A Checklist for Beauty Brand Success

Starting a new beauty brand takes a lot of moxie, a lot of creativity and a whole lot of strategy.Map out a plan before you start to ensure your brand hits the ground as a genius and not a disaster.

Alisa Marie Beyer

In the five-plus years since I started The Beauty Company (TBC), I have had the pleasure of working with many beauty brands both large and small. Some come to my agency in need of a lot of guidance, some less so, but regardless of size or state of development, the one thing I have found is that it takes way more than a good idea to create and build a successful beauty brand. It takes determination, trial and error, planning (and re-planning), strategizing and a laser-focus dedication to seeing through to completion this perfect beast you are building.

At TBC, we call this approach the Beauty Business Development Checklist (BBDC)—seven phases that guarantee your great new idea has the bandwidth and vital elements necessary to not only succeed, but to flourish. Built from a deep understanding of industry standards, the BBDC is a proven and validated seven-phase blueprint of the critical steps necessary for launching a new beauty brand in today’s competitive marketplace. Don’t leave anything to chance—let the BBDC ensure your beauty baby is a winner and must-have with consumers from the start.

Vision

A clear vision of how to grow and nurture your idea ensures that your new brand or product thrives in-market, and doesn’t become a failure statistic. That’s why for every new beauty entrepreneur, several cut-and-dry key business elements must be in order before any creative brand work kicks off: business planning, financial strategy, budgets, competitive studies, concept creation, testing and strategy overviews to name a few.While admittedly not all that creative, these elements will provide your brand with the solid foundation it needs to even just enter the market, and should be fully developed and vetted out before any deep creative brand work is kicked off. Establishing operating plans and budgets, as well as testing your idea with consumers (before moving along to brand and product development) helps create the kind of sound foundation every brand must have in order to truly achieve success.

Plan & Design

Okay, so you have your vision—now what? Now it’s time to truly kick-off the creative or fun part of brand development. Plan & Design is the process of decanting your brand down to its look, feel and image—those deep “ownable” elements that will make it stand up and stand out amidst competition and to consumers. Now is when you get to indulge your biggest creative ideas and go for gold as you begin to create and develop your brand positioning story and platform, mood boards, logos and icons, usage guidelines and creative photography, as well as any other consumer facing collateral. You will also be developing your actual product now, so set aside considerable time (and resources) to evaluate your portfolio, create product profiles and choose benchmarks, as well as confirm a formulation house, and identify (and begin) all industry-mandated testing protocols. In order to transition to manufacturing and fulfillment, it is critical that all of these objectives are met on time and on budget, or you risk extended delivery delays and increased costs down the road.

Test

Once you have viable product samples formulated, you are ready to test your initial brand creative and formulas with consumers. Beauty Product Testing (BPT) groups allow you to get vital consumer feedback on your nearly finished formula: the look, the feel, the smell, texture and overall appeal before anything is finalized. In addition, BPT groups allow you to garner market-ready claims, which today are a required point-of-entry for most categories. These quantitative studies reveal what your target consumer thinks of brand messages, key consumer insights and reasons-to-believe, as well as revealing purchase intent in order to help you create a consumer-ready offer that wins out of the gate.

Build

The build phase is the nexus where your vision, your planning and your designing meet up and show off their shape and personality. At this point, foundational brand elements such as the identity, stories, color palettes and logos should be well on their way to completion, freeing your creative team to focus on the other concrete, physical elements of the brand—packaging copy, websites, user guides, brand books, social media pages, and retailer kits. Additionally, now is the time to start package sourcing, package design and production, as well as manufacturing of the actual product and the creation of finished goods.

Deliver & Operate

Deliver and operate—the moment when your intense work conceptualizing and creating your new brand pays off, and you get to watch it thrive. With your brand identity set, your formula(s) optimized, and your primary and secondary packaging done, it’s time to implement a rock-solid go-to-market and sales distribution plan. Although it may seem that the harder work of launching your brand is behind you, in reality, much effort remains. One of the last vital steps to success is to ensure that you have an aggressive sales plan, which includes retail distribution and consumer purchase scenarios, as well as a plan for managing inventory and distribution. Key to this final step is the launch of all marketing, public relations, beauty editorial and social media campaigns and retailer outreach in order to start fanning the flames on the one part of this entire process you can’t create—consumer interest.

Launching a successful new beauty brand is serious business, and every new contender hoping to enter into this exciting, dynamic and competitive marketplace needs to think like an entrepreneur, create like a sculptor and execute like a surgeon. By following the proven phases of TBC’s Beauty Business Development Checklist, new brands are well on their way to identifying and understanding these key, critical steps which must be taken in order to successfully see your beautiful vision through from concept-to-counter.

About the Author

After founding and exiting three companies, Alisa Marie Beyer started The Beauty Company (TBC) five and a half years ago. TBC is a strategy firm that has worked with clients at every stage of development, in skin care, makeup, hair care, fragrance, devices and beauty-focused supplements.