Product research and production at Shiseido are designed to create products that customers can use with confidence and peace of mind. Based on our belief that correct knowledge of the skin is critical, the cosmetics development process starts with intensive research into skin structure conducted in collaboration with Japanese and overseas dermatologists, universities, and other research institutions utilizing state-of-the-art technology from a broad range of disciplines related to cosmetics (including the life sciences, dermatology, surface science, ergonomics, and psychology). Then ingredients are thoroughly investigated for impurities and other substances that might adversely affect the skin, and only those of unquestionable safety are selected for use. Finally, we conduct patch tests and dermatologist-supervised trials to ensure that the resulting formulations will be free of problems when used in products.

During product manufacturing, Shiseido establishes strict standards with regard to hygiene, manufacturing and product quality at its factories. Personnel, working under hygienically controlled conditions, use clean facilities and manufacture products while conforming to stringent manufacturing guidelines. In addition to verifying products through implementing respective inspections during and after the manufacturing processes, Shiseido conducts sensory tests to check smell, color and usability, thereby ensuring that there is no uncomfortable feeling for customers when using products. Sensory testing is an inspection carried out by internally qualified inspectors, whose senses (vision, smell, touch) are relied upon to make judgments. Products that have passed such quality checks are then shipped and delivered to customers. Additionally, we are also checking the quality of our products by storing product samples for five years after shipment.

When treating patients with dermatitis (rash) suspected to have been caused by cosmetics, dermatologists attempt to track down the cause of the condition by conducting patch tests with the cosmetics used by the patient, as well as their ingredients. Statistical data summarizing the rate of positive results for these patch tests for individual manufacturers can be interpreted as an indicator of the effectiveness of those companies' safety assurance programs. Published reports show that the rate of positive results for Shiseido cosmetics is the lowest of all domestic and overseas cosmetics manufacturers*, and that a high level of safety is maintained.

*From Fujimoto et al., "Patch Test Results in 492 Patients of Suspected Cosmetic Dermatitis (1996 to 2000)," Environmental Dermatology, Vol. 9, No. 53-62, 2002

Shiseido also promotes a 100% customer-oriented approach to the manufacture of healthcare products.
At Shiseido, state-of-the-art technology plays an important role in the commercialization of beauty, health, and pharmaceutical products like Aperio, a pioneering beauty drink that has inspired a dedicated following for more than 20 years.
We’ve also made social contributions in the area of food products, for example with Fine Rice, which was launched in 1991for individuals with rice allergies as Japan’s first specified health food. The product employed technology for eliminating allergens from rice germ and was sold for 16 years until 2007, when alternative technologies became available.
We pride ourselves on manufacturing healthcare products that our customers can consume with confidence and peace of mind by following GMP standards developed for pharmaceuticals<*1> or Shiseido standards at every stage of the manufacturing process, from ingredient selection to commercialization and production.
As with our cosmetics, the ingredient selection process involves gathering information from around the world and checking data describing site conditions, soil quality, residual pesticides, and other characteristics so that we can use only ingredients that inspire peace of mind. In commercialization and production, we maintain systems capable of maintaining a stable supply of high-caliber, high-quality products by observing internal Shiseido standards as well as HACCP<*2>, ISO 9000, ISO 22000, GMP, and other industry standards and guidelines.
In all of these initiatives, we are not satisfied to rest on our accumulated experience, but rather continuously strive to develop safe and original products while gathering the latest health information and applying state-of-the-art technologies. To this end, our research, product development, and beauty services departments cooperate and regularly exchange information.

*1 GMP: Good Manufacturing Practice. Quality control standards for pharmaceuticals and other products developed by the Minister of Health, Labour and Welfare in accordance with Japan's Pharmaceutical Affairs Law.
*2 HACCP: A technique for controlling food product hygiene developed in the 1960s in the United States to ensure the safety of space rations used by astronauts.

In addition to moving beyond the retail outlets that comprise our most common point of contact to seek out the opinions and desires of our customers, we are promoting two-way communication as a way to provide a range of information about products and beauty.

The Shiseido Customer Center solicits opinions from customers throughout Japan by a variety of means including toll-free calls, letters, and email. The Center processes some 190,000 contacts on a broad range of subjects each year, including questions about how to use or choose products, opinions and requests for products, and responses to advertisements.

The Shiseido Customer Center

Company newsletter featuring
the Shiseido Customer Center

We grouped together answers to some of the most common questions we receive from customers in a Frequently Asked Questions document (FAQ) and made it available on the Shiseido website(Japanese only) in February 2008.

Shiseido provides extensive product, beauty, and company information on its website(Japanese only), reflecting efforts to create appealing content and administer the site in response to customers' desires and needs.
Additionally, the Shiseido Global website is also available through three carriers, iMode, EZweb and Yahoo! Mobile.
More than 1.25 million registered Shiseido Net members (Japanese only) receive various exclusive service offers including participation as monitors, application to receive complimentary product samples and viewing of "my page" with personalized information. Additionally, subscription to email magazines including Shiseido News (Japanese only) packed with a variety of the latest information is also available.

Shiseido website

Shiseido global website

The online Beauty Dictionary(Japanese only) is a helpful resource for individuals wanting to know more about beauty. It contains theoretical explanations related to beauty, basic instructions for using cosmetics, and information about makeup techniques and skincare methods. Videos make content more accessible.

Shiseido's Listener's Cafe provides the audio equivalents of content such as beauty information and basic cosmetics knowledge for visually challenged individuals. Other offerings include A Time for Beauty, a wide-ranging compilation of information about beauty, trends, fashion, and health published quarterly on CD and donated by the Company to 100 Braille libraries throughout Japan.
We've also made this report easier to use by making detailed information about the products it mentions immediately accessible.

Since 2005, Shiseido has been holding Shiseido Nationwide Beauty Enhancement Seminars, which are carried out in conjunction with various measures, concurrently at business locations throughout Japan to provide Shiseido Net Members with the latest beauty information and also allow them to experience new products. To date, over 45,000 customers have participated. The online registration process gives priority to customers who have registered as Shiseido Net Members.

Note: Registration is available through such channels as select store locations and via local media.

Customer Service Code of Conduct

Shiseido uses feedback from customers as a compass to guide its corporate activities and to create more satisfying products and services. Our Consumer Information Center accepts suggestions and feedback from customers and plays a central role in navigating the corporate organization to ensure that this valuable resource is reflected in a variety of activities designed to create joy on the part of customers.
We adopted a Customer Service Code of Conduct in fiscal 2006 to ensure that the Center's daily efforts to respond in good faith serve to foster trust and meaningful relationships with the Company, and we continue to work to improve the quality of our communication with customers.
In order to deepen our understanding of customers and to reflect their input in our efforts to improve and develop more satisfying products and services, we are working to implement a program of customer information management that seeks to collect customer feedback via a variety of sources and methods, including the Shiseido Customer Center.

Shiseido gathers customer feedback through a broad range of methods and puts it to work in developing a deeper understanding of its customers.

Special mobile handset used by Beauty Consultants

Based on a belief that spontaneous reactions at retail outlets signal customers' true feelings, Beauty Consultants collect 130,000 instances of customer feedback each year on the sales floor using special mobile handsets. The system enables authentic customer reactions to the Company's marketing activities to be shared companywide within one day of being entered on the handsets.

About 10,000 survey participants and Internet Monitors are selected from customers who have registered to become Shiseido Net members(Japanese only). In addition to having these individuals respond to our proprietary survey system, we use feedback gained from monitor surveys and other means of two-way communication in product development, and to help improve customer service.

Shiseido added an area where visitors can submit ideas and suggestions to its website in April 2008. Solicitations are limited to users of My Page on the Shiseido website (Japanese only), but are publicized widely. Voting by all website visitors helps the Company understand customers' expectations and reflect them in its corporate activities.

Customer feedback that has been aggregated by the Voicenet C system is subjectively analyzed by employees and used to provide better products and services.

In order to collectively manage customer information, Shiseido has implemented the "Voicenet C" system since 1996.
The Voicenet C system provides functionality for supporting responses at the Customer Center (Customer Consultation Support System), recording and storing feedback details and associated circumstances (Customer Information Entry System), supporting contact between the Consumer Information Center and other worksites and departments throughout Japan (Customer Service Information Management System), and analyzing issues and trends in customer information that should be shared (Customer Information Analysis System).
Information from these four functions can be accessed from any Company location via the Internet, enabling the results of customer feedback analysis to be employed in enhancing a variety of operations.

Shiseido maintains a system for quickly routing information obtained from the Consumer Information Center, which forwards feedback received on a daily basis to other departments as appropriate, ensuring its ability to take optimal and timely action in regard to customers. Customer feedback continuously circulates throughout the Company so that customer satisfaction can be assured not only in times of emergency, but also in daily operations.

The Consumer Information Center selects evaluations of Shiseido products and services as well as hints for increasing customer satisfaction from customer information collected by Voicenet C and edits them for dissemination in weekly, monthly, annual, and other reports so that they can be reflected in the Company's marketing activities.

Seminar being held at a factory

Shiseido holds Voices of Customers seminars to provide deeper knowledge of customer's thoughts and feelings as they enjoy cosmetics in their daily lives, as well as background information. By allowing them to directly experience and share actual customer feedback among themselves, the program gives participating employees an opportunity to see their responsibilities in a new light from the customer's perspective, helping them to develop a sense of empathy with and understanding of customers.

Shiseido shares feedback from customers internally to ensure our products will satisfy customers for as long as they use them. The valuable information we gain from this feedback is used in company activities, and these initiatives are also applied to the product creation process.
Recent key examples are introduced here.

Click here (Japanese only) to view key examples up until now.

To facilitate the disposal of used product packaging, which is "taking up too much space and is therefore difficult to dispose of," plastic packaging used for limited sets of products has been changed to paper packaging to make disposal more convenient.

In order to address a request of "reducing waste volume and eliminating waste," shrink wrap packaging has been newly adopted for eight items of the AquaLabel line, including skin lotion and emulsion at the time of product renewal, thereby reduced items that use plastic cases. As for products that require cases, the plastic is made thinner and the amount of resin used has been reduced.
Through this initiative, Shiseido has reduced the overall annual amount of resin used in packaging by 23.7 tons for this brand.

The shape of the soap tray has been modified to address the request of "enhancing stability when soap is placed on the tray."
The shape of the soap has also been changed, making it easier to hold and less likely to slip for enhanced usability.

In response to customer's requests for containers that enable them to see the remaining volume to give an idea when they will finish the product and offer refill products, Shiseido has made improvements to containers in line with the renewal of content to enable users to see the remaining volume and newly launched refill products.
Since users can visually check the remaining volume, the inconvenience of suddenly running out of a product is avoided and users can refill dispensers instead of disposal.

Shiseido has released a SEA BREEZE Body Shampoo Cool & Deodorant refill in response to a number of requests and feedback from long time users.

With regard to containers in which light does not pass thorough to preserve content ingredients, we have been receiving a number of requests to use containers that allow users to visually see the remaining volume so that they know the next time to purchase the item. In order to allow users to more easily have a better idea of when the lotion inside will run out, a space has been created at the bottom of containers to write down a rough estimate of when they will finish using the product.

While the effects of highlight color that makes skin look beautiful have a wide appeal, among shade, highlight and cheek colors, a number of users have specifically requested to "increase the amount of highlight color since it is used up faster than other two colors. "Accordingly, Shiseido has improved the balance of colors and increased the proportion of highlight color.

Shiseido has created "contents color refills" requested by a number of customers using an eye makeup compact that comes in a set of several colors. All contents colors are distributed as a single item so as to enable users to refill one color at a time and use the compact or eye shadow without any waste.

Shiseido is using product packaging that has eliminated stress factors (e.g., hard to open or close, heavy, hard to read) when using skincare cosmetics for senior generation women. At the same time, bottles have been designed placing importance on being "genuine cosmetics" that also provide a "feminine" and "pampered" feeling.

Universal design takes into account the environments in which all kinds of people live. It is an important approach for Shiseido given our commitment to create products that all customers can enjoy with confidence and peace of mind.
Shiseido adopted the Shiseido Universal Design Guidelines in 2005 based on expert theory and legislation, and crafted to reflect the characteristics of our products. The guidelines span 6 principles and 14 provisions and describe a product development process in which all product planning and design departments share information. A key point during the formulation of the guidelines was to precisely identify what kind of customers used actual products, as well as how they used them and in what circumstances. It was also important to imagine as many such situations as possible.
For example, the principle requiring that it be obvious how to use the product includes an "intuitive design" checkbox indicating that users should intuitively understand where to hold the container and twist in order to open it. Designs that take such considerations into account are defined as easy-to-use designs. Conversely, a design that contravenes the user's intuition by having a non-functional design element that looks like a button that should be pressed to open the container would be a difficult-to-use design.
In fall 2008, we launched ELIXIR PRIOR for customers aged 60 and over. During the development of the container, designers met many times with customers in the target age group to solicit feedback on what they found inconvenient about their daily makeup routine and to give them an opportunity to handle the actual container. The requests and concerns that emerged from those meetings were incorporated into the design as shown in the photograph below.
Shiseido will continue to value customer's perspectives in product development.

A space between the bottle and cap provides
a finger-hold, making it easier to open
the product.

We incorporated enlarged item names like
"lotion", which had been displayed
in English on the front of the product as design
elements, into easily visible positions on the
back of the product. Moreover, the product seals are also easy to peal off.