Yasmin Dastmalchi, president of Maybelline and Essie USA, has banned the word “sponsorship” from her team’s vocabulary. At the Glossy Beauty & Wellness Summit in Westlake Village, California, she explained what she hears when someone pitches her one. “You’re trying to get me to put the logo on something,” she said.
This summer, in its third year working with “Love Island USA,” Maybelline put its Lifter Gel lip gloss at the center of a challenge on the show. Dastmalchi said she was initially hesitant about how the product would appear. She put fans of the show from her own team on the project, and they looked beyond the episodes to see what viewers were already doing together. That meant paying attention to watch parties around the country, as well as to the social accounts that some contestants’ relatives ran while they were in the villa.
“You’re becoming a part of these people’s lives,” Dastmalchi said of the show’s near-nightly run. Maybelline helped create pop-up villas in New York City and worked with the show on its app, where viewers could vote for the winners. The brand could reach people in the middle of something they were already doing, whether that was following a favorite contestant or getting together to watch the show.
There was a sales payoff, too. As Glossy previously reported, weekly sales of Lifter Gel Lip Oil-in-Gel grew tenfold between the show’s June 2 premiere and July 12 finale, according to Daash Intelligence. The gloss went from accounting for under 5% of Maybelline’s lip product unit sales in May to more than 30% in July. Dastmalchi said the partnership also lifted brand desirability, though she didn’t quantify the increase.
“Creating desirability and likability for us is really our top [priority],” she said. Maybelline already has broad name recognition. And as Dastmalchi pointed out, shoppers routinely carry drugstore, prestige and indie products in the same makeup bag. They may splurge on one product, buy another on impulse and keep coming back to a third out of habit. That makes the reason to pick up a particular gloss more important than whether the customer already knows the brand.
Dastmalchi pointed to the New York City Marathon, another partnership now in its third year, as a way to reach people through a different interest. She described how the team worked with participants who had different reasons for showing up, from chasing a personal record to proving they could finish the course on foot.
Maybelline has also tried making the entertainment itself. Last holiday season, it reunited “Hot Frosty” stars Lacey Chabert and Dustin Milligan for “Maybe This Christmas,” a five-part vertical series featuring its Instant Eraser concealer. It ran on TikTok and YouTube as well as ReelShort, where viewers already go looking for short serialized dramas. The brief, Dastmalchi said, was to make episodes that people “wanted to start, and then each one made you want to watch the next one.”
The brand is applying the same attention to what people are already doing online to a different kind of discovery. On October 29, Maybelline launched virtual makeup try-on in ChatGPT using L’Oréal’s ModiFace technology. Shoppers can ask for a product recommendation, preview shades with their camera and follow a link to a retailer. Dastmalchi’s example brought it back to the marathon. A runner may ask which lipstick would last the whole race without needing to reapply. For Maybelline, that’s a chance to get a shade in front of someone who came looking for an answer to a very specific question.
