This month, clean skin-care brand Youth To The People launched a new initiative to emphasize its connection with professional estheticians.
The program, called Pros To The People, is being offered to seven people from across the U.S. and Canada spanning a diverse cast of races, genders and disciplines. They include spa owners, esthetician educators and esthetician content creators. The application process was opened six months ago with a call to action via a January 13 Instagram post, followed by a product gifting initiative, allowing Instagram followers who tagged their favorite estheticians to try out the brand. It concluded with a hand-picked selection of estheticians and an announcement on July 7. As part of the program, Youth To The People will offer a mix of mentoring-style webinars and in-person meetings that cover different topics across business growth, communications and growing a community. Youth To The People plans to make Pros To The People an ongoing mentorship program. L’Oreal announced the acquisition of Youth To The People in Dec. 2021, noting at the time that the brand would earn $50 million in sales that year.
The main goal of Pros to the People is to “highlight and amplify” the brand’s community of estheticians, said Joe Cloyes, co-founder of Youth To The People. Family members of Cloyes and Greg Gonzalez, co-founder of Youth To The People (Cloyes and Gonzalez are cousins) are estheticians and Youth To The People relied on those connections for informing the early years of the 7-year-old brand.
“As we have grown and started to look at the next phase of the business, there was also [a need] to go back and highlight the estheticians that inspire us and our products,” said Cloyes. “Customers want to learn from those professionals and not just us. Beyond hearing about our clinical trials or product research, [people want to know] what the professionals in the world are saying.”
Functional, clinical and expert-backed brands have gained favor among beauty consumers overwhelmed with an abundance of skin-care information. Terms like “G-beauty,” which is dominated by German doctor-founded brands, and “cleanical” brands which combine clean beauty with performance-focused ingredients, have become de rigueur in order for skin-care brands to speak with authority. Some of the buzziest brands in these sub-categories include Augustinus Bader and Shani Darden, and more entrants are launching daily, like Dr. Whitney Bowe, which launched in June. By partnering with estheticians, Youth To The People can emphasize its authenticity origins while also using skin-care experts to lend approval and provide customer education.
Though Youth To The People sells through retailers like Sephora, Anthropologie and Amazon, the brand does not yet have a back bar or a professional channel, but it’s slowly building one. For example, Despina Daniilidis, an esthetician that is part of Pros to the People, launched a spa in Montreal that is one of the first to exclusively use Youth To The People products in her location, said Gonzalez. Youth To The People also plans to open its own standalone brick-and-mortar store in the Los Angeles Arts District at an undetermined time. And it will expand internationally beginning in 2023.
Pros to the People will appear on multiple social media channels, including Instagram and TikTok, plus it will be featured on a landing page and editorial vertical on Youth to the People’s DTC e-commerce site. Pros to the People will even appear on merchandising units and endcaps, especially in the brand’s own upcoming store. Overall, Youth To The People is looking at how to highlight its roots as a brand even as it ventures into its post-acquisition chapter and launches new products. Its latest product, called Polypeptide-121 Future Cream, debuted on July 5.
“New products are exciting, but [it’s important] to speak about your hero products in a new way. We want to focus on showing love to our top products and how those work in someone’s routine.… That ties into some of the products used with Pros to the People,” said Gonzalez.
