At this week’s Glossy’s E-Commerce Summit in Miami, both onstage and in working groups, beauty and fashion brand leaders are engaging in in-depth discussions about the business challenges they’re facing and the strategies that are proving effective. Through Wednesday, Glossy will be sending the highlights from these conversations in daily briefings. To receive them in your inbox, sign up here.
On Day 1, executives talked up the value of both organic and brand-developed content, as recapped below.
Organic content is king
For marketers at the Glossy E-commerce Summit, organic content is still king. As paid advertising through platforms like Google, Meta and TikTok keeps climbing in price, brand leaders told Glossy that focusing on organic content isn’t just more affordable, but it also leads to better results.
“There is no way you can do paid advertising [on social media] that keeps up with algorithms,” said Oshiya Savur, chief brand and marketing officer at beauty incubator Maesa. “We all know organic content performs better. We’ve done organic content that’s seen 150,000 views. Now think about how much you’d have to spend on paid media to get that many views, and those views wouldn’t even be of the same quality because organic resonates better.” According to a Maesa spokesperson, the company is approaching 150 million video views through its owned and earned channels.
But focusing on organic content also means competing with all the noise out there. TikTok alone sees 34 million new videos posted daily. Organic content has an uphill battle to be noticed, and brands can’t always predict what content will take off and what won’t.
Jenn Volk, head of digital for H&M in the Americas, said creators and influencers can be a huge help to brands thanks to their organic engaged audience. She said H&M will ensure that whatever product or themes it seeds to influencers is also reflected on the site and in-store so that if the content does take off, the product is readily available.
“One of the biggest challenges we all face as brands is cutting through the noise,” said Volk. “There are so many channels of communication now that it’s hard to find the right customer and have your message resonate.”
Aila Morin, CMO of the beauty brand Merit, said that chasing virality isn’t always a good thing. If a product takes off on TikTok, it can be tempting to overextend and order too much of it or alter your supply chain to capitalize. But, she said, virality can disappear just as fast as it arrives.
“I believe in viral content, not viral products,” Morin said. “Viral products are dangerous to your supply chain. The peak of a viral product on TikTok is so short, and it’s getting shorter.”
But Morin added that jumping on trends or viral moments is still a necessary component when done in moderation.
“I would argue that you can predict virality to a degree,” she said. “We are so close to our customer and we know what moves us and what would make us stop scrolling, so we lean into that when we find it. Marketing is 80% safe bets and 20% jumping on opportunities as they arrive. And if you’re just doing the safe bet and never jumping, you’re not learning.”
-Danny Parisi
Is vertically integrated marketing worth it?
During a session on strategies for cutting through the noise across marketing channels, Oshiya Savur, chief brand and marketing officer at Maesa, spoke about the benefits of developing all marketing in-house. Maesa is the beauty incubator behind brands including Kristin Ess Hair, Hairitage by Mindy, Being Frenshe and Fine’ry, among others.
“Our creative studio is a shared service [across brands],” she said. “The creative studio is our internal agency that does everything for us — we do nothing with external agencies, which is such a beautiful thing because of the pace at which we can move and the quality of work. Some of our employees in the creative studio have been with the company for 20-25 years. There’s so much built-in gut [instinct] that is only earned — you can’t buy gut. So they know what works.”
On an April episode of the Glossy Podcast, Ricardo Larroudé, who will be speaking at the Glossy Summit on Tuesday, shared similar thoughts about the value of vertically integrated marketing.
“We have an in-house agency — a whole team of 9-10 people in Brazil — and all they do is treat our images in a photo studio,” he said. “Even if we take a [photo] or videos here in the U.S., we’ll ship them to Brazil and they’ll get treated, edited. All the [content] you see on Larroudé is done in Brazil, and it’s done in the same building where we make the shoes. If you think about how connected it is, you can have a [design] idea in the morning, that shoe could be ready in the afternoon, you could take the shot in the afternoon, and by night, it could be on the website and selling by pre-order. And we’ve done things this quickly.”
However, at a recent Glossy Beauty Leaders Dinner, also in April, when a founder of an independent beauty brand raised the question to the room of whether her brand should invest in establishing a creative studio of its own, she was overwhelmingly discouraged. The reasoning of the other executives was largely based on the costs required to build out a full-time creative team.
“It’s a case-by-case basis — there’s never a blanket approach,” Savur said today. “For Maesa, we fell into [having a studio] because we started as a private label company, and we still have a huge private label business. At one point, we were [only] selling design and product creation — that was the company. So over the years, as the owned [brand] part of the business has really developed, the private label skills we’ve honed over 25 years have become a huge asset. “[Our brands’] aesthetics are what we dream up, and the designs — they’re all ours. Nobody can take that away. So it’s really a competitive advantage, especially in mass where the aisles often look boring and lack innovation.”
–Jill Manoff
Editor’s note: This story was updated to include Maesa’s video views across earned and organic channels.
