La Mer has inked a first-of-its-kind partnership.
The luxury skin care brand has partnered with The Salk Institute in San Diego on a three-year fellowship. Called the La Mer Healthy Aging Fellowship, the postdoctoral research program will focus on cell mitochondria and aging, and has been awarded to Ankita Chadda.
It is the first partnership of its nature between The Salk Institute and a beauty brand, La Mer said in a statement. The insights uncovered through the research may be parlayed into future innovation from the brand, but the rationale behind the partnership was manifold.
“What’s important for us is to deepen our knowledge and understand what we can do differently within the world of beauty and skin care,” said Sandra Main, La Mer’s global brand president. “From a consumer-facing perspective, yes, this helps from an efficacy standpoint or credibility standpoint. But this partnership is real because we want to make sure Ankita can help educate us as individuals, as well as in regards to what we can do to deliver better products for consumers.”
The luxury skin care market in the U.S. has dragged on the category overall, though Main said La Mer is still swimming upstream. “We are currently the number-one luxury skin care brand. We have about 24 percent market share, and we are gaining share not only in North America but across all different regions,” she said, crediting a mix of heroes like The Concentrate and Crème de La Mer, as well as new launches like the new Rejuvenating Night Cream.
“We’re not about launching lots of different things. We are very, very choiceful in terms of what we launch,” Main said, calling out the brand’s repeat purchase rate of around 65 percent. “When you purchase La Mer products, it is an investment. We’ve got to make sure that we’re delivering the best product possible for that client to make sure that it’s a worthwhile investment for them and they stick with it for life.
“We’re a very understated brand. We’re not a brand that does a lot of advertising; we believe in the products speaking for themselves,” Main continued.
Indeed, the brand has been more active in scientific and medical communities in recent years. “Over the past few years, we’ve been prioritizing peer-reviewed research and clinical validation to substantiate what we’ve always known about [hero ingredient] Miracle Broth’s biological activity,” said Lauren Waldrum, global vice president, product development, La Mer. “We present original research at some of the leading dermatologist conferences, like AAD, and scale our partnership with Dr. Gold.”
Gold is a dermatologist and founder of the Gold Skin Care Center, as well as a science adviser for La Mer. “These efforts bridge the gap between luxury and true credibility in the eyes of the medical community, and also the consumer. We’re not just using science to validate what we already know. We’re investing in the science to discover what’s next, and it’s important for us to grow and continue to evolve as a brand,” she continued.
La Mer’s relationship started with The Salk Institute last year with a PR and influencer event at the Louis I. Kahn-designed grounds, an icon of Brutalist architecture, which also hosted the Louis Vuitton Cruise 2023 show.
“That was really our first date,” Main said of the event. “It was love at first sight. They were super fun, super smart, and they knew so much more about science and biology. We realized there were a lot of commonalities with how they work within their organization — even in terms of the physical structure, there are no walls and lots of opportunities for cross-pollination.”
The Salk Institute also noticed similar overlap.
“One of the things we discussed was the science of healthy aging, whether that’s keeping skin cell strength, cell integrity or more fundamental mechanics. These are the types of things we study here,” said the institute’s president Gerald Joyce, MD and PhD. “We have cancer researchers that are looking at genome stability, DNA repair, and we are very interested in energy metabolism because it plays a central role.”
For the institute, “Post-doctoral fellows are an absolutely essential part of our research,” said Jan Karlseder, PhD, vice president, chief science officer and professor at The Salk Institute, clarifying that Chadda hypothesizes cellular transport pathways change in composition and direction with age. “We expect from that, we will gain insights into novel processes that contribute to the healthy aging process and to cellular energy metabolism.”
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