The post-pandemic event boom is just picking up in beauty.
September saw a slew of in-person events on both coasts. Beautycon took place in Los Angeles on Sept. 16 and Sept. 17, with a combined 150,000 physical and virtual attendees. Sephoria hit New York on Sept. 30, coinciding with the Byrdie Beauty Lab, and Allure’s Best of Beauty franchise is also taking on its first consumer-facing event on Oct. 21.
Among the common threads between the key players are services and celebrity, and big-ticket sponsors. Beautycon, for example, partnered with Walmart. Allure’s Best of Beauty: The Live Event will include sponsors from Xeomin and AARP, Amazon, Dove, EltaMD, Loved01, Nexxus, SkinCeuticals and Tresemmé, among others.
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The benefits for sponsors is simple: it’s where consumers are looking to interact with beauty.
“We’re in a test-and-learn mode. We know that beauty is something to be experienced, and it’s a social platform, not just digitally, but physically,” said Creighton Kiper, Walmart’s vice president of beauty merchandising, of the partnership with Beautycon. “We know that people are getting back out and we wanted to see how far that will carry. We teamed up with Beautycon, and it was a wonderful step, a lot of learnings as far as how multigenerational beauty is, how expansive it truly is.
“It’s about experience, it’s about storytelling and the community that we represent. It will continue to be important for Walmart beauty, and it’s going to be important for beauty as an industry,” he continued.
As reported, Beautycon faced some backlash online for the long wait times on its first day, with one brand describing the event to WWD as “chaotic.” Overall, though, attendance and sponsorships have given the Essence Ventures-owned company the confidence to expand.
“Beautycon has such a loyal consumer base, any time would have been a good time to do it,” said Sophia Dennis, Beautycon’s head of programming. It was Beautycon’s first iteration under new ownership, and it included a runway show called Texture on the Runway, as well as musical performances from Bia and Rhea Raj. “We also had Beautycon Live onstage, where we were able to connect with brands and brand founders,” Dennis said.
The live event also serves as a template for digital programming. “That’s going to be something that we do on a monthly basis on our social media platforms. That’ll be one of four content initiatives that will engage with our consumers, even when we’re not doing an event,” said Dennis. “However, we will have multiple events throughout the year. It’s ensuring that we are making content in partnership with the brands that we work with and the talent that we work with to support their initiatives and their products, and so on and so forth.”
She’s also looking to tap more international brands, saying one of her priorities is “opening up Beautycon as an opportunity for those international brands to interact with the U.S. market, which has a very high demand for these global brands.”
For Sephoria, the strategy was similar. The event took place in New York Sept. 30, with the first day facing cancellation due to the flooding that caused New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to declare a state of emergency. The retailer also brought the event to Paris, where it took place Oct. 6 and Oct. 7.
Sephoria’s New York iteration included more than 50 participating brands, where tickets ranged from $119 to $369.
The benefit for brands wasn’t necessarily sales conversion, but a mixture of marketing and the opportunity to engage with ultra-passionate beauty consumers, said Amy Liu, founder of Tower 28. “The biggest benefit is that your audience is all in the same place,” she said. “Somebody might come for Sol de Janeiro who doesn’t know Tower 28, but that’s the same person who would theoretically be shopping for your product.”
Beautycon held similar advantages for Charlotte Palermino, the cofounder of Dieux. “We’re always trying to understand who our early adopters and brand evangelists are,” she said. “What was cool about Beautycon was people knew about Dieux from the day we launched, and being able to interact with them, but I also got to meet a lot of new people who had never heard about the brand.”
Liu’s experience at Sephoria was a hybrid of awareness-building and social listening, she said. “We use Tribe [Dynamics], so I think about it from an EMV point of view and social awareness. The other part is it’s a sampling opportunity. It’s hard to get samples in the hands of the right people… and my marketing director asked every single person in line for samples if they had heard of Tower 28.”
Meanwhile, Allure, which dabbled in retail with the debut of the Allure Store in 2021, is augmenting its annual Best of Beauty franchise with a consumer-facing event later this month. It will include John Legend as a headlining speaker, in addition to a slew of services and partnering brands. Tickets start at $59.
The event space will be segmented between a showcase of each of the winning products — alongside QR codes for digital purchase — a space for services, and a stage for conversations with Allure editors.
“I became editor in chief two years ago, and an event was always at the top of my to-do list. A lot of other [Condé Nast] brands have marquee events; there’s the Met Gala, there’s the Oscars and there’s Women of the Year. Allure needed an event, and we wanted to do something around our biggest moment of the year, which is the Best of Beauty,” said Jessica Cruel, Allure’s editor in chief.
Part of the rationale was to foster community among Allure’s readership. “I wanted to create opportunities for our readers to talk back to us in person. The appetite has increased for that after the pandemic,” Cruel said. “We’ve been out for a while now, and beauty is such a tactile category. You want to touch a sample before you decide to purchase, you want to talk to a pro before they do your hair. Everything we do is about touch, feel and smell, and we’re seeing people are a little tired of just shopping online.”
Community was also key to the fifth iteration of the Byrdie Beauty Lab, a consumer-facing event heavy on services and a product gift bag boasting the likes of Rhode, Dieux, Glow Recipe, Topicals and K18, among others.
“It’s always been about this feeling of intimacy with our readers, our experts and friends of the brand,” said Hallie Gould, editor in chief and general manager of Byrdie. “We wanted to get everybody in one room so they could meet and mingle, and experience these high-value, curated experiences and treatments.”
Attractions included makeup by Euphoria makeup artist Donni Davy, hand-drawn temporary tattoos from Inked by Dani and brow services from Joshua Beeler. Gould said the audience skewed more Millennial in age, but demand spanned all generations. “Our RSVPs filled up faster than ever before. We were completely sold out of appointments in just two hours after opening them up,” Gould said.
Guests came for product and stayed for the services, Gould said. “Having a curated gift bag from editors of free, full-size products will always be the most exciting draw,” she continued. “But allowing for the services and the various activations opens it up to the real beauty superfans and Byrdie devotees.”