On the last day of Glossy’s E-Commerce Summit, Glossy senior reporter Danny Parisi sat down with Sarah Lee, co-founder and co-CEO of the buzzy skin-care brand Glow Recipe. On the heels of its 10th anniversary, Glow Recipe has racked up a pretty extensive brag sheet. For example, in 2022, according to Tribe Dynamics, the brand ranked No. 1 among skin-care brands in earned media value, at nearly $22 million, thanks to its bestselling products: Watermelon Glow Niacinamide Dew Drops and Strawberry BHA Pore-Smooth Blur Drops.
Despite only hosting its first brand trip in February 2023, Glow Recipe has managed to build a strong community. At the Summit, Lee discussed how Glow Recipe’s community-building initiatives, like its Dew You campaign, have created loyal customers.
Prioritizing community
“When we were a small brand and didn’t have a ton of resources, the best means of marketing was social media. As a core DNA of the brand, when we founded Glow Recipe, we always wanted to figure out a way to help people feel good about their skin. … We believe in real skin acceptance, meaning embracing your own skin and feeling confident and beautiful no matter what stage you’re at with your skin journey. When we first started the company, my co-founder, Christina [Chang], and I were the only two people on the customer care team … so we were the ones interacting directly with our customers and building out the community by building relationships with them directly. Now, we have a team of 70 people, and our community has grown exponentially in the last 10 years. But it really started from our friendship as two female founders and then us directly dealing with the customers and building relationships. … Internally, when we have brainstorming sessions, we start by asking, ‘What can we do for the community?’ … Having the internal team focus on that as a top priority has helped to do that externally. For example, we get hundreds and thousands of DMs, and we respond to every single DM every single day. Those are the little touchpoints that go a long way because our community wants to feel heard and seen and feel like they can actually engage with the people behind the brand. Those are the tactics that we’ve implemented across the board.”
Leveraging community in marketing campaigns
“[Our Dew You campaign] was an awareness campaign, but it was also a moment where we brought together the community in an emotional way. When something touches you in a deep way, that brings loyalty out of you, so that was definitely a loyalty sort of breaking point for the community, as well. We saw a huge swell from the campaign. Typically, when you have an awareness campaign, that’s not what you expect from a traffic and sales perspective, but there was conversion. What we did strategically, because we didn’t want it to be just an emotional campaign, … was selecting models … who were truly fans of the brand and have tried the best-selling product, the Watermelon Niacinamid Dew Drops. All of the 10 models were superfans of the product, so organically, they were showing Get Ready With Me videos with how they were using and loving the Dew Drops throughout the whole campaign phase. People thought that it was so authentic and organic — nothing was staged. It was purely out of excitement and joy that they wanted to go above and beyond and feature our product over and over again. So we amplified those content pieces. What we could do on our end was boost those so that more people could see those beautiful, authentic voices. As a result of that, Dew Drops saw a huge lift. … But the brand also experienced a halo across the board. When you have an awareness campaign, there is a way, at least from our experience, to link it to a couple of products from the portfolio in a natural, organic way. You’re not just saying, ‘Hey, these are our drops and they do this.’ … That wasn’t part of the messaging. It was more like: Let the [models] play with the product and have them feel so passionate about it and naturally showcase their beauty. As a result, we saw a huge conversion.”
Glow Recipe’s TikTok strategy
“We’re present everywhere, but TikTok has certainly been a growth driver. What was interesting about TikTok is that, when it first came to the world, I don’t think anyone knew what to do about it, at least from a brand standpoint. It was this new platform where things were more raw and people were showcasing real stuff behind the scenes in a vulnerable way. So brands were thinking, ‘Where do we fit in this world?’ It was important for us, as a community-driven brand, that we jump on it and experiment and see what sticks with our community. We were one of the very first brands in the beauty industry that jumped on TikTok and tried all different things to see what trends stuck from a brand perspective. We now have a great flow of what works for us, at least on this platform. But the lesson here is to not be afraid to jump on a new platform and try things out. … With TikTok, it is important to be part of the trend because it’s what gets amplified. But every platform has its own ways of boosting through the algorithm that they are pushing for. For us, it was a mix of that, but also focusing on really high-quality content that was native to the platform and focused on value-driven messaging, of course, along with a product. That’s really our secret sauce, and TikTok has been incredible for our growth. It’s not because we just played within our account, but with TikTok, we also reached out to creators constantly, especially the ones who talked about our products. … We internally have a Slack channel called ‘TikTok’ where people share what they think is interesting from competition or outside of beauty, or things that are inspiring, or what we’ve done that they think is worth rehashing. It’s a really free-flowing platform and channel within Slack where everyone is sharing and brainstorming, but through that, we have a lot of moments where we’re like, ‘Oh, that’s a great point. Let’s do this.’ It’s very real-time internally. With creators, if anyone thinks there’s a creator that’s interesting for us to tap into, then that’s a platform where we can do that, too. For us, it’s, ‘How do we leverage the community that’s already a fan of Glow Recipe and amplify them even more or partner with them in a deeper way, along with our rich, educational content?’ Those were sort of our flywheel [tactics] across the platform.”
