Marc Rosen Associates, a design agency that does branding and packaging development for beauty lines, is launching a new division, MRA Studio, specifically for emerging niche brands entering the beauty industry.

“I’m interested in how the industry keeps changing and this new niche market is the latest phenomenon,” said Marc Rosen, president and chief executive officer of Marc Rosen Associates.

The new division was created to give smaller brands, which typically don’t have the resources or capital to invest in developing a beauty line, the chance to work with professionals and specialty manufacturers.

MRA Studio brings together industry professionals to help niche brands create beauty products from everything from idea generation to creating fragrance profiles. To make the process more affordable for niche brands, the studio creates designs based on stock packaging, which are then decorated uniquely to reflect the brand and concept.

The studio also teams these brands up with big fragrance suppliers such as Givaudan and Firmenich to create the product, and then later with packaging suppliers like Pochet and Qualipac to put together the physical packaging.

Elsewhere in the industry other suppliers have started working with niche start-ups. Pochet, for example, has revived its semiautomatic glass furnace after years or being closed in order to develop a smaller quantity of units specifically for these niche brands, who otherwise could not meet the unit minimums usually demanded.

“[This phenomenon] is a reaction to the fact that there’s a much more educated consumer,” Rosen said about the popularity of the smaller start-ups. “Niche brands have creativity, are unorthodox and are new age. They have new discoveries and a new mind-set.”