TKE: Creating a truly inclusive beauty brand, with Simi Lindgren, founder of Yuty

Beautiful Misfits

Mary Portas

Society & Culture, Business

4.5 • 834 Ratings

🗓️ 2 December 2021

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

FOR a long time, the world of beauty was stuck in the old ways of perfume counter selling, excess packaging – and those giveaway foundation samples in magazines that only ever came in some shade of peach. As a teenager of Nigerian heritage, Simi Lindgren felt invisible when she opened up those samples. But last year she founded online beauty marketplace Yuty that has radical inclusivity at its heart. It uses AI to take into account everything from a shopper’s skin type to facial formation to make truly personal recommendations. Every product on the site also meets strict standards on ethics, cruelty and sustainability. With investor and consumer interest growing in sustainable - and in particular beauty - brands, Yuty has just secured £500,000 in pre-seed funding. Join Mary as she chats with Simi about tech, representation and pushing boundaries in the beauty industry. To get in touch with team Portas, email us at: [email protected] Subscribe to the Portas POV Newsletter for musings, provocation insights and inspiration. Want to keep up-to-date with all things Portas? Follow us here: Instagram ** Linkedin ** Twitter

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Mary Portis, and this is The Kindness Economy, a podcast that looks at the new values
0:05.9	driving the businesses of tomorrow, people, planet, and profit in that order.
0:11.5	It's the future.
0:12.8	Are you ready for better?
0:15.0	In a moment, you're going to hear me chatting with an entrepreneur called Simi Lundgren.
0:20.7	And when we met a couple of weeks ago,
0:22.6	we talked about the radical inclusivity that she's embedded in her online beauty marketplace U-T.
0:28.6	Simi has developed AI to take into account everything from ethnicity to medical conditions and skin types
0:36.6	to really create truly personal beauty recommendations.
0:41.7	Another factor she is also really considered
0:44.5	are those issues facing those with physical disabilities
0:48.1	in accessing many beauty products.
0:51.3	About 15% of the world's population lives with some form of disability. That's a huge
0:57.7	stat, isn't it? And you know, together, if we're listening with a business head on, which I'm sure
1:02.8	we are as well as our heart, they have more than 13 trillion of annual disposable income. So it's not
1:10.5	exactly a niche market, is it? And yet,
1:13.9	almost half of all adults with disabilities feel totally excluded from society. And worse still,
1:21.6	they also feel actively discriminated against. I mean, just asked the Israeli minister,
1:26.8	who was told she couldn't attend
1:28.7	the COP 26 summit because it wasn't wheelchair accessible, the embarrassment, the thoughtlessness,
1:35.2	really. And at a time when the dial has shifted so far in terms of our understanding of gender
1:42.1	and sexual identity, even M&S has given it staff's ID badges with their pronouns on,
	...

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