On the heels of its December 11 entry into fragrance and body care, Rare Beauty has more newness up its sleeve — but this time, it’s not for sale.
On January 10, Rare Beauty introduced the Comfort Club, a digital hub dedicated to providing its community with strategies for finding comfort. Since before its inception in September 2020, the brand has talked about and fundraised for mental health. Its nonprofit arm, the Rare Impact Fund, has raised more than $12 million since July 2020.
In December, the brand primarily focused on promoting its new products: an aromatherapy pen, a body and hair fragrance mist, a hand cream, and a body cream. The corresponding campaign focused on the “unique sensory profiles” of the products, said Katie Welch, Rare Beauty’s CMO. After the launch, the brand came up with the idea of the digital hub as a way to continue the conversation with its community.
“Finding comfort” is essentially the brand’s way of looking at self-care, as defined by its famous founder, Selena Gomez, and other members of its team. “Selena was talking about her own version of self-care and how, sometimes, it’s just … breath work for five minutes or a five-minute meditation, or it could be dinner with friends,” said Welch. “What we learned from Selena is that she just does what makes her feel good.”
Welch stressed that Rare’s version of self-care is not the idea of self-care that has been built up across media over the last few years. “It’s not this never-ending [process of] trying to do everything because you’re supposed to,” she said.
Polling Rare Beauty’s staff of around 100 people, Welch and her team came to the conclusion that the common methods of self-comfort fell into three common buckets: relaxation, movement and connection. “Relaxation” includes massage and breath work; “movement” includes yoga, dancing and stretching; and “connection” could be a movie night or a virtual meetup.
The company sought to deliver this concept of comfort to its community, which includes 6.6 million followers on Instagram, 3.5 million on TikTok over 9,000 on its recently launched TYB platform. The goal was to inspire them to find comfort in their own lives, Welch said.
To create exclusive content for the hub, Rare Beauty tapped four partners it had previously worked with in some capacity. They included the meditation app Open, apparel brand Beyond Yoga, massage studio The Now, and creator and podcaster Alexis Barber of Too Collective. The hub launched with nine videos. The videos live on Rare Beauty’s e-commerce site, under a menu item dubbed Comfort Club.
Each partner aligns with one of the buckets Rare Beauty defined as contributing to holistic self-comfort: Beyond Yoga for movement, Open and The Now for relaxation, and Alexis Barber and Too Collective for community. Of the partners, Welch said, “Each has like-minded values … and a warm, welcoming presence online, [and] we’ve gotten to know them over the last few years.”
As for Beyond Yoga, Ashley Hart, the brand’s vp of marketing, said, “We champion self-confidence by embracing individual journeys and feeling at ease in your own body.”
So, for the hub, Beyond Yoga provided “two unique movement routines … for energizing your mornings or unwinding after a hectic day,” she said, adding, “These workouts are effortless to incorporate and provide either an energy boost or relaxation, catering to your specific needs.”
As for Open, company co-founder Manoj Dias said the company’s “open’s breath work and meditation practices” featured on the hub “are designed to meet you where you are and allow you to completely shift your state within a few minutes.”
He added, “There is great power in the present moment, and we hope the Rare Beauty community gets to experience it through the Comfort Club.”
Overall, Rare is “in service to our community, “Welch said. “And so, if we can introduce them to the ideas of breath work, meditation or yoga as new concepts of self-care, then that’s beneficial to us.”
