The range of beauty products has increased significantly in recent years. The public awareness is also increasing, we seek information about ingredients and read the table of contents thoroughly. Despite this, the traditional beauty industry is built around mysterious labs and secret formulas.

The Swedish skincare brand ACO is built on the opposite – no additives, no deception. ACO has created skincare with carefully selected ingredients in their own laboratories since 1939. ACO wanted to demonstrate their expertise through transparency by showing how skincare actually works and how their products are produced.

ACO wrote history as the first skincare company to digitally open up their laboratory. The ACO Beauty Share Lab was created, an advanced digital skincare lab, where consumers for the first time ever could create their fully customized personal moisturizers with 18,500 possible outcomes.

Users created their personal moisturizer by choosing the ingredients they preferred or they could consult ACO’s experts for recommendations on appropriate ingredients based on age and skin type. When the moisturizer was ready, the user customized the packaging by naming their cream and adding their Facebook profile picture. ACO’s skin care experts then mixed the moisturizer in the real lab and sent it home to the user.

The lab was pre-launched to prioritized beauty journalists, who created their own personal face creams and shared this with their readers. During the campaign, 13,000 consumers created their own unique moisturizer. Due to its authenticity, the ACO Lab is now used to educate pharmacists.

Users entered the Lab on ACO’s Facebook-page and completed six steps to create their personal moisturizer among 18,500 possible outcomes. In every step they could turn to ACO’s experts for advice on appropriate ingredients based on age and skin type. Users could deepen their knowledge with information about all ingredients. When the moisturizer was ready, the user customized the packaging by naming their cream and adding their Facebook profile picture.

Once a week ACO’s experts choose the most characteristic mixes and produced them in the real lab. The process was filmed, and posted on Facebook. Through the social part of the lab, users spread their activity by sharing their mixes and interacted with other people's mixes.

The lab was pre-launched to prioritized beauty journalists who created their personal facial creams, creating unique content which they spread in their own blog channels and the broader media they work for.

The campaign differentiated ACO from competitors and proved their expertise by each step the user interacted with in the lab. By becoming the first skincare company to completely open up and digitalize their lab, ACO attracted the interest of Sweden’s top beauty journalists. “Plaza Kvinna”, “Damernas Värld” and “Solo”, to name a few, created massive impact in prioritized beauty medias that described the content as groundbreaking, communicating ACO as an innovative company in both personal and wider editorial media channels.

Nearly 13,000 users created their personal moisturizers during one month. Due to its authenticity, the Beauty Share Lab is now used as a permanent tool in the training of pharmacists. They first learn to mix moisturizers in the digital lab, before mixing IRL. This increases the pharmacist’s preference for ACO when recommending products to consumers. On Facebook, fans praised the Lab. ACO and their fans had found a common interest.