McPherson’s has a long, rich history in Australia. Founded in 1860, the company was originally in the business of raw materials, however, this focus has shifted significantly throughout the years. In 2004, McPherson’s began on it’s path into the health and beauty space with the purchase of Cosmex, with the last five years seeing the company grow its health and beauty category by 26 per cent.
McPherson’s markets over 30 brands – and 3000+ products. The last 10 years has seen McPherson’s acquire many beauty brands including Manicare, Lady Jayne, Swisspers®, , , , Maseur and, more recently, Dr. LeWinn's and . The company also has exclusive marketing and distribution agreements with market-leading agency brands such as , , and Disney.
Responsible for designing, marketing and distributing a wide range of consumer products, the company is steadfastly achieving its mission to be a world-class consumer products company.
beautydirectory sat down with McPherson’s marketing team members Donna Chan, Fiona Windsor and Luiza Anthes to discover how this company is shaking up the Australian beauty industry.
McPherson's marketing team - Donna Chan, Luiza Anthes and Fiona Windsor.
What is the company infrastructure at McPherson’s?
Windsor: The single biggest strength for McPherson’s is our reach. We have a team of 40+ field representatives in the pharmacy channel, as well as 250+ grocery and mass-merchant merchandisers across the country. We have a very strong distribution network and a sophisticated logistics centre at head office. Our warehouse has a pick to light system, which means the operators are able to pick and pack each box specifically for every pharmacy every day of the week. This means our customer service is second-to-none. This is evidenced by the fact that we’ve won a lot of awards from our retailers, including the coveted Coles Supplier of the Year Award (General Merchandise) last year.
How is the business organised?
Chan: We’re very much a consumer products business. We have three divisions – a health and beauty division, a household consumables division, and a consumer durables division – so we’re quite a diverse organisation from that perspective. This means we can diversify our channels but leverage the internal expertise of sales, marketing and operations. If you look at our future, we’re actually changing the mix of our business and it’s very much around driving growth and accelerating in health and beauty. Most of our recent acquisitions have been in the health and beauty space.
Why did the company decide to move into the health and beauty arena?
Chan: The business wanted to diversify into other areas, leveraging the expertise it already had. We know that it’s a category which is growing and performing extremely well, plus it’s an area of strength in terms of our channels – we’re very strong within the pharmacy channel, the grocery channel, and department stores. We’ve been able to enjoy a lot of success within the health and beauty category due to our expertise, and we’ve obviously got the backing operationally to be able to support and deliver that expertise.
Have the beauty and health brands received success since being acquired by McPherson’s?
Chan: If I look at how successful we’ve been in acquisitions, we’ve actually done extremely well. Since acquiring the Cosmex business two years ago, we’ve grown Eylure by 53 per cent, Montagne Jeunesse by 36 per cent, plus we’re getting more distribution and opening more doors for our other beauty businesses as well.
McPherson's headquarters.
What are the reasons behind these successes?
Chan: It’s a combination of things – we’ve put in the right marketing plans, we’re very strong at execution in the field from the merchandisers to pharmacy sales representatives, leveraging our account relationships to increase our distribution and ratings in-store, being able to access more doors through our operational expertise, delivering to any postcode in Australia, and our innovation speed. We’re not tied down to manufacturing, we source from all over the world so have a strong network of suppliers that we can leverage, and we’ve got people on the ground to build those networks and deliver projects with speed.
How did you choose which brands you wanted to acquire?
Chan: We’re quite strict with the type of brands we want. We are looking for brands that are market leaders in their own right, for example, Dr. LeWinn’s is a market leader in premium anti-ageing within the pharmacy channel. We wanted to have strong consumer brands, so brands that consumers recognise and love, and we wanted to focus on categories of growth, for example, anti-ageing and beauty accessories are areas that are growing. We also look for what synergies there are within our business, so within beauty accessories, if we look at Priceline we have 60 per cent market share. We’re looking for those brands that have a lot of strength in the marketplace, a lot of leadership, and bring a lot of opportunities that we can forge forward to growth.
Have any changes been made?
Chan: The recent acquisitions, say for example Revitanail and Dr.LeWinn’s, have already got very strong plans in place, so we’re continuing those strong plans.
Windsor: Our large sale team, our strong distribution, our reach and our customer service will contribute to growth of the brands. We’ll be opening more doors, reaching more people, and therefore bringing more consumers to our products.
Dr. LeWinn's launches the Eternal Youth Day & Night Cream.
This year Dr. LeWinn’s is celebrating 25 years in Australia. Are there any plans in place to recognise this milestone?
Anthes: We’re celebrating with everyone who has supported the brand over the years to make it what it is today – that includes our consumers, retail partners, editors. We have limited-edition 25th anniversary collection tin sets which include our best-sellers to reward our loyal users, plus we are launching the luxurious Eternal Youth Day & Night Cream. Finally, this year we will be unveiling a new Dr. LeWinn’s campaign, which will be focusing on getting new users to discover the Dr. LeWinn’s brand.
What are McPherson’s plans for the beauty division over the next five years?
Windsor: We’re definitely looking to acquire market-leading brands in growth categories. We’re looking for synergies in what we already have here in terms of infrastructure, we want to leverage our strong distribution network and our sales team and the channels in which we’re already placed. We’re also looking at taking on more agency brands – via distribution agreements - to leverage our distribution network as well as our strong marketing team.
Chan: Watch this space in terms of the areas we’re going to expand in. There are things in the pipeline that are very confidential that we’re working on, but they will definitely be true consumer brands that we can see a lot of opportunity to leverage McPherson’s strength to grow them.