On a per capita basis, 25.7 million Australians shell out an average of $238.40 yearly on beauty products, a greater beauty spend than Americans’ roughly $200 per capita yearly, according to figures from Statista. The data resource estimates the beauty and personal care market in Australia will generate $6.21 billion in 2022 sales and increase at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 4% to reach $7.24 billion in 2026. E-commerce is responsible for some 40% of the business this year.

Australians pay lavishly for imports, but there’s plenty happening in the Aussie beauty landscape despite the grim global economic picture. Australian beauty manufacturing is burgeoning. It’s not as big as beauty manufacturing in South Korea, Germany or France, but it’s getting there.

And the indie beauty scene is bursting. According to a recent Euromonitor report, niche domestic brands are responding to three key consumer trends: Slow beauty with a focus on transparency, certifications, clean ingredients and local sourcing; diversity characterized by purposeful and inclusive stories; and experiential marketing, which encompasses edutainment, master classes and pop-ups.

Last year, we spotlighted five rising Australian indie beauty brands to put on your beauty watch list, and we added to that list earlier this year with a look at five sustainability-oriented rising Australian beauty brands. Now, we’re diving into the thriving Australian indie beauty segment yet again by identifying five more indie beauty brands doing things differently.

Vela Days: Amelia Gartner has learned many lessons launching her own and other people’s beauty brands, but one thing that consistently surprises the founder of luxury hemp-based skincare range Vela Days, who formerly founded Raw Skincare Australia and was GM at Cedar + Stone, is how ever-changing the beauty industry is.

“You can’t expect what you did previously to work again,” she reflects. “Each brand I work with is unique to the time it’s created, and you need to analyze the current state of the market to ensure you are going to get cut through and be relevant. Having a good idea isn’t enough anymore when consumers have access to thousands of new skincare brands each year.”

Raw Skincare Australia, Gartner’s first beauty undertaking, needed funding to expand and a meeting with a potential backer led to her taking on the GM role at Cedar + Stone, an already established company. Navigating the beauty market in that position instilled hardcore hustling skills in her. Nonetheless, when her current business partners at medical cannabis company medicinal cannabis specialist Greenfield MC approached her with an idea for yet another new brand, her enthusiasm was understandably waning.

“The industry was saturated and slightly stagnant, so I wasn’t excited by much I saw. However, after initial discussions, the prospect of creating something new within the hemp space was interesting,” she says. “I’d seen cannabis explode in the U.S., but that category was still reasonably nonexistent in Australia.”

Vela Days’ objective is to enable consumers to do more with less. “The mammoth rise in the beauty industry over the recent years has led to people ending up with sometimes 10 different skincare products they were trying to juggle using each day, most ending up wasted or used incorrectly. I saw fatigue and confusion,” says Gartner. “Consumers wanted all the promised benefits they saw available. However, they didn’t have time, knowledge and skill to achieve them. Vela Days was born to fix this.”

Vela Days’ skincare lineup contains three products priced from 70 to 110 Australian dollars or roughly $50 to $76 at the current exchange rate—gel-to-oil cleanser Liquid Complex, multivitamin facial serum Active Compound and serum/oil hybrid Oil Infusion—intended to replace 12 products. Each product has hemp in its base that’s paired with active ingredients such as niacinamide, ceramides and tocopherols.

Priced at 20 Australian dollars or about $14, Cleansing Bands have been a surprise viral hit. They’re microfibre scrunchies that fit around the wrists to catch water dripping down people’s arms when they cleanse their face. The bands are a godsend for anyone who’s cursed wet pajama sleeves when they’re trying to fall asleep at night.

Launched last year, Australia is Vela Days’ biggest market, but it’s beginning to have a presence in the U.S. It recently won Best Facial Serum in the Clean Beauty Awards, a program out of Canada. In the United Kingdom, two nominations for the Pure Beauty Global Awards has boosted brand awareness. Concentrating on direct-to-consumer distribution for now, Vela Days’ future plans call for moving into the retail sector to allow customers to experience the brand in person.

Today, Gartner says, “We’re targeting first-time buyers with our marketing strategy, relying heavily on digital for the moment and investing heavily in TikTok which has proven a significant sales channel to reach a beauty market we might have otherwise never found. We can’t expect influencers to correlate to direct sales anymore, but they help you stand out and get the top-of-mind brand recognition everyone is vying for.”

While the cannabis skincare category remains in its infancy in Australia, Gartner is hopeful new innovative formulas will enter the market. She says, “We haven’t even touched the surface of what’s possible yet.”

Habitual Beauty: Melbournite Keira Rumble leaned on learnings from her first entrepreneurial endeavor, Krumbled Foods, which was established in 2017, to build skincare brand Habitual Beauty. “Krumbled was a nutraceutical FMCG brand with collagen as a hero ingredient, and we did these Beauty Bites,” she recounts. “That grew rapidly and exported internationally, so I used those experiences and have applied that as a templated approach to new ventures. I could see a gap for clean, effective skincare that works synergistically with a high-dose nutraceutical supplement to fast-track beauty results.”

Habitual Beauty’s emphasis on clean, effective skincare is grounded in Rumble’s personal experiences. Rumble, who had her son Hunter five days before launching Habitual Beauty in July 2021, gravitated to natural skincare after suffering through years of infertility and pregnancy loss, but wasn’t impressed with the results.

The debut products to roll off the production line for Habitual Beauty were the ingestible Advanced Skin + Gut Health Collagen Elixir, and topicals Rejuvenating Facial Oil, Hydrating Serum, Sleep Mask, Balancing Cleanser and Nourishing Moisturiser. The Elixir has a high dose of hydrolyzed collagen peptides (10,000 milligrams per serving versus the 2,500 to 3,500 primarily on the market). The products are priced from 70 to 125 Australian dollars or roughly $48 to $86.

Habitual Beauty was accepted into Sephora Australia’s Accelerator program in 2019, and Rumble says the retailer fast-tracked the brand into its selection. Currently, it’s only marketed in Australia, but global orders are happening organically, principally driven by Instagram. U.K. and U.S. launches are anticipated in 2023.

“Our performance marketing strategy is of course a big focus and spend varies based on the promotional calendar, NPD and where we’re seeing the most return,” says Rumble. “We have pivoted and move budget into content creation now that short-form video and user-generated content is such a big part of our content mix. We’re also starting to invest more spend into TikTok. The digital space moves quickly.”

At its nascent stage, Habitual is targeting first-time buyers, but the potential for repeat purchasers topping off their 30-day supply of Advanced Skin + Gut Health Collagen Elixir is there. Word of mouth and glowing endorsements are lifting the brand. Google Habitual Beauty Hydrating Sleep Mask to get the gist.

The Raconteur: Five years ago, corporate lawyer Craig Andrade pivoted in a big way. After 25 years working in South Africa, the U.S. and U.K. as well as Australia, the Sydneysider decided to become a perfumer, as one does. “I needed to exercise my creative skills and make something tangible with my hands,” he says. Surprisingly, his previous life had him in good stead. Andrade says, “Helping clients assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of hundreds of businesses in multiple sectors gave me a long runway of opportunity to learn and insights into potential pitfalls.”

Andrade couldn’t find a brand tapping into Australia’s native botanicals in high-quality scent products, so he set out to create The Raconteur with such products appealing to consumers he describes as “independent thinkers.” The brand’s artisanal luxury fragrances are inspired by iconic locations like Sydney’s Northern Beaches, Bondi and Byron Bay, to name a few. “Our customers don’t follow fragrance trends,” says Andrade. “A generic fragrance from a major commercial brand isn’t going to match the identity of who they are.”

The Raconteur’s gender-neutral product roster priced largely from 70 to 245 Australian dollars or around $48 to $168 consists of 20 scented candles, six perfume serums and two limited-edition eau de parfums. The products are crafted in Australia from plant-derived ingredients with functional properties (think calming, grounding, uplifting, mind focus). Candles are the brand’s bread and butter. Hamilton Island, a refreshing citrus, spicy oceanic blend; Tasmania, a peppery lemon myrtle and cedarwood concoction; and spicy fruity Red Centre are bestsellers.

“I’m most proud of the formulas,” says Andrade, who manufactures The Raconteur’s products weekly and has a seasonally adjusted plan for managing the business’s peaks and troughs. “We tend to be conservative so as not to have excess stock and can scale up quickly for excess demand.”

Self-funded The Raconteur is sold on its website and at a flagship boutique called The Embassy in Sydney’s prestigious Paddington neighborhood. Retail distribution is in the works. Favorable press, digital advertising and word of mouth have led to brand awareness advancing steadily. The Raconteur saw a pandemic-related sales boost as perfumes provided opportunities for armchair travel.

“We doubled our revenue every six months in 2021, so after a year sat at almost 200% growth. Online spiked with people isolated at home, and our home fragrance category exploded,” says Andrade. “The power of scent to connect to memory and emotion meant our business boomed. There was definitely an escapism element attached.”

Boring Without You: The term “clean beauty” is a pet peeve of Boring Without You co-founder and cosmetic science student David Rooney. He’s out to challenge conventional beauty standards and marketing myths. “Consumers are bombarded with bullshit information weaponized to fearmonger and force people to buy ‘their product,’” laments Rooney. “We hate this. We are not clean. We are evidence-based.”

Rooney continues, “Parabens are safe, and preservatives won’t kill you! One of the first things I learnt studying cosmetic science is that different parts of your face behave differently, but what I was seeing on shelves was a one-fixes-all approach. I wanted something that could help combination skins.”

The solution? Boring Without You’s product For Face Sake Multi-Mask is housed in a tub with two sections. One half has a creamy detoxifying formula containing salicylic acid, colloidal oatmeal and niacinamide to control and balance an oily T Zone, and the other half has a calming hydrating jelly with celentella asiatica, alpha-hydroxy acids (AHAs) and hydrolyzed hyaluronic acid. For Face Sake Multi-Mask is priced at 54 Australian dollars or almost $37. It joins Duo Brush (11 Australian dollars or about $8) and Big Softie Face Cloth (19 Australian dollars or $13) in Boring Without You’s product lineup.

A one-week pre-sale launch in mid-May followed by an official launch on July 20 saw the first drop sell out within 20 days. Rooney is proud of the community Boring Without You has amassed through social media and personal connections made by sending direct messages to consumers. “We have 47,000 followers on TikTok [36.2k on @skincaredavey and 11.2k on @boringwithoutyou] who were really engaged pre-sale” says Rooney.

Boring Without You’s packaging design, brand voice and mission speak to a gen Z audience. A quarter of the brand’s profits will be committed to mental health initiatives. Customers can choose from one of five Australian youth-focused charities upon purchasing its products. “Jordan and I have both had our fair share of mental health battles,” reveals Rooney, referring to his Boring Without You co-founder Jordan Meachen. “We understood the link between skin health and mental health. So, from day one, we wanted mental well-being to be a massive part of this brand.”

Boring Without You is self-funded and sticking to direct-to-consumer for now, but wholesale is on the Melbourne-based brand’s roadmap. Rooney says, “Like many businesses, we probably won’t make a profit in the first or second year, but we have big plans beyond that.”

Sśaint: Fragrance bottles may be silent salesmen for peddling perfumes, but Aussie creators are letting the juice do the talking, with many of the new locally manufactured fragrance brands choosing minimalistic packaging. Sśaint is unambiguously in that camp. The brainchild of former flight attendants Ciara Mahoney and Elle Wallace, Sśaint launched four gender-neutral scents in 2021 and has already been picked up by Sephora Australia, The Iconic and hundreds of independent stores despite the co-founders having no previous beauty industry experience or contacts.

“We’d both dreamt of creating our own signature scent and would layer our perfume collections,” says the pair via email. “Sśaint is a culminated influence drawn from our surrounds, be that traditional Asian markets, Middle Eastern souks or the Australian outback.”

To inform the creation of Sśaint, Mahoney and Wallace researched the market and detected a gap for Australian-made products without $400-plus price tags. (Sśaint’s 50-ml. eau de parfum is 100 Australian dollars or about $68, and a 100-ml. size is 159 Australian dollars or about $109.)

Presently, the core range includes the amber-woody Twenty Two; Cosmic Bang, a cocktail of black tea and bergamot; Smokeshow, a warming orange flower, clove and chestnut blend; and Modus Vivendi, a cardamon and cedarwood concoction. There’s a fifth and sixth fragrance in the pipeline.

The bulk of growth to date is due to first-time buyers. Consumers are discovering the brand through Instagram, traditional media and retail partners. The current marketing strategy is limited to partnering with a hand-picked selection of influencers and some digital ads, but Sśaint is exploring events in the next six months. Self-funded, the brand avoids excess inventory by hand-filling each bottle to order and skirts excess stock issues by using old stock for sampling purposes. “We recently changed our packaging,” explains Mahoney and Wallace.

What’s Sśaint’s long-term goal? Its speedy trajectory makes it tempting to expand internationally, but the co-founders are devoted to carving out a clear position in Australia and New Zealand before traveling abroad. “We want to stay boutique for now,” they say. “That’s what’s true to the Sśaint brand.”