when Loreal let go of Decleor, another brand that seemed so entrenched in our beauty culture, with amazing natural-ingredient based products, a fantastic brand story, endless possibilities for salon services, a brand that could perhaps be Loreal’s answer to Clarins? But at least Decleor will live to see another day - it got sold to Cospal, whose founder Mathieu Lesieur’s father once owned Decleor, according to Beauty Packaging.

I have a few stand-out Ren moments. The first was when I had tea with the founders in Claridges, I’m guessing this must have been when I was beauty director at Tatler. Ren launched in 2000, founded by Antony Buck and Rob Calcraft, who both came from a brand consulting background. The story went something like this: during the pregnancy of Buck’s wife, all the usual skincare products she was using seemed to trigger reactions in her skin. It led to the founders creating a line that focused on ingredients that were “clean” - a new concept back then pretty much; that were good for the planet, and that looked and smelt good. It was so long ago that I now can’t remember whether I met one of them, or both of them, but what I do remember is that “they” - let’s assume it was both - were different. They had a bit of swagger to them, they felt modern, cool, they didn’t fit within the same-same beauty culture that dominated at the time, ie they weren’t French or corporate suits, they were clearly creatives. The packaging felt very fresh too. It wasn’t pandering to the luxury stereotypes - no plastic cellophane, no ribbons, just this very gender neutral, confident, simple way of presenting its balms, oils and lotions to the world. I was both underwhelmed and overwhelmed. I could see elements of what they were doing were already being done better by several other brands out there, and yet this felt different. They didn’t seem to care what other brands were doing, they were doing their own thing. I liked that.

Suddenly they were everywhere - hotel amenities, SpaceNK, John Lewis and the next thing I remember was David Olsen (now CEO at RMS Beauty but then setting up the beauty ecomms at Net-A-Porter when I was their beauty director) coming up to my desk and wowing me with a product he had just tried. “They tried it on one hand, and look!” It was an exfoliating mask, from memory, that fizzed up with the tiniest bit of water, and left the skin looking glossy, glowing, like magic. “Can you see the difference?” I could.

My personal favourite - ask any beauty editor and we all have one, two or more Ren favourites - is the Ready Steady Glow which looks and feels like a toner but is packed with AHAs and BHAs and gets rid of the grey in my skin. I use it from time to time.