Beauty brands are giving themselves their version of a facelift.
A handful of brands across price points and categories, including L’Occitane, Essie and It’s a 10 Haircare, are revitalizing their visual identities. They join the likes of Kiss Nails and RéVive Skincare, which each relaunched with rejiggered product portfolios, and other rebrands including recent ones from Raw Sugar, First Aid Beauty and more.
“Rebrands are easy Band-Aids sometimes,” said Christopher Skinner, chief revenue officer of Front Row Group, who added that rebrands are equal parts art and science. “There’s so many stories out there of rebranding that leads to repackaging with immediate decline in sales, and then reverting back and public apology. That side of the coin ultimately means that there’s a structural issue of relevance that no color palette or packaging redesign will solve.”
Skinner thinks much of the frenzy is spurred by social media, where brands are chasing buzz at breakneck speed.
“On the flip side, there are certain brands for whom a rebrand is really quite a successful restage. It’s an acknowledgement that the consumer has moved and brands might not have caught up yet,” Skinner said. “There’s a change in just the pure knowledge of today’s consumer, and that really demands more of brands. Brands that are thinking of a restage in a successful way acknowledge that.”
L’Occitane’s rebrand, which is happening in phases based on franchise, has timed the rebrand of its hero almond franchise to its 50th anniversary. “We are really in celebration mode,” said Vandana Tandon, the brand’s chief marketing officer. “It’s the kind of icon you don’t redesign except when you think the brand deserves something more.”
The emphasis was on “reinforcing the ingredient,” as Tandon put it, who said the considerations for the brand are both quantitative and qualitative. “When it’s done intentionally, it does provide a strategic ROI, but it also provides an emotional connection,” Tandon said. “When you think about strengthening our market position, you think about our new stores, we want to make sure we’re deepening the consumer connection. It’s not necessarily about thinking, ‘Hey, let’s go find new customers.’ We want to ensure they really understand the 50 years of brand equity.”
Also rounding out an anniversary, It’s a 10 Haircare debuted its rebrand for its 20th birthday Friday, including its first brand ambassador, Khloé Kardashian.
“We wanted to announce to everyone that we may be 20 but we are just as fresh as we were 20 years ago,” brand founder and chief executive officer Carolyn Aronson told WWD at the time, who is also publishing a book and rolling out retail activations throughout the year. “It’s in-person activations, retail activations, social activations. We’ll also have a huge party in Miami.”
It’s a 10 leave-in products.
Courtesy of It’s a 10 Haircare
For Essie, the thinking was also about capturing a new consumer cohort.
“Essie is a brand that has such a strong heritage and has always had such a cult following, but with the way the market and consumer landscape have been evolving, we saw an opportunity for the brand to refresh a little bit how we show up and show up with a little bit more attitude and intention,” said Melanie Ioanna, senior vice president and brand lead, Essie. “If you think about the consumer today, they’re all about emotional connection with the brands they consume, that they interact with, and they want to have that connection with them.”
The consumer is getting younger, Ioanna said, and it’s time to broaden the business’s shoulders beyond the core Millennial and Gen X consumer base.
“For us, it’s how we recruit that new, younger consumer that’s getting introduced to the nail category for the first time,” Ioanna said. “There are also so many other ways to do your nails — salons have been using UV gel, there are accessories and such. So for us, it was important to introduce the new generation of consumers to Essie and make sure our positioning and product range was competitive with all of those options.”
Much of that, including Essie’s new campaign, is happening on social media. “People want to get inspired for different looks and it’s very emotional,” she said. “Nail is the only makeup category you see on yourself without looking in the mirror, and you’re looking at your hands all day. In terms of putting together content, people want to be inspired and digital and social is a huge space for that.”
Assunta Anif, director of social media strategy at Kiss Nails, said that that brand’s relaunch was born out of consumer research. “We found that how consumers were in-store shopping for our product could be improved,” she said. “Over 35-plus years, we had so many different franchises and collections, and there was not one specific look and feel for the Kiss brand. It was getting diluted, because on the wall there were so many different styles of packaging.”
Kiss also tested 4,000 hands to ensure the nails had a better fit. The relaunch went live in December and hit shelves in January. “The core franchises now really helped,” Anif said. “If anything, it’s more about the consumer and how they are benefiting from the product.”
In order for a rebrand to be successful, Skinner reasoned it must be an organization-wide effort. “The easiest way to go wrong is that it’s all surface: New logos, new color palettes, new campaign but same positioning and internal culture,” Skinner said. “We as an industry think about a rebrand as something an organization needs to own, but in reality, it’s an opportunity from culture-up to restage. It can be a celebratory step change in a brand’s overall path. This is not a creative director or creative team scope. This is all-company, from HR to marketing to sales, everyone should feel their thumbprint is part of it.”
