For beauty brands, deciding how and when to participate in fashion month can be a difficult decision reliant upon access to the right opportunities and an expansive budget to execute them properly.
Sponsoring a runway show, presentation or celebrity look, for example, can yield press impressions, online buzz and sales conversions. But it can also disappoint, all depending on a laundry list of changing conditions and competing events.
As highlighted in this week’s beauty briefing, brands like Revlon, Tarte, JINsoon and Dieux all sponsored NYFW shows this week with different goals, including industry networking, brand recognition and a halo effect for new product launches.
However, many smaller and emerging brands have found their sweet spot at this season’s fashion month in what has become the industry’s buzziest lifestyle gifting suite: Air Milkshake.
“There are so many gifting suites, and we’ve had incredible experiences with a number of different suites. … But, you know, some are great and sometimes the suites are very transactional,” Michelle Liu, gm of Half Magic Beauty, told Glossy.
That is, an influencer, editor or celebrity visits a gifting suite, receives the free goods and creates a lackluster social post as a thank you. Younger consumers, and those with better media literacy, often understand this unspoken transaction, so these posts rarely resonate.
“Air Milkshake isn’t a transactional experience at all,” Liu said. “The [attendees] want to discover new things and new brands. They’re coming because they trust [founder] Marta [Mae Freedman] and her curation and because they want to talk about what they’re discovering there.”
Half Magic Beauty, the color cosmetics line launched in August of 2021 by “Euphoria” makeup artist Donni Davy and the show’s indie production company, A24, is participating in Air Milkshake for the first time this week alongside brands like D.S. & Durga, Osea, 19/99 Beauty, Futurewise, Dr. Jart and Fable & Mane, among others.
Air Milkshake’s nine previous events have been split between New York and Los Angeles, but this is its first time popping up during fashion month. The three-day suite started on Tuesday and will conclude Thursday the 13th, one day after the end of NYFW. Brands can participate only if invited and do so by paying an undisclosed fee and providing gratis products. Planning begins months in advance.
“We are always growing the Air Milkshake community, so for every suite, we try to invite 25-30% new attendees,” Freedman told Glossy. “We invite back our most engaged creators and tastemakers.”
The Air Milkshake gifting suite was launched in 2021 by Freedman, who co-founded Dieux skin-care and digital communities including It’s Nice Paper and Hot Girls Eating Pizza — a cannabis newsletter and now-defunct early aughts IG account, respectively. She also started a cannabis line called Angel Therapy and has worked with brands like Depop, Parade underwear and Starface pimple patches.
Brands told Glossy that the allure of the suite relies solely on Freedman, who personally invites brands, helps curate the products, designs the space — which is at the Ace Hotel New York this time — and selects the guest list from her network of creators, editors, makeup artists, burgeoning celebs and other key opinion leaders.
Freedman and her team only make 100 gift bags per suite and everyone is prescheduled into 20 minute time slots between 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. “We get to at least 95 appointments by the end of the suite,” Freedman said. “We also get a lot of inbounds asking how to get invited. With 100 invites per suite, it can feel limiting but hopefully in the future we can do a suite at a bigger scale. We love the intimate nature of each suite, though, and so do the brands. They trust us.”
“Gifting suites are a dime a dozen,” said Liza Tagliati, vp of marketing at Hume Supernatural, a microbiome-focused body-care line that launched in 2020. “All of them can say, ‘We have celebrities come through, we have influencers come through, we have makeup artists come through, we have press come through.’ I’ve seen a million of them. Marta’s is different because of who she is and her entire approach to relationship building, in general.”
Hume Supernatural has participated five times since the brand launched and Tagliati has measured the results through press impressions and KOL relationship building. This has included the brand being used on celebrities and featured in the media, thanks to artists and editors discovering the line through their attendance.
“There is an element of word-of-mouth marketing that happens organically through these channels,” Hume Supernatural’s Tagliati told Glossy. “It really does have an incredible and measurable effect.”
The brand will be gifting three products in the suite: its best-selling deodorant stick and body oil, as well as its newer all-body deodorant.
Meanwhile, to maximize the impact for Half Magic, Liu worked with Freedman to have a makeup artist on-site to help attendees select and apply the brand’s best-selling Face Gems. Co-founder Donni Davy, who has 515,000 followers on Instagram, will also attend between her celebrity clients. Guests will also be able to select shades from the brand’s new Sparklestik Eye Crayon and bestselling Glitter Puck pressed glitter.
“We have a gem station so every person that comes through has the opportunity to have their look finished with gems. And we know from experience that, once you have that level of sparkle on your face — even if it’s just one or two [gems] — that pickup you get in impressions and engagement, and in people who want to photograph you because your look is more striking and more differentiated from everyone else at the show that you’re attending, makes a huge difference,” Liu said.
For Freedman, syncing a suite to a large event like fashion month has pros and cons. “The last suite we hosted in NYC was in early November, pre-holiday. With less going on that week, it felt like it had a bigger impact,” Freedman said. “It’s not a con, but NYFW is super active and the overwhelming buzz could feel like there is a competition for visibility, even if you don’t intend on competing.”
