When pop star Rihanna launched Fenty Beauty, the line offered 40 foundation shades to match a wider variety of skin tones—and appeal to more customers. The so-called “Fenty Effect” prompted well-known brands to expand beyond the typical few shades.
But does a brand need to offer so many shades to be inclusive? What if, despite a wide array of shades, a brand still overlooks a sizable part of the market?
Research by Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Elisabeth C. Paulson explores these questions as cosmetics companies look for an edge in a market that has been growing more slowly, according to L'Oréal data. While customization and variety might help brands stand apart, it turns out that they don’t need to produce so many shades to meet customers’ needs.
“We find that full inclusivity could be achieved using only 37 shades–fewer than most of the brands considered,” explains "Designing Inclusive Offerings,” published online in Management Science in November. “Inclusivity can be achieved with a small but strategically chosen set of offerings,” write Paulson and her coauthors, MIT Sloan School of Management Professors Retsef Levi and Georgia Perakis.
The team developed a model to assess how 11 well-known makeup brands fared in offering inclusive products. The analysis considers the distribution of shades, the population’s skin tones, and customers’ tolerance for mismatching.
