When Scottish businesswoman and former salon owner Sandra McClumpha brought US self-tanning brand Fake Bake to the UK in 2001, she probably didn’t imagine that in just ten years it would become the world’s largest independent tanning brand. Focused on developing the salon-only spray tanning formula into a range of products for the retail market, McClumpha went on to win several awards praising her entrepreneurial and business skills. Now, with a strong product line-up, a new entry into Marks & Spencer’s beauty halls in the UK and expansion into further countries worldwide, it seems that Fake Bake isn’t showing any signs of slowing down.
Fake Bake was founded by US couple Mary and Joe Cooper in Oklahoma City back in 1994. The story goes that Joe thought that Mary would get a better finish on her self-tan if she could see where she had applied the colour – if it was dark, rather than cream coloured. Joe, being a businessman and entrepreneur, recognised this as a gap in the market, and so came the brand’s still popular Original Self Tan Lotion, the first product of its kind to feature a colour guide. Fast forward 20 years, and the product range now consists of 17 tanning products, body care, moisturisers and exfoliators for the face and colour cosmetics.
“The brand has always been independently owned and I think the biggest achievement still has been extending and adding to the product range, because it started as a salon brand. Now we’ve got around 30 products in the line,” says McClumpha.
Fast bakes
The company’s lab is in Texas, US, and having its own dedicated space for product development is something that McClumpha cites as a competitive advantage for the brand: “We’re very involved in our lab, meaning we can react quickly to the marketplace. So for example if there’s a fantastic ingredient like the apple stem cell [in Fake Bake’s Face Self-Tan], which came out as an anti-ageing technology, we jumped straight on it to get it mixed with a self-tan product to be sure that we’d be the first to market with it.” A combined experience of 50 years between the
lab’s technicians, McClumpha says, allows the company to develop products “in a matter of months, when it would take 12-18 months for anybody else.” Constant innovation and improvement is vital in a marketplace as saturated as tanning, and the company’s continual product development is something McClumpha prides it on: “Myself and Mary actually sit in the lab and concoct, and sometimes it’s just an idea or something that doesn’t work, but we’re always inventing. It’s got to be a continual process to stay ahead of the game.”
Going global
2013 brought some changes to the way the company is run. Fake Bake UK became Fake Bake United, now a subsidiary for the UK and Europe of the global Fake Bake company, owned by the Coopers. Quick to assure that this will only have a positive impact on the brand moving forward, McClumpha explains: “It’s now a global company with global marketing and PR campaigns. Everything is now being looked at from a global perspective instead of as individual countries. So as far as the UK market is concerned, it’s really taken a step up because we’ve got support from the global system which will aid our plans. It’s going to make the UK brand a lot more prominent and the global brand in general more successful. The brand is in a stronger position than it’s ever been.” This must be a strong position indeed, since a decade after setting up Fake Bake UK, McClumpha had grown the company’s turnover from £38,000 to approximately £8.5m, almost matching the figures of its established US parent.
McClumpha is now Global Consultant to Fake Bake United and is taking the restructure as an opportunity to think beyond the UK and US and focus on expanding the brand worldwide, into as many countries as possible. Fake Bake is currently available in Australia, South Africa, Canada, Brazil and across Europe, and McClumpha reveals that the brand is in talks with retailers in new markets: “Over the last ten years we’ve been on this massive growth plan. It’s been 100 miles an hour in the UK and in the US, so we didn’t really concentrate on anywhere else in the world. We’re talking to a couple of big retailers, including one in Russia, but we want a partner. We could sell product to everybody that asks, but we want someone to take the brand and actually market it.”
The brand takes a cautious approach to choosing retail channels. The products are sold through Fake Bake professional salons and retailers from high street chains to premium department stores. In the UK, this includes Boots and Selfridges, although they are looking to expand into grocer-level stores with a more affordable range. To keep a level of structure and selectivity, McClumpha says that expansion into retail channels must be controlled: “Our mantra is: it’s not hard to get our products into stores, but they have to sell once they’re in there. We get approached on a daily basis by numerous distributors and retailers, but unless there’s a plan about how the product is going to be launched and all the aftercare, we would prefer to say no until it’s the right time. It’s always got to be well thought out or we don’t go there. We probably say no to more people than we say yes.”
US focus
In the US, Fake Bake is still predominantly a salon brand, although the website does stock the full range of retail products. “We really want to focus on retail because we haven’t stepped into that market there yet. We’ve got the Fake Bake premium line, and the Beyond Bronze range which is going to be available for the mass market over there,” says McClumpha. In the UK, though, profit is split 60/40 between retail and salon, and it looks as though even here retail is the division that the company is focusing on growing.
Fake Bake’s latest product is anti-ageing facial tanner The Face, which has launched exclusively in M&S
An edited selection of products will enter Marks & Spencer’s beauty halls at the end of March. The British high street retailer has adopted the popular European pharmacy-style concept of offering a selection of beauty products from hand-picked brands. McClumpha sees it as an exciting move for Fake Bake: “I think what Marks & Spencer has created is very unique to the UK market. We only have mass market retailers and then department stores, there’s nothing in the middle. I think it’s going to be a great partnership for us, because what we’ve seen so far with Marks & Spencer is that they’ve really got their finger on the pulse of what’s going on, and they allow the brands to have a voice in the store. When they approached us and presented their plans it was an absolute no-brainer.”
McClumpha hopes that this forward-thinking approach will introduce more people to the brand once consumers discover that the product range “has something for everyone”, ranging from one night, wash-off instant tans to products with added anti-ageing or anti-cellulite benefits. “The products that we’ve hand-picked to go in will help us communicate the message that it’s not just a self-tan product that’s for the younger market. We’ve got advanced formulations that would really suit the M&S customer.”
Home improvement
Another area of focus for the company is Fake Bake at Home, which employs around 2,800 Fake Bake professional therapists to visit clients’ homes to do a spray tan or spray tan party. “We’re going to expand it into Fake Bake Beauty at Home, so there’s going to be a skin care element – we will develop our own skin care line – and additional products to the brand’s ranges. We hope to eventually expand that worldwide as well.” In addition to this, McClumpha reveals that the brand is planning to introduce more products in the skin care, bath and body care and colour cosmetics categories, with a planned release date for May this year.
Looking to the future, McClumpha says her plan is simply to “keep going”, although for her, this means getting established in all major retailers worldwide as the number one self-tanning brand.
“Everybody has put in such hard work and sacrificed a lot,” she says, “We want the brand to be at the forefront, so that when anybody thinks about self-tanning, they think about Fake Bake.”
