Case study: Grant Industries

About Grant Industries

Grant Industries is a provider of specialty chemicals, serving the personal care and beauty industry since 1938.

They are located in New Jersey and Beijing with a global customer base.

You can check out the live site here.

The Problem

Grant approached us with a goal to enhance their digital presence to improve conversion by providing more value to chemists on the bench.

They wanted to target a younger generation of chemists who don't have the same habits of picking up the phone and talking to a sales person.

Cosmetics has a weird e-commerce flow

The cosmetics industry has some interesting quirks that prevent using an off-the-shelf e-commerce solution:

1. Pricing is specific to the customer and their needs, there is no global price to display online.
2. Most of the buying is actually requesting samples online. It takes up the majority of their requests.

This makes your standard e-commerce solutions a bad fit when they expect items to have prices that apply to everyone (or at least identifiable groups) and take direct payment.

Chemists ask for samples, they don't purchase products

Chemists who are looking to create new formulations usually first order samples from chemical suppliers.

These samples are usually free. This is because prototyping can be a lengthy process with a lot of trial and error. You might imagine this is costly, and it can be.

However, having a chemist use your ingredient can be a big payday if their product takes off.

Once the client is happy with the prototype and the final formulation has been locked in, only then do the deals happen for the supply of the production of the final formula.

Adding value for formulators

Formulators are chemists who are assigned to formulate a new product, say a new lip gloss or mascara. They have the difficult task of making an affordable product, while adhering to the constraints that their client wants.

In order to quickly develop a minimum viable product (MVP) for the formulation, chemists often reverse-engineer other successful formulas. Once they have an effective base formula to work off of, they customize it to their client's needs.

We wanted to figure out a way to help formulators in this workflow, while simultaneously introducing them to more of Grant's products and formulas.

Solutions

The young professionals of today are more and more accustomed to doing their own research online, and will avoid picking up that phone until they're left with no other options.

Having the ability for customers to brainstorm about what they need and explore what you offer before they even pick up the phone is an invaluable on-ramp to having better conversations with sales staff.

The old website fulfilled its purpose of showcasing select products and formulas, but didn't allow for much exploration.

We revamped the product catalog, giving the Grant team full control over their featured products. We introduced a search engine and filtering system to allow chemists to find exactly what they're looking for.

We gave the same treatment to their Formulary, allowing chemists to more easily find relevant formulas for their use case.

This was a great improvement for customer experience, but does that translate to more business?

Empowering human sales staff

Providing a platform where Grant's customers can browse and research potential materials and formula ideas was a great start, acting as a new way to process requests for samples outside of aggregators such as UL Prospector.

But even more helpful was the introduction of sales analytics.

We developed a sales dashboard to give the sales team a helpful set of nudges to help them be there for the customer as they shop, as well as giving them a high level overview of customer behavior.

Instead of sales staff having to put together context purely through discussions with their customers, they now have an opportunity to see which products and formulas they've viewed or taken an interest in.

With these analytics they can put together a clear picture of what the chemist wants so that the next sales call can be as targeted and helpful as possible.

Benchmate

Benchmate is a tool that helps chemists on the bench, which is where all the real formulation work gets done. Benchmate helps chemists discover new ingredients, find alternatives to ingredients and reverse-engineer successful products to suit their needs.

By searching a list of chemicals, users will find results featuring each matched chemical, alongside other useful information like chemical functions, regulatory information (restrictions and maximum concentrations for example), and links to learn more on Pubchem or EU's COSING database.

We also added the ability for Grant staff to suggest proprietary alternatives when searching for particular chemicals, so chemists are prompted to further explore Grant Industries offerings.

To further simplify ingredient discovery we're introducing the ability to analyze ingredient lists directly from your phone. By simply taking a photo of the "back of the bottle", we parse information about the entire ingredient list without the need to type out all the ingredients by hand.

We're very excited for the launch of this new feature and we know many formulators are as well.

The Result

We at InHouse have thoroughly enjoyed our continued work with Grant Industries.

The deep domain of chemistry, and the unique ways the industry works, has been a fascinating challenge to take on as a developer.

We're happy to have had such great reception to the re-imagined website, catalog and Benchmate tool, and are looking forward to more improvements and releases as our work with Grant Industries continues.