Beauty Barrage has an impressive track record for successfully helping brands grow at retail, counting more than 300 ambassadors who support brand partners at stores including Sephora, Nordstrom and Ulta Beauty.
At the WWD Los Angeles Beauty event, Sonia Summers, chief executive officer and founder of Beauty Barrage, joined Jayme Cyk, contributing beauty editor, WWD and Beauty Inc and cofounder of And Repeat, for a conversation about how successful brands are positioning themselves in stores today.
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Acknowledging that the Los Angeles Beauty event was live and how nice it was to be together, Summers said retail is very much the same — for consumers, being able to speak with people in person opens up new experiences and new ways to learn.
It’s a huge pain point for brands who “work so hard to create beautiful brands” but when they achieve being placed in the store the strategy falls short, said Summers. It’s not enough just to get on the shelves, brands need to build a budget and consider how to support the brand at retail. “Even the retailers want you to do that,” she noted.
“You have a brand and you’re spending all this money on digital, and you need to, so that the brand comes alive on social, but then when a brand goes to retail it’s just sitting on the shelf,” she said. “The biggest thing that works is when you have someone building a signature experience at the store. It’s not just that we’re doing events, it’s the way that you interact with a consumer.”
Through Beauty Barrage’s ambassadors, consumers are learning how to use products, key ingredients and the ethos of the brand. It’s this support within the retail stores that allows brands to find success.
Something Summers said she speaks with brands about a lot is understanding how a budget will allow them to successfully live in a store. Put simply, it is not always the right answer for a brand to launch into every door of a retailer’s locations. Instead, Summers advised, it would be better to start small by entering a select number of stores — supported by data — where the budget is able to support them.
“If you don’t have the budget to go into all of those doors, I would say take a very small approach as for 50 doors,” said Summers. “Then support the hell out of those doors and keep that brand alive on social and digital and grow from there.”
At the same time, when working with brands, Beauty Barrage leverages the data to determine a focused approach in store. Data is also shared with the brand, allowing both parties to understand sales and strategies for a total support solution in real time on the Beauty Barrage mobile app and portal.
Importantly, Summers believes in establishing and building relationships in every part of the business. The philosophy is extended to the ambassadors who work for Beauty Barrage, who are full-time employees, rather than freelancers, which has become in industry standard.
“For me, it’s providing real jobs that pay them well, opportunities to grow within the business,” said Summers. “So just as our company is super high touch with our accounts, because we love our accounts and our brand partners, we are very much high touch with our own field team.”
This approach, she said, also gives Beauty Barrage’s ambassadors some “skin in the game,” as they represent brands from a narrative perspective. The company’s education department supports its ambassadors, who are always expanding their knowledge, rather than learning a new brand with each assignment.