There’s never been a better moment for fashion and beauty brands to get into sports. With the rise of the WNBA, the continued crossover between fashion and leagues like the NBA and the NFL, and the overall flourishing of women’s sports in popular culture, there’s more interest than ever in collaborating with athletes and teams.
At The Sports Opportunity, a digital event hosted by Glossy on August 21, Zoe Housman, VP and head of marketing and strategic projects at L’Oréal, explained just how much potential there is for fashion and beauty brands. In May, the L’Oréal-owned brand Essie collaborated with the New York Liberty women’s basketball team as part of a campaign to promote its Gel by Essie, a long-wear nail polish product. But rather than players, the campaign spotlighted Liberty’s beloved mascot, Ellie the Elephant. Essie gave Ellie a manicure, featured her in several videos that went viral and had her appear with non-elephant influencers like Tefi Pessoa (410,000 followers on Instagram).
Housman said sports was an entirely new world for Essie.
“This was all new to the brand,” she said. “But we wanted to bring the brand to life in a bold, culturally relevant way. We didn’t want to just have a beauty influencer. We wanted to do something bigger.”
Results from the campaign show that the move paid off. Housman told Glossy that in the first 24 hours of the campaign, it earned more than a billion organic impressions, making it by far the biggest and most successful campaign the brand had ever done. That organic start then led to more traditional media pick up, which eventually crossed over from beauty-focused media into mainstream publications like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
The campaign also allowed Essie to give away 5,000 sample units, plus 15,000 new customers interacted with the brand, both at New York Liberty games.
The campaign came together quickly. Housman started brainstorming the idea in January, Essie signed with the Liberty in April, and the campaign landed in May. It was all shot in one day. Since then, the campaign has netted over 4 billion impressions.
It’s also helped Essie defy industry trends. While nail polish brands are trending downward at the moment, Housman said Essie is 36% ahead of the average growth rate for nail polish brands right now.
Essie isn’t the only L’Oréal brand that has embraced sports. Housman said many other brands within L’Oréal are taking part in sports collaborations, including Maybelline, which, in July, became the first cosmetics sponsor of the WWE. Others plan to launch their first sports collabs soon, she said.
But Essie is also working with and benefiting from other brands that are partnering with the New York Liberty. Essie has done crossovers with fellow Liberty brand sponsors — like the luggage brand Away and the fast-food chain Shake Shack — for one-off campaigns and on-site gifting at New York Liberty games.
“I’ve been involved with Shake Shack, Away and the Fenty leadership team,” Housman said. “There are just so many ways to get involved in sports and support the players and the leagues and the individual teams. There are a lot of synergies happening between us all. So, how can we leverage each other’s strengths? It’s a 360-degree ecosystem, and we all support the team.”
