Growing the British Cosmetics Superlab

About Pangaea

Pangaea specializes in professional skin care (Medik8), hair care (Nanogen), and beauty (The Hero Project). With distribution in over 20 countries, the London based company’s rapid growth is driven by a reputation for providing innovative and cutting-edge solutions.

In 1999, after traveling the Far East for four years, Pangaea founder Elliot Isaacs began building the foundations for a new kind of cosmetics company, from a small rented lab in the back of a village pharmacy. With the success of their first product, discovered during Elliot’s travels, Pangaea began to grow. In 2004 Dean Pearson, now CEO at Pangaea joined the company and set about helping them build an organization that has become a widely respected player in the global cosmetics market.

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Challenge

Keep the entire company focused on the overall strategy while growing rapidly

Dean Pearson, CEO at Pangaea, knows that growing a business at high speed comes with risks and hurdles. “Back in 2015 one of the biggest challenges we had was how to manage our growth in a way that everyone stayed connected to our purpose and focused on our strategy while driving the company in the right direction.” At the time, Dean and his team already had goal-setting processes and KPI dashboards in place, but they learned they would have to take a new approach to fulfill their ambitions as a company.

In search of a framework that would best support Pangaea’s growth targets, Dean stumbled across OKR (Objectives and Key Results). “It wasn’t until I saw Google Ventures partner Rick Klaus’ talk How Google sets goals that I realized OKR was what we needed,” says Dean. “I read any article I could find on OKR, then looked into how we could do this ourselves and got started with putting it all in place.”

There is just a great buzz in the place. Sure, there are tough meetings and targets but it’s all rational and data-based. You feel like you want to succeed and give your best.
_{- Glassdoor review from a Pangaea employee}

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Solution

Use Perdoo’s software and coaching to establish OKR as a strategy implementation framework

Use Perdoo’s software and coaching to establish OKR as a strategy implementation framework

“At first it was all about the software that helped us intuitively manage OKRs and visualize them. However, after about nine months of using OKR at Pangaea, we couldn’t see the true potential,” says Dean. “I was so busy running a company that I simply didn’t have the time to establish a great OKR program, and people weren’t really engaged. OKR wasn’t a part of our DNA yet, so I asked our team for their feedback, and then I asked Perdoo for help.”

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OKR Health Check

In 2016 Perdoo began coaching the team on OKR, as a result of Pangaea’s request. Pangaea’s dedicated Perdoo Coach started with a comprehensive health check of their OKR program, followed by training executives and team members on the OKR methodology and helping everyone get the most out of Perdoo.

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Training & Feedback

Through training and feedback sessions with executives and team leads, Perdoo was quickly able to add value to Pangaea’s OKR program. Perdoo helped Pangaea bring more clarity to company strategy through clearly defined goals, assisted team leads in aligning their goals to those of the company, and led all employees to a better understanding of the OKR framework.

Working with Perdoo has really helped us become the goal-driven company we are today
_{- Dean Pearson, CEO at Pangaea}

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Result

The most successful period in Pangaea’s history

Since Pangaea implemented OKR and started working with Perdoo in 2016, the cosmetics company has successfully developed and launched over 40 product innovations, and doubled the team size while receiving top ratings from employees.

“Working with Perdoo has helped me ingrain OKR into our culture, so much so that I can be confident our new brands will go live fast, each with a clear strategy and an engaged team that is aligned behind the goals for the new business,” says Dean. “Perdoo has contributed to a large part of our success, and their software and coaching is something I couldn’t imagine running our business without,” Dean concluded.

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What’s next for Pangaea?

The future is bright for Pangaea, the company has set itself some big goals. With three unique cosmetic brands already in the market, Pangaea aims to launch another five by 2025, and there is no doubt the team will achieve it.