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SUMMARY POINTS
What’s Important?
Retail multiple brands, choosing the best from each.
Limit your inventory by knowing your patient demographic.
Offer the least expensive option when possible.
What’s New?
Choose hero products from each brand and combine based on skin type.
Limit the number of anti-aging products to reduce inventory costs.
What’s Coming?
Methods to analyze amounts of ingredients in products.
Methods to compare product efficacy.
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There is a plethora of cosmeceuticals from which to choose to retail in your medical practice. It is difficult to know how many and which products to carry. Inventory is expensive, particularly when considering that inventory may expire before it is sold. Knowing how many products to retail is just as important as choosing which skincare brands and products to offer to patients. This chapter discusses how many products to make available and how to choose the best skincare brands and products for patients.
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CHOOSING A SKINCARE BRAND TO OFFER IN YOUR PRACTICE
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Choosing a skincare brand to sell in your medical practice is challenging. Brands want you to exclusively sell their products. They will encourage you to sell entire regimens consisting of only their products. Also, they require minimum purchases that are often in the range of $2,500 to $3,000, which complicates carrying more than one brand. They offer discounts based on volume sales that entice you to sell only their brand. There are two main problems with only offering one skincare brand in your practice: efficacy and ethics.
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Each brand is based on a core technology that serves as the “hero product.” Once companies develop that product, for financial reasons they develop other products to sell to complement the original formulation. For example, if a brand has a serum with unique anti-aging ingredients, that is their hero product. They will develop other products to sell along with that product such as cleansers and moisturizers. The problem arises in that these “add on” or supporting products are not unique; often they are copycat products with no special technology. Although they are developed to be compatible with the hero product, they are usually not designed with various skin types in mind. Brands operate on the belief that there is one best product that works for everyone. They do not have the resources to develop individual formulations suited to all of the variations in the 16 Baumann Skin Types. Their product offerings and marketing strategies are developed to increase sales of the hero product and the supporting products, and not necessarily to improve the patient’s skin. To offer the optimal and most efficacious cosmeceuticals for your patients, you should choose the hero products from the various brands and combine them in a scientific manner that increases the efficacy of each product (see Chapter 35, Skincare Regimen Design).
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You can retail skincare products ...