Andrea Lisbona’s desire to innovate an industry with Touchland
Touchland was born out of a desire to shift an industry.
In a discussion with Andrea Lisbona, the founder and chief executive officer of Touchland, a personal care and lifestyle brand, the retail executive explained that she wanted to create a type of product that was innovative to an industry, such as the iPhone with Apple or the hairdryer Dyson.
Much like the way the brand founder would never have expected to find herself inspired to purchase a $400 hair dryer, the retail industry could not have predicted the virality of Touchland’s hero product, the Power Mist, a $10 hydrating sanitiser that is as practical as it is aesthetically pleasing.
Inside Retail spoke with Lisbona to learn more about the origin story behind the brand, her approach to slowly but steadily growing the business, and upcoming plans for the company in the year ahead.
Kicking things off with a Kickstarter campaign
Like many indie brands on the market today, a large source of funding was found via Kickstarter, a public funding platform for creative and entrepreneurial projects.
However, few brands have been able to attain the results on Kickstart such as the one Touchland experienced prior to its launch in the US retail market.
Lisbona’s goal for the Kickstarter campaign she created for Touchland in July 2018 was set at a mere $15,000 and withinjust a few days of the campaign’s launch, Lisbona received over $67,000 in funding, a 450 per cent increase over her original goal. Additionally, there were also 1,500 pre-orders for the product in just one month.
Consumers were excited about a product that combined practicality with a sense of self-care and a highly enjoyableaesthetic, which was exactly Lisbona’s intention.
The brand founder told Inside Retail that much in the way that consumers used to look at steps of a skincare routine as a chore to finish, she wanted to elevate the hand-sanitizing experience to be more enjoyable through an elevated, sensory-focused approach.
The brand founder achieved this through a few elements, such as the hero product’s compact component that easily fits in the palm of the hand to the brand’s varied range of unique scents (many of which were formulated in partnership with the Swiss fragrance manufacturer Givaudan), and its wide array of colours, which consumers often will match to their outfit-of-the-day on platforms like TikTok.
Lisbona partially credits the company’s popularity on the video-focused social media platform to its success in the market today.
She stated, “I like how over the last years with social media, it has put brands at the level of the community where you can actually chat with them [the consumers] like a friend, and really listen [to them].”
The brand founder emphasized that “we started building this community around not just selling the beauty experience, but that sort of aspirational lifestyle approach of a brand with fashionable accessories.”
Taking a slow, but steady approach to growth
Before launching the brand, Lisbona and her husband were on the opposite end of the retail spectrum and were selling other brands’ sanitization products. However, Lisbona always knew she wanted to start her brand, citing a long-running entrepreneurial streak in her family’s bloodline.
It is witnessing the experiences her family went through in running their own businesses, especially after the financially catastrophic events of the 2008 recession, that influenced Lisbona’s own approach to the retail industry.
Seeing how the macroeconomic situation limited company operations on multiple levels created the mindset for the brand founder to build businesses responsibly and sustainably through cultivated external and self-funding.
Using the money they saved up through their prior business ventures, Lisbona formulated the first round of products for Touchland in 2014.
In 2016, Lisbona and her husband took the gamble to move from Barcelona to Miami, Florida and upon reformulating the products to suit the American market and launching the Kickstarter campaign in 2018, the duo set about to truly dig their heels into the American retail market.
A wager that was well-taken if one looks at Touchland’s track record in recent years.
In 2023, the company experienced a 203 per cent increase in sales year-over-year, with the fourth fiscal quarter alone outperforming quarter four of 2022 by an impressive 180 per cent.
While the exponential growth of a brand is thrilling for indie brands to experience, as Lisbona pointed out, “a good problem to have” is still often a difficult issue for a company to deal with.
The brand founder expressed that her approach to growth is “brutally humble” and that she wants to make sure that she and her team are handling product creation and distribution in a way that will keep up with growing customer demands, rather than trying to maintain a warp-speed expansion.
Even with a cautious approach to expansion, Touchland has created a noteworthy omnichannel distribution. In addition to the brand’s direct-to-consumer site, Touchland is also distributed in over 4,000 US retail doors including big-box chains; Sephora, Ulta and Target.
Moving forward, Lisbona told Inside Retail that there are plans in place to expand Touchland’s retail reach to corners outside of the US, with a prioritized focus on travel retail avenues.
Since launching the brand’s hero product, the Power Mist, Touchland has also launched the Gentle Mist and the Glow Mist for consumers seeking out extra skin-reviving benefits.
The brand founder hinted that there are some intriguing product releases in store for the brand over the next year and a half.
“We don’t like meaningless innovation. We like to create products that blow everyone’s mind and over-deliver what you expect this product to [be able to] give. So we could have launched [more products] before, but it was not amazing [yet]. We’ve been refining and refining and refining to be where we are today,” Lisbona concluded.
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