HERO WORSHIP: FIRMING BODY BUTTER

Written by LAURA REGENSDORF
Illustrated by LYDIA McKEE

In 2019, while recovering from her second endometriosis surgery, Tanné Snowden started canvassing far and wide for the most effective scar treatments. Soon, though, she grew dismayed when digging into the commonly used ingredients: “petrochemicals, dyes, known carcinogens that you’re basically putting on open wounds,” she says. Until that point, the Auckland, New Zealand, native had been working in real estate and art curation, but her drive to solve her own problem led her to develop a clean formula for scars, ultimately building a brand in the process. By the time Tronque arrived in late 2023, she’d added two products to the introductory lineup—and Firming Body Butter became the runaway hit. Here’s how Snowden upended a routine category and created a transformative, deeply nourishing best seller.

THE GENESIS

Snowden initially figured her top-performing product would be the Scar Concentrate, given how well it worked and how enthusiastically her friends and acquaintances would ask for more. Still, she didn’t want the brand to just be associated with a specialized treatment. Instead, she sought to position it as body care—“hence the name Tronque, meaning the trunk of your body,” she says. After launching in New Zealand, she took a year to fine-tune the branding before setting her sights on her target market, the US. It was during that time, as the body butter started to climb in sales, that she decided to reformulate, bolstering the active-ingredient profile. “We really wanted it to be the best and to have that customer for life,” says Snowden, who had a certain key retailer in mind. “Honestly, VIOLET GREY was the standard that Tronque was conceptualized for,” she says. She would make pilgrimages to The Melrose Store on visits to Los Angeles and imagined the Tronque and VIOLET GREY customers as one and the same. As it turned out, the American audience for an ultra-efficacious whipped body cream was ready and waiting.

THE FORMULA

“With body care, textures need to be very, very specific—a customer can be completely drawn in or completely turned off,” says Snowden. The goal, as she told her formulators, was to make something that was “thick and creamy and delicious, but truly absorbed into the skin.” She estimates that it took some 40 iterations to nail the perfect body-butter feel. But what really gives the formula its punch is the slate of active ingredients. The first is a rare New Zealand red seaweed—a local find, given that Tronque’s products are all manufactured in her home country. “It creates this incredible matrix on the skin, where it plumps up all your water molecules,” she says of the immediate bounce and, more important, the long-term effect on improved moisture levels. Next comes red maple bark extract, which works to shore up firmness and elasticity, all while delivering a subtle glow without added mica. And because this is a body butter, there are a host of ingredients that bolster the lipid barrier and support hydration. That means ceramides, squalene, and hyaluronic acid, along with nourishing butters like shea, cacao, and mango. Best in class was the only option: “For me, there was really no point in launching something that was comparative to anyone else’s.” The natural, low-profile scent was the final piece, with notes of Italian lemon, watermelon, and guaiac wood.

THE MOMENTUM

“The feedback has been so rewarding, with customers reaching out to say we’ve helped their daughter’s eczema, or we’ve changed someone’s skin at 75 years old,” says Snowden. She chose to make the packaging red—an outlier in a sea of neutral, clinical-skewing brands—because the color is the “heartbeat of the body,” she says. There’s an especially loyal customer base for subscription orders, and the jar is designed to easily swap in a refill, for minimal waste. The real goal for Tronque is to change the narrative around body care, so it’s less of an afterthought and instead the first ritual after you step out of the shower. “We can be so hard on ourselves,” she says. “We need to give ourselves that time to look after the skin and put love back into our bodies.” The coming shift into winter spells an uptick in interest around Firming Body Butter—Snowden likes to pair it with the Vitamin C Body Oil for an extra antioxidant boost. The product also now serves, rather glamorously, as the closing step of the new Body on Duty treatment exclusively at the Bvlgari hotels in Rome and Milan—a protocol co-developed with Tronque that involves lymphatic massage and body gua sha. The Italian partnership brings the Firming Body Butter one step closer to the ancient Mediterranean king in the tagline on the jar: “Rich as Croesus.” Let it be a reminder to seek riches where it counts.