To receive the Glossy Pop newsletter in your inbox every Friday, click here.
In 1996, the makeup brand Smashbox launched on the heels of the company’s 1990 opening of the Los Angeles photo studio by the same name.
In 2000, it launched The Original Photo Finish Smooth & Blur Oil-Free Primer ($34), which, in the 25 years since, has been repackaged several times, but never reformulated. In 2010, Estée Lauder acquired the beauty brand.
“It is an icon, in the sense that there really weren’t primers out back in 2000,” said Michelle Shigemasa, Smashbox’s global gm. Of course, since then, the market has changed dramatically. On Ulta’s website today, where Smashbox is sold, a search for the word “primer” brings up 242 results.
Still, the “OG Primer,” as Smashbox calls the product, remains the brand’s bestseller, and, according to Circana, is the No. 1 vegan and cruelty-free prestige primer in North America. Some other bragging rights: Since 2000, Smashbox has sold 20 million units of the SKU, and today, one Photo Finish Smooth & Blur Primer is sold every minute in North America.
To celebrate its 25th year, but also to attract new fans of all ages, the brand has cast a campaign featuring six nontraditional creators. Outside of Alexis Oakley (715,000 TikTok followers), who is a professional makeup artist, none of the creators work in beauty. The other five women include Pia Baroncini, creative director of the fashion brand LPA (237,000 Instagram followers); dancer Stevie Doré (356,000 Instagram followers), who is currently on tour with Tate McRae; Pilates instructor and studio owner Caroline Citelli (92,000 TikTok followers); artist and filmmaker Ganna Bogdan (134,000 Instagram followers); and the mega-influencer and founder of Dairy Boy, Paige Lorenze (1 million Instagram followers).
The concept for the campaign is to show how the primer, with its emphasis on performance and studio heritage, helps each of these busy women get through their days, whether they’re “on Zoom, a podcast or even in front of the papparazzi,” said Cassandra Cadwell, Smashbox’s manager of influencer marketing, events and PR. To that end, the participants were asked to create content in the popular “day in my life” format. Otherwise, their content could feature whatever they wished, “as long as they showed [the product’s] performance, of course, and [demonstrated] application,” Cadwell said.
The OG Primer already has a lot of fans, which made casting the campaign easy,” Cadwell said. “We didn’t have to look very hard for people who know [this product],” she said. “It was kind of saying, ‘Hey, remember how much you love this?’ And some of them were like, ‘Oh, my gosh! I still use this every day.’ Others were like, ‘I can’t believe I stopped using this.'”
With this campaign, Smashbox hopes to “reach out to new demographics, new users, [from all] walks of life,” Shigemasa said.
The campaigns cast spans from “early 20s creatives to more mature, nearly-40-old creators, reflecting the versatility of our OG Primer and its relevance across generations,” Cadwell said. She added that “many stakeholders” were involved in “meticulously” selecting these creators, to also ensure their performance tests would “shine and feel organic.”
Doré wore the product while dancing on McRae’s tour, while Lorenze wore it while cheering on her fiancé, tennis star Tommy Paul, at the U.S. Open. Others wore it to pilates and for red-carpet appearances.
“This campaign aligned so much with my real life that it didn’t even feel like a campaign,” Doré told Glossy. “I always need to stay camera-ready, whether it’s through an eight-hour rehearsal or a full stage performance, and the OG Primer does just that.”
Meanwhile, Oakley said, “[The primer] helped me to stay polished for client-facing bookings and camera-ready for my ‘day in the life’ content during busy workdays in Los Angeles.”
Shigemasa worked at Smashbox from 2004-2017 and rejoined the brand about 10 months ago. “I’m on a mission to modernize our unique studio heritage and create differentiation and even more relevancy for the brand,” she said. “This beloved product really supports our point of differentiation, as it’s trusted and true and born out of a studio, and is all about high-performance.”
It’s a good time to highlight the product, she said, as nostalgic, cult-classic products are getting renewed moments in the spotlight. Think: Clinique’s Black Honey “Almost Lipstick” and Urban Decay’s Moondust eyeshadows. “[There is] consumer demand for products that are trusted and perform,” Shigemasa said.
In addition to the social campaign, Smashbox will also run advertisements on Spotify. And, in the coming months, the brand will shift its focus to new launches.
“I hate to use the term ‘filling some gaps,’ but we are a primer authority, which is a highly loyal product,” Shigemasa said, hinting at what’s next for the brand. “There are some adjacencies in complexion that we can own in a more meaningful way, to build on our authority in complexion.”
Inside Our Coverage
Bag first, charm later — Coach’s formula for repeat Gen-Z luxury spending
Is this the end of foam sunscreen?
The secret to a successful pop-up event
Reading List
Can Gap make jeans ads good again?
eBay sales of Tory Burch and On Running are on the rise
Louis Vuitton Tests the Limits of Luxury Beauty With $160 Lipsticks
