Inside CEW Innovators Awards 2025

No, it's so interesting because, and Ilana, I want to kind of get your take on this because innovation is now such an important topic and it's such, I think it always has been, right? But now to see it come front and center is very inspiring, especially I think for a lot of women in medicine, women in science, especially.

I mean, what is your take on that in terms of innovation being the focus rather than just the broader beauty category?

Yeah, I mean, I can tell you because it was I attended the awards and it was before I officially joined CW.

And I think what struck me was that this is an industry that's based a lot on newness and on how it's marketed and what the package looks like, etc., But we never pull back the curtain on how the product actually gets made.

And yet, interestingly, consumers love that, right? Like they love to see like on the line, like people love when brands kind of post like, here's the lipstick getting filled or this is what it looks like on the line or whatever.

And I think really what Andrea and CW did was it re... focused people's attention on the fact that there are individuals at every step of the process and that not only are women the end consumer, but there's this group of women, obviously men also, but we put the spotlight on women, of who are behind the scenes, right? Either doing the research, creating the ingredients, formulating the product, working on the product package fit, et cetera.

And what I saw was in that room were a lot of women who felt like they were the intel inside, but they were the best kept secret out there, right? And so they were just so thrilled to kind of have this spotlight on them to say, okay, A, thank you for doing this.

But B, yes, like I raised my hand.

I worked on the bench in this big company for 30 years.

And now I started my own ingredient manufacturer, my own lab or my own whatever.

And there was just an enormous amount of pride.

And I would also say camaraderie.

among those people because they kind of looked at each other and they understood each other, right? Like they were like, we are part of this community.

I feel like what happened was they came together like a cohort and they sort of wanted to create this sub-community of innovators and creators.

Yeah, that's really fascinating because I like what you said.

I think these awards really, for me, stand out so much because the recognition that's needed.

I mean, you can spend your whole life, right, like trying to create something magical and do it behind the bench, but then to not have anyone even know that you were behind that, that's...

That's hard for any scientist, for any innovator.

And so this is huge that you guys have introduced these awards.

Andrea, I want to go back to you and ask you about the actual evaluation process for the awards.

I'm sure that's pretty difficult, right, to kind of understand, like, what are the two factors that stand out in any kind of innovation rather than something that's trend-driven novelty? So can you give us a little bit of insight into that evaluation process for the awards?

So we received more than 100, 150 submissions, and they were entered by category, not only by the innovators themselves, but also by their peers.

So their peers called out, hey, you should know about this fantastic program.

product development person or this amazing R&D person or an up-and-comer.

And so a lot of them who were ultimately chosen didn't know that they were even in the running.