This year, KVD Beauty, formerly known first as Kat Von D Beauty and then KVD Vegan Beauty, rebranded once again.
Tara Loftis, who heads up KVD’s marketing, was at the helm of this third refresh. According to Loftis, who’s spent about eight years at Kendo, LVMH’s beauty incubator, is the perfect place to execute such a rebrand, as it’s the kind of environment where you “can throw out a crazy idea and then [actually] do it,” she said.
To bring the 2021 vision of the brand to life, Loftis tapped a host of ambassadors. They included Nikki Wolf (aka, @nikki_makeup), who stepped in as the global creative director of artistry, and, in keeping with the original roots of the line, Miryam Lumpini, who became the brand’s global director of tattoo artistry. In the new KVD, KVD now stands for kara, veritas and decora, meaning value, truth and beauty in Latin. It formerly stood for the brand’s founder, Kat Von D.
When it came to revealing the updated KVD and its biggest launch of the year, the Good Apple Foundation, a powerful marketing strategy was paramount. Loftis decided to take a big bet on TikTok.
“Typically, you want to have a fully diversified marketing plan that leans heavily into YouTube influencers and media. But I just had this crazy gut feeling that we needed to go big on TikTok and that TikTok was becoming what YouTube was six years ago,” Loftis said. “I’m sure some people thought I was totally crazy for building that marketing plan the way that I did, but it paid off.”
To date, #goodapplefoundation has 180 million views on TikTok. The product went viral, thanks to a series of smart partnerships with the likes of influencer Mikayla Nogueira.
Another strategic partner was 15-year-old Alabama Barker, rocker Travis Barker’s daughter, who has 1.6 million TikTok followers. “We were thinking about icons who were tattooed, and then the idea kind of snowballed,” Loftis said. “First we thought, well, Travis is so iconic, he’s so cool, and Alabama is beginning to establish her name as an influencer in her own right. And she loves makeup. We thought it would be fun to have Alabama try to cover her dad’s tattoos with the Good Apple foundation, and Travis was game.They shot a video, and that was another big moment.”
