Early-Stage Australian Baby Skincare Brand

A new Australian consumer product business approached us to place Product Liability cover before launching a dermatologically tested baby skincare product. The brand is early-stage and pre-revenue, but the compliance story is strong:

• The formulation is Australian-developed and registered with the Australian Industrial Chemicals Introduction Scheme (AICIS)
• Manufacturing is outsourced overseas to a GMP-aligned facility
• The product has been through Australian dermatological testing

On paper, this is a well-built product from a cautious, compliance-minded founder. In practice, "new baby skincare brand" is still a hard occupation to place through standard markets.

The instinct for a new founder is to go to an online panel, but the reality is that those panels aren't built for this risk. In this case, all of the standard markets accessible through a major online quote platform declined.

We pivoted to a specialist market that underwrites consumer chemical products. The submission emphasised:

• The AICIS registration status
• The Australian dermatological testing evidence
• The distribution channel and target customer base
• The founder's realistic projected turnover and product volumes

Two things made this placement harder than it looks on the surface.

First, "baby" as an occupation descriptor triggers the most conservative settings in every underwriter's appetite. Anything sold for use on infants attracts the highest level of underwriting scrutiny because the downstream claims environment is more emotionally charged and the settlements skew higher.

Second, it's a pre-revenue business. A new brand with no claims history, no trading history and no established distribution pattern is a blank sheet for underwriters to fill in. Without a broker pushing the right story, most will just decline.

We placed Product Liability cover for the baby skincare brand through a specialist market at an annual premium of around $2,900.

If you're launching an AICIS-registered consumer chemical product in Australia and the mainstream markets have come back with declines, the next step isn't "try a different online form". It's reaching a specialist underwriter that writes this work. More on how we place these risks on our life sciences insurance page, or see our broader guide to product liability insurance.