Edgewell Personal Care builds a future-forward innovation engine with Halo

Situation

Creating a scalable future innovation practice from the ground up

Edgewell Personal Care, the company behind brands like Schick, Banana Boat, and Playtex, is known for delivering trusted personal care products to consumers worldwide. But when Joi Ruud, Senior Innovation Lead and Founding Team member of Edgewell Futures, was tasked with standing up a completely new innovation function, she faced a blank slate and a bold opportunity.

The Futures Practice was envisioned as a four-pillar innovation engine:

• Disruptive innovation: imaginative, future-focused ideas launched under existing brands
• Thought leadership: trend-driven strategy across personal care and women’s health
• Brand scouting: tracking startups for potential partnerships or funding opportunities
• Technology scouting: identifying novel technologies that could transform product offerings

While Edgewell’s in-house R&D team is talented and globally distributed, they were already focused on high-priority business demands. Joi needed a way to reliably explore speculative, sometimes unconventional ideas that didn’t always fit within traditional innovation channels.

Action

Powering external innovation with Halo’s platform and people

Edgewell turned to Halo to serve as the backbone of its technology scouting pillar. With a mix of AI-powered search, a diverse global network, and hands-on support, Halo enabled Joi to launch RFPs across a wide range of challenges and futuristic product adjacencies.

Consultants sometimes want to put their own spin on things. With Halo, the goal is simple: get the brief right, connect with the right people, and see what’s out there. There’s a purity to that.

Halo’s platform helped Joi go from concept to execution quickly, organizing proposals, enabling chat with innovators, and supporting outreach to promising startups and researchers. And unlike traditional consultants or university outreach efforts, Halo democratized access to global expertise efficiently and without bias.

What really makes Halo sing is the people. The platform is structured, sure, but it’s the team that helps translate my harebrained ideas into briefs that make sense to scientists. That partnership is the magic.

Results

Establishing credibility and driving global connections

Since adopting Halo, Edgewell has run multiple challenges, receiving up to 40 proposals for a single RFP from academic labs, startups, and subject-matter experts across the world.

These high-response challenges not only surfaced promising technologies, but also gave Joi valuable insight into hot market areas, even when a project didn’t move forward.

Even if we don’t act on every proposal, the signal is incredibly valuable. If 40 people are working on this, it tells us something important. That kind of intelligence is power.

Perhaps most critically, Halo has helped Joi validate the Futures Practice’s strategic direction internally. What began as an unproven hypothesis that technology scouting could be a credible and scalable part of innovation has now become a recognized source of competitive insight and global partnership.

As Edgewell looks to scale its innovation efforts, Halo remains a critical partner, fueling Joi’s ability to lead with creativity, uncover novel technologies, and shape the company’s future-forward strategy.

Now I can show leadership that we’re talking to innovators around the world, some of whom I never would’ve discovered otherwise. Halo helped us prove this model works.