Giving Every Product a Reason to Exist: The Mission Behind Nawa Nova

Beauty has never lacked ideas. What it often lacks is a clear way to decide which ideas deserve the budget, the lab time and the launch slot. Parisian beauty executive Nassim Belhaq spent fifteen years watching promising concepts stall late in development, and he built Nawa Nova to catch those problems at the start.

Nawa Nova is an AI-powered decision intelligence platform for beauty. It connects market understanding, brand strategy, science and economics, then carries that reasoning into concepts, formulation briefs and business cases. Its goal is simple to state and hard to do: help teams decide what deserves to be developed, and why.

Fifteen years inside the industry

Belhaq's career reads like a tour of the industry's biggest names. He held product marketing and development roles across L'Oréal, LVMH, Coty and Shiseido, working with houses such as Dior and Guerlain. He later became VP of Innovation and NPD for Coco & Eve and Loving Tan, two self-tanning brands within a US private equity-backed beauty group.

That last role changed his perspective. He owned the full product cycle, from ideation and innovation strategy through R&D, packaging, regulatory coordination and launch. "Creative direction affects the formulation brief, texture affects packaging, a supplier choice affects cost, timing and the options available to the brand," he explains. "You have to hold that whole picture together."

The experience also convinced him that supplier strategy belongs inside innovation strategy, not in a separate silo. Understanding what a partner can do, he says, can reshape an opportunity before the brief is even fixed.

Honoring a house's heritage

Working across both licensing and integrated models also taught him how much a brand's heritage shapes innovation. For a house like Dior or Guerlain, every brief starts with brand DNA and equity. "Understanding its codes deeply gives you room to interpret them," Belhaq says. "The goal is a product that belongs to that house and gives people a new reason to desire it."

Staying relevant, he says, means keeping the key brand codes in mind and making them echo what is shaping today's consumer needs. Houses with such a rich history offer an endless source of inspiration for innovation teams to build modern points of view.

The problem hiding in plain sight

Belhaq is careful not to call beauty's development process broken. The industry has excellent expertise and rigorous practices. The trouble, he says, is how those perspectives connect, and how late the contradictions surface.

A project moves through several teams, each making sensible decisions. Then everyone comes together and discovers the concept depends on a claim that needs more evidence, a cost assumption that no longer holds, or a consumer behavior nobody tested. By then, time has been invested and people are attached to the idea.

"I wanted to make that reasoning visible earlier," he says. "What do we know? What are we assuming? And what would change our decision?" For Belhaq, this is a question of resource allocation. Every project consumes cash, development capacity and attention, and every weak project takes space a stronger one could have used. Larger companies may have more at stake, with more people and cash involved, but Belhak sees the core issue as risk management at any scale. Human decision-making, he says, sometimes lacks perspective and substantiation, and that is the gap AI can now help close.

From personal framework to platform

The idea for Nawa Nova grew from questions Belhak kept returning to with his teams. Is this a meaningful consumer need? Does the brand have a credible role? Can we deliver the experience and the economics we are promising? He began writing that reasoning down: the questions, the dependencies and the criteria he used to challenge an opportunity.

That work became the NB Beauty Code, the proprietary framework at the heart of the platform. AI gave him a way to put the framework to work, and AI-assisted development let him take a direct role in building the software himself, despite not being an engineer by training. "Building the system forced me to make my own judgment explicit," he says.

One connected brief, in minutes

In practice, a team starts with the decision it needs to make. A skincare brand exploring barrier care, for example, would examine the consumer insight, what competitors already offer and why the brand has a credible role. Those choices shape the concept, which Nawa Nova translates into formulation directions, sensory targets, packaging and evidence needs, alongside price, channel, cost and volume assumptions. If the packaging breaks the economics, or a claim needs evidence the plan doesn't cover, the concept gets revisited before anyone commits. Belhaq says the platform puts that connected brief together in minutes. Formulation, testing and industrial validation still have to follow, but every team and partner starts from the same clear reasoning.

An encouraging start

Nawa Nova launched on September 29, 2026. Within its first month it had several client conversations underway, around 100,000 impressions on LinkedIn and early talks with investment funds. Belhak's focus now is turning that momentum into real use, working through live briefs with teams to show how the platform fits their decisions.

His long-term ambition is for every product decision to begin with a clearer reason to exist. "We are at a very early stage," he says, "but I'm very excited to see how far we can push this idea of an integrated, strategic decision-making system for beauty NPD."