I’ve written endlessly about celebrity and influencer beauty brands: why there are so many, why some work (and why most don’t), and which categories do better than others. I’ve weighed in on why some famous founders are outliers and called a fair number of these brands failures. I’ve dissected their meticulously timed marketing, product, and distribution strategies and the different ways celebrities bring their brands to life.
This week, the topic feels particularly timely. Two of the year’s most talked about celebrity skincare brands will make their debuts six days apart: Hailey Bieber’s Rhode launches Wednesday and Kim Kardashian’s SKKN by Kim launches June 21. Bieber, 25, is starting with three products that cost less than $30, and Kardashian, 41, is launching a nine-product routine, including an $85 moisturizer and $95 serums.
When a celebrity announces that she is launching a beauty brand, as Kardashian did two weeks ago to build hype ahead of next week’s launch, a strong emotional response is bound to follow. We are trained to become bitter or enthusiastic about these companies. Celebrities prefer the latter (although many will prefer the former). I interviewed Kardashian and Bieber in the weeks leading up to their launches, and they both recognized the dreaded trope of celebrity branding, in which a famous person puts their name on a product and calls it a day. (Ariana Grande’s “Chapter 3” makeup collection is also out tomorrow.)
“I want to be the majority owner of the brand. I have lent my face and name to other brands for a long time. I’m not interested in doing that again,” Bieber told me. “I am too demanding and too intentional to let an incubator tell me how to make my products, the brand.”
But are the Bieber and Kardashian brands really that different from the everyday beauty lines, new products and non-celebrity collaborations like Fashion Nova, which NovaBeauty launched yesterday? Most skincare or makeup lines, started by a famous person or not, won’t make it. The market is too crowded and the customer is more demanding than ever.
And yet, we can’t look the other way, even as people continue against celebrity beauty brands. Why Bieber and Kardashian think they have what it takes to be something more
the american style
We’ve been told that hard work and a good idea is all it takes to succeed – it’s the American dream. Or, as Kardashian recently put it: “Get the f—— up and get to work.”
But as the line between a celebrity and a regular person blurs, or as the time to go from a regular person to an influencer or celebrity truncates, the immediacy of monetizing this relatively new fame through beauty causes a negative reaction.
Responses range from confusion (“What does this teen actress know about skin care?”) to disbelief (“Does this person really use her own products? A baby line?”). When the celebrity or influencer becomes especially polarized, the reaction is virulent. There’s always a subset of fans excited to try their favorite singer’s new fragrance, but mostly, we’re skeptical of these companies. Or maybe it’s just that famous people just have a short cut and a built-in audience, and the public hates that.
Rhode and SKKN take opposite approaches to address this potential problem. Bieber is a minimalist and Kardashian is a maximalist, but both say their brands are true to how they take care of their own skin.
“You don’t need a million things to have great skin. Most of the time doing less is more. I really wanted to have these steps edited out, these products edited out,” Bieber explained. “I don’t like things that are hard and complicated. I want without effort. I want easy. I want just realistic, basically.” It’s all about “fewer steps, fewer products” and you can’t stand going to a website to shop for skincare and seeing “like a hundred things to choose from and you feel lost.”
Then there’s Kardashian, who swears by a nine-step routine she knows is over the top. She admits that her appearance is “not entirely natural”.
“I really wanted to stay true to exactly what I use, even if everyone said this is overwhelming and there are so many products and [most] people launch with three or four products,” Kardashian said.
a powerful cocktail
A promise of authenticity, even from a celebrity, may not be enough to guarantee success, especially in skin care, a category where it’s harder to gain credibility than makeup. (The most successful celebrity beauty lines, Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty and Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty, predominantly sell makeup.) A celebrity can help drive test purchases, but that’s about it; the product has to stand on its own to drive repeated behavior.
A famous founder alone will get you trying, the product alone will get you engaged, and the combination of the two is a potent cocktail.
An executive at a major talent agency who works deals with celebrity brands (and doesn’t personally work with Bieber or Kardashian), told me that whichever conviction or “why” is stronger will be the key to capturing clients. Bieber and Kardashian aren’t convincing their fans that their toner or serum is superior, they’re convincing them of their approach, ethos, and mission to skin care. A customer will either subscribe to Kardashian’s philosophy of more is more or resonate with Bieber’s simplistic approach.
If the two products went hand-in-hand in skincare, “you could easily argue that Hailey, because of what she represents and her less-made-up look, might actually translate better,” this person said.
Though they position themselves differently, one thing that unites the two brands, aside from the dull gray packaging, is that Bieber and Kardashian didn’t describe their brands to me as “clean” or “non-toxic.” They used terms like “effective”, “beautiful moist hydration”, “glow for life”, etc., but none mentioned what their products are made of or “free”. It was refreshing, for once, to talk to someone who didn’t point out that their skincare isn’t formulated with a bunch of things that should never be (or are forbidden to be) in skincare in the first place.
Rhode and SKKN don’t go head-to-head, at least not directly. Still, Bieber may find success easier: She’s the epitome of minimalist beauty and the skincare she’s selling. Bieber is extremely likeable, non-confrontational, and has been vocal about her skin care and beauty routine for years. Plus, her products are affordably priced: Her moisturizer, priced at $29, is about a third of the price of Kardashian’s. On the other hand, she’s also 25 years old and has flawless skin, and it’s unclear if anyone over 25 wants to take skin care advice from a genetically blessed Gen-Z-er.
Simply put, a celebrity brand is forcing a transaction based on their character and their perception in the market. For either line to work, one of two things has to happen: People must either like Bieber or Kardashian enough to blindly follow them in any endeavor, or want to look like either of them enough to buy their skin care. skin. Then time will tell if the products can stand on their own.
Source: www.businessoffashion.com