With cost of living on the rise, a D2C ethical and sustainable beauty brand was noticing a drop in sales and commissioned 181st Street to fix it.
Their products were high quality and made with premium ingredients, but their visual branding and price point was positioning them as a mid-market brand and making it difficult to achieve cut-through.
Faced with rising costs and tighter margins, the brand wanted to increase their price, but with sales in decline as customers faced rising costs of living, they were scared of alienating their existing customer base.
They also wanted to break into wholesale to maximise growth potential, but with rising costs their margins didn’t make this a viable option.
We began the project by mapping the beauty landscape from mid-market to luxury, to identify where our client’s product fit and where there were opportunities for greater cut-through.
Our demographics team analysed data from the client’s social media, website and digital marketing to identify who was engaging with the brand, and who was buying. They were able to identify that the current customer base had the disposable income for premium-luxury and valued the high quality of the brand’s signature product, suggesting that the client could afford to reposition themselves at the higher end of the market without alienating their base.
62% of shoppers rate having natural ingredients as an ‘important’ consideration when making a beauty purchase and nearly half (44%) of shoppers have chosen one product over another because it had better sustainability credentials.
While too much focus on sustainability in marketing and advertising messaging triggers the attitude/behaviour gap, consumer research shows that audiences are starting to expect sustainability credentials as standard. This is particularly true at the luxury end of the market, where recent research by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Comité Colbert shows that 65% of consumers “take into account companies’ commitment to sustainable development when deciding on their purchases”.
The client already had a premium-luxury product. With branding, packaging and messaging properly aligned to this market segment, they had the opportunity to raise prices, unlock wholesale opportunities, increase margin and achieve significant growth.
To achieve this, our design team refreshed the brand with a new colour palette and photographic style more suited to premium-luxury, and created a messaging hierarchy to focus their copy and content on customer benefits, product quality and premium natural ingredients.
This refresh was rolled out across the website and our UX team restructured the customer journey in line with the premium luxury positioning.
We redesigned the packaging to fit the premium-luxury market and maximise brand recall on-shelf in preparation for wholesale, and we focused on creating a premium unboxing experience for D2C customers to support the positioning shift.
Using the demographic audience data and market research, we designed a new advertising strategy, supported by a digital and social growth strategy. We engaged new influencers to grow the premium-luxury audience base and ran a highly segmented advertising campaign to promote the brand to new and existing customers.
The reposition achieved a 4% increase in margin and within 12 months of implementing the new marketing, advertising and growth strategy, we increased D2C sales by 75%.
The brand is now well positioned for buy-out or significant investment.
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