How brands including Rare Beauty are earning traffic and loyalists
Hi, and welcome to Glossy’s Weekly Recap, where Glossy editor-in-chief Jill Manoff breaks down the industry conversation that ruled the week and highlights five of the latest must-read Glossy stories. Sign up here to get Glossy’s daily, in-depth coverage on the businesses of beauty and fashion in your inbox every weekday morning.
Last week, Glossy spoke with influencer marketing experts from some of the most influential fashion and beauty brands while hosting our virtual Influencer Strategies Forum in collaboration with Dash Hudson . Among the brands represented were Rare Beauty , K18 Hair , SET ACTIVE and Hally Hair . Strategies they discussed included how to attract visitors to the brand’s social accounts and how to best foster relationships with the brand’s fans, which they described as influencers or community members.
It called to mind another conversation during the week with Ruari Mahon , founder and director of the NYC-based brand consultancy Loughlin Joseph. He spoke about how to attract consumers to stores and how to best engage the “truest brand ambassadors,” which he said are its existing shopper base.
All made valid points about what it takes to earn traffic and loyalists. Below are highlights from these conversations, in the executives’ own words.
Designing a destination
On social media: “Building community on social media [includes] being of service to your community … and creating a destination of your social channels. It’s about sharing content that represents that perfect hybrid of educational and entertaining that makes them engage. And through this content, you can showcase your brand personality more and more, in order to build a community people can identify with. Beyond a brand or a corporation, people want a personality. … Finally, treat them like a friend — give them something proud to be a part of. The way you spend time with friends in real life, you should do the same online. Monitor the comments and spend time in the comments.” – Ashley Murphy, vp of consumer marketing, Rare Beauty
IRL: “For someone to seek out a destination, it has to deliver purpose and relevance, combined with an element not available through other channels or at other times. That could be an elevated service or experience, or a unique, limited-edition product. On the brand’s side, this requires intelligence, confidence and strategy to activate. And for the longer term, this [strategy] can be grown and strengthened through a consistent cadence of refreshing [the offering]. … This can also [be achieved] by meeting the customer where they are when they’re not strictly in shopping mode. For example, when vacationing, energy is more [focused on] enjoyment and relaxation, and senses are not overstimulated with enticements to purchase. Therefore, a more organic introduction and brand conversation can occur.” –Mahon
Building a community
Through client experiences: “Eschewing a reliance on external influencer validation, [our agency] sees loyal clientele as the truest brand ambassadors. … We build from the inside out. Providing clients with tactile, layered experiences is as relevant to earning their loyalty as design, product and philosophy.”–Mahon
Through word of mouth: “At the start of the brand, I made a purchase from Gaia, which makes a non-alcoholic aperitif. When Melanie [Masarin], the founder, was creating the brand’s community, she would hand-write a letter to every single person who placed an order to say thank you. And even if that only [meant something to] 10 people, that’s great. … For a lot of people, the word community feels very grandiose, in terms of what to do to get there. But it's actually really simple. It’s rooted in one central idea that galvanizes everyone together. And if it's only those 10 people, they have 10 friends [they’ll tell about it], and it continues to grow.” –Murphy
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Catch up on the week’s 5 biggest beauty and fashion stories below.
Consignment platforms like The RealReal, Rebag and Fashionphile have encouraged customers to think of their watches and handbags as financial investments, ones that can store value and appreciate the same way that investments like fine art do. These platforms already take authentication seriously, but when customers are buying things with the expectation that they’ll be able to sell it in the future and make money, the stakes are higher. In this story, Glossy’s senior fashion reporter, Danny Parisi , breaks down the result of a 3-year-old authenticating mistake that threatened to cost the purchaser thousands of dollars in lost appreciation value.
Two weeks ago, Glossy’s senior Pop reporter, Sara Spruch-Feiner , spoke to several pre-teen and younger youths while sourcing an edition of the Pop Newsletter titled "Get Ready With Me, 9-Year-Old Edition — Aspiring beauty influencers are getting younger." Throughout the conversations, one name kept coming up: Katie Fang, a 17-year-old TikToker with 3.9 million followers at the time. To get to the bottom of the Fang fascination, Spruch-Feiner booked an interview with the beauty influencer.
While reporting this story on what brands can expect from the looming enforcement of the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act of 2022, or MoCRA, Glossy West Coast correspondent Lexy Lebsack uncovered several new details. For one, the FDA will soon require all brands selling eye makeup or remover in the United States — no matter their revenue or size — to register their facility with the FDA.
E.L.F. BEAUTY is joining Roblox with the same go-big-or-go-home approach for which the brand has become known. Its entry onto the platform is through a game called “E.l.f UP,” which is set to evolve based on community feedback.
Through its 29-year-old Viva Glam philanthropic program, MAC Cosmetics has a new initiative focused on educating and inspiring the next generation of trans makeup artists.
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