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“WE F*****G WON” reads a comment on a Reddit thread where news, reviews and discussions about Glossier’s skincare and makeup are shared to 57,000 followers. The feat the comment refers to is the brand’s reversal of the vegan formulation of the fan favourite Balm Dotcom lip balm, which launched in January 2023.
Complaints had flooded in about the vegan formula, which replaced lanolin with emollients like castor jelly and naturally derived beeswax with a synthetic substitute. Customers said the balm would separate and didn’t provide as long-lasting moisture; Glossier listened, pulling it from production and bringing back the original formulation by popular demand.
At their best, beauty communities — super fans of brands brought together into vocal entities by social media platforms and online forums — hold brands accountable by being their sounding board and provide critical feedback on product performance. Glossier’s community has been core to the brand since its beginnings as a beauty blog, Into The Gloss, which had an active and engaged audience.
But, at their worst, they can prove hard to placate and mercilessly decide a brand’s future if it misses the mark. Hardcore fans might mobilise when a new product drop sells out too soon, or a misstep ruffles feathers in a specific market. Brands have to act quickly to recover.
“We’re always listening to our community,” explains Kleo Mack, Glossier’s CMO. “And with Balm Dotcom, we heard them loud and clear.” Following the brand’s failed vegan Balm Dotcom, Glossier cleverly came out with a viral video, titled “The Comments Section”, featuring members of the Glossier HQ reading mean and funny comments from its community, all as part of the original formulations relaunch. “Understanding your community’s needs and motivations is the linchpin to any consumer brand’s success,” says Mack.
The power of passionate fans
“Before we look at the importance of community within the beauty industry, we need to step back and understand the role of communities within society as a whole,” says Cristina Harrell, co-founder of beauty brand Convié. “The rapid digitisation of society over the last decades has completely upended how individuals engage with society daily.”
Covid-19, screens, virtual realities and an emboldening of faceless commenting and trolling have all exacerbated this effect. “All of this makes communities all the more important for brands, as a brand’s community becomes their ‘safe space’ to build proximity and engagement with their customer base. It’s a means to foster real relationships and transparent customer feedback in an informal, pressure-free manner — an invaluable resource for new brands in the market.”
Saie, the clean beauty brand founded by Laney Crowell in 2019, was launched to offer non-toxic makeup products that aren’t too expensive, yet cool enough to occupy top-shelf space. “It’s in our name, really,” explains Crowell. “You say it, we create it.” In practice, this means combing the brand’s comments across social media, responding and taking them into count when it comes to launching new products. “We have a place where we record every single request for our product, that we then share with product development.”
But even a community-based brand like Saie is not immune to backlash — and a mobilised fan community means founders must react quickly and sincerely when things go wrong.
In May, when the timelines on the sales of a limited-edition vanity case went awry with a third-party online retailer releasing them earlier than planned, Saie’s community became angry and upset over miscommunicated timings. “We had to issue an apology, and take control of all sales of the product going forward,” explains Crowell. “Now the product has waitlists of over 10,000 on our website.”
Similarly, when influencer-turned-entrepreneur Diipa Büller-Khosla launched her brand Indē Wild, it intended to democratise beauty and “co-found” a brand with her community. The skincare and haircare brand now offers products based on Ayurveda and chemistry. Several focus groups and community feedback sessions later, it launched the Vitamin C Sunrise Glow Serum to tackle hyperpigmentation. Although a massive success in global markets, the product failed with its Indian consumers. Differing storage systems meant that the product oxidised too quickly, turning an orange-brown colour.
“Some influencers even made not-so-nice videos about it. We were so obsessed with getting the formulation right, we didn’t take into account the vastly different infrastructure in India,” Büller-Khosla says. What followed was a personally handwritten mea culpa from the founder along with free reformulated Vitamin C Sunrise Glow Serums 2.0, for anyone who had reported a bad experience with the previous product.
Intimate spaces
It’s not a one-way conversation: brands need to engage with these fans to make them feel heard. This is especially relevant for brands founded by influencers, which have built-in engaged audiences. These fan bases are particularly sensitive to the influencers they enjoy following losing their personality and authenticity when a brand comes along. “You have to humanise the whole experience and how you talk to your community,” explains Büller-Khosla.
One of the brand’s fastest-growing community engagement platforms outside of Instagram is a closed 1,000-member group on WhatsApp, which is used widely in India. “The group is so driven because they feel part of an inner group. It’s highly engaged,” Büller-Khosla says. She adds that about 70 members of the WhatsApp group can be counted on to buy every single product that launches.
These customers serve as early-stage testers and can provide critical feedback before products launch widely. When Saie was ready to launch in 2019, it started a closed Facebook group called “Clean Beauty Crew”, that served as a pre-launch community for the brand as well as a resource for consumer sentiment. Crowell even crowdsourced early campaign models from the group.
Now, Saie is launching a Substack, where the built-in chat feature is the major pull for the brand. Crowell says the content will focus on team stories and behind-the-scenes at the Saie office. Right now, the brand is working on a guide to the team’s favourite places in London. “Blogging in beauty is back,” says Crowell, who was an early fan of Into The Gloss, where scraping the comments section became the blueprint for Glossier.
New rewards
Passionate communities stay alive when brands recognise them for being big supporters.
As Sephora made its comeback to the UK following its acquisition of Feelunique in 2021, it was the launch of the MySephora rewards system that the retailer’s loyalists were most looking forward to, according to Sarah Boyd, MD, Sephora UK. The three-tier reward system, which gives early access to sales and birthday gifts, was launched in the UK last month. Unlike a typical loyalty programme, shoppers rack up tier status via spend but also via engagement, such as attending in-store services and reviewing products. “People really respond to ratings and reviews. And right now, because we only have a small number of stores, and most of our business is online, online ratings and reviews are hugely important to people when they’re making decisions,” explains Boyd.
TYB (Try Your Best) is a community rewards platform that launched in 2022 by Outdoor Voices founder Ty Haney. Glossier joined TYB’s roster of brands last week and is already the fastest-growing brand on the platform, with 10,000 fans in under 24 hours. Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty has the most, with 16,000 fans. By engaging with brands, shopping with them, chatting, collaborating, answering surveys, and creating content, members earn coins that power their status within the community to unlock exclusive access to products and experiences and can also be redeemed on the brand's website for a discount.
The natural next step? Giving your biggest fans a stake in your brand. In March 2024, Indē Wild put out feelers within its community to temper with the idea of a future equity crowdfunding opportunity. “The reception was incredible. My DMs exploded,” says Büller-Khosla. Most respondents were looking to invest between $500 and $2,000, and many were first-time investors. “So, yes, there is certainly an appetite,” says Büller-Khosla. For now, though, the brand put the idea to the side while they considered a crowdfunding platform that could umbrella across the brand’s three major markets: India, the US and the UK.
Giving customers what they want — all the way up to ownership in their favourite brands — is a good idea on paper. But can customers get too close? Brands still need to innovate to stay ahead. Crowell says that while customers may think they know what they want, it’s on her to get it right.
“They might say ‘I really want a powder blush’. But what does that look like? What’s on the market that’s not working? And how do we improve on that? That involves a combination of forces at work,” she says.
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