Bregaglio is a company that is part of the Zschimmer&Schwarz Group involved in selecting, purchasing, and distributing the best raw materials for the cosmetic and pharmaceutical industry.
For over 35 years, Bregaglio has put its expertise in the choice of raw materials at the service of the cosmetic and pharmaceutical world, stimulating the curiosity of its clients with innovative and avant-garde projects.
At the heart of Bregaglio’s philosophy are: truth, beauty, science, and cosmetics. It’s science’s job to help improve the cosmetic sector – to make the lives of people more beautiful.
With its eyes on today’s market and attention geared to tomorrow’s trends, Bregaglio is a true hotbed of new projects and ideas. The company stands out thanks to its development and support application lab as well as its analytical work on the zeitgeist of the cosmetics world that bring about inspiration and then transformation into formulation offerings.
Telling us about where new trends are born and how these inspire new cosmetic products is Cristina Minelle, beauty marketing & coolhunter at Bregaglio.
The profession of “coolhunter” is often associated with the world of fashion. How would you define the role of a coolhunter as it applies to raw materials?
You know when you have to choose which photo best represents a trip amongst a pile of them, how do you decide?
Ask a coolhunter…. the “trip” is the zeitgeist, the cultural mood of the moment, observed in the sociological, religious, and political changes. The “photos” are the messages collected, the literal definition of “cool”: fresh, never before seen, without a name, and that fits into an interesting repetition of sorts.
There’s always just one question to ask: ‘Who am I researching for?’ – ‘For the world of raw materials!’ – but little changes at the beginning of our “trip” …The initial concept applies across the board, independently of whether it’s about art, technology, design, fashion, food, or cosmetics. The beating heart is in fact, the same.
It’s only the rhythm that varies based on the request. It’ll be accelerating and pulsing with life when it concerns research about artists, the first to put new ideas out into the world; slower and more regular when adventuring into cosmetics which is inspired by other, more avant-garde sectors.
Is it correct to say that a cosmetic coolhunter has a specific code and vocabulary?
Yes absolutely: they are vital! A coolhunter collects this energy released by pulses and translates it into the correct aesthetic language for a particular area of interest, they sense what is essential and the symbolism that insights reveal at various speeds and, most importantly, they make choices thinking about the final product.
In fact, there would be no point in presenting a trend report for raw materials with words and language that belong to the world of fashion: it would be a failure!
How could your colleagues listen to you if, in analyzing events and picking the coolest raw materials or the places to look, you used terms like crop top, cuissardes or chunky?! Every field has its own lingo, its own code, and this should not be forgotten! In the case of raw materials, it’s about a mixture of science, transparency, and vision.
Where does inspiration for new trends come from?
Emerging yourself in the hot zones of the city with a notebook and a camera and transforming into something like water that takes the form of what it sees. Without losing your intuition and keeping personal taste at bay, you let them take over, the sources.
But what are the sources?
Exhibitions, shops, films, events, walls but also ideas, concerts, lifestyles that tell what direction thoughts are moving in. The hunt doesn’t have working hours, there is no “on/off”, a coolhunter is always a coolhunter because even in this very moment, the signals of what will be are taking form all around us. The future starts in every moment.
Well, it’s same old story, you’ll think “you need to be in the right place at the right time’…and although this is important, don’t say it’s a coincidence! All of this happens in the Bregaglio Observatory on its Instagram profile which collects inputs from hot zones.
What is a trend? How does a trend become a product?
“You’ve missed the boat! Carpe diem!’ are expressions that have never been truer for coolhunting, whether a trend is too early or too late doesn’t matter, it’s not on time and therefore it’s useless to transform it into a product and for us, into a formulation idea.
But what is a trend? It’s a flow of reality that moves at different speeds pushed by social, religious, cultural, and economical pressures…
Each flow is a direction that, like a wave in the sea, can grow or get lost on the shore. When something is suddenly “fashionable”, it means that many flows mixed, generating a new mood and it’s from there that a new product/formula is born.
What will it be like? It’ll be permeated with all the influences that generated the flow. It will capture the spirt of the moment in texture, color, and packaging; its function will pioneer a necessity, maybe one that has never been explored yet within the creative atmosphere: a brand-new reality!
How is this approach integrated into the company’s operations? Is it true that there’s an Application Laboratory within Bregaglio that “interprets” these trends?
In the company, the Observatory’s work is expressed on several levels and has its own rituals. On one side, it tracks signals in real-time with the goal of inspiring us and opening a window on the world and on the other, it constantly collaborates with the Application Laboratory, the atelier of science where the abstract becomes concrete. With its technical expertise, the Laboratory intercepts the most significant insights to transform them into projects that incorporate vision, chemistry, efficacy, aesthetics, and obviously safety..
How does the Sales division collaborate?
Who better can spread all of this better than the Sales Team? It’s thanks to them, in fact, that the laboratory’s research and then development live outside the company! The sales staff at Bregaglio have high technical knowledge and are an excellent driver in bringing what’s happening “inside” the company to clients. We call them the catalyzers of our favorite chemical reaction, capable of increasing the percentage of beauty in the cosmos.
This is how, every time you try to reinterpret the signals to give support to a client, a real symposium is born between the various company sectors! A banquet of ideas where the songs are our most contemporary offerings and the dances are the visions of the market that get the party started amongst beakers and formulations. Hence, there’s no reason to be jealous of the banquets held by the Greeks and Romans: the only difference is that we prefer raw materials to wine!
Can you talk to us about some of the projects that came from this cooperation?
The Visual Podcast is our latest project and at this point, we’re ready to share it and spread it on our social media channels. With respect to traditional podcasts, a new feature is the addition of photos that make words come to life.
During this period, we often asked ourselves How can we involve our far away clients in a new experience? Everyone is full of Zoom meetings, Skype appointments and a bit of solitude and so we thought about creating short content where our voices would be transported into other imagery in which coolhunting, scientific research, and a trained look at the future on the market all come together to reach our customers.
It’s a new tool offered by Bregaglio to support its sales team in opening innovative dialogues and upcoming avant-garde collaborations. In fact, each podcast episode is about one topic, a mood to keep in mind that could give rise to interesting cosmetic developments.
To spread the “beautiful” in cosmetics today means contaminating ourselves with high technology to find new ideas and being less conventional. The Visual Podcast wants to be a place to fantasize about the future of beauty together, a concentrated active ingredient of hope in this elusive and confusing season. We are convinced that beauty never dies and maybe in just a few minutes we will also convince you. Who knows…?
Is it true that the first of these podcast episodes will speak about “upcycling”?
Yes! The first will be focused on Upcycling and on “creative reuse” as a new philosophy to be inspired by, also in the beauty world.
We will send our clients a newsletter to inform them of the project and it will also be possible to access the content directly from our social media pages. Our goal? To transform the podcast into our new way of communication with, on average, one new episode a month.
