‘Full products and brands’: How the merch-ization of beauty is being shaped by celebs, venture capital

By jim cooper

This story is part of ‘Now What?’ Digiday Media’s 2021 fall preview, a look at how media, marketing and retail have changed over the past 18 months, and what it means for their futures. Check out the rest of the stories here.

Jennifer Lopez, Prince, Game of Thrones, Pharrell, Hello Kitty, Lady Gaga, Harry Potter, Halsey, Baby Yoda, Friends, the Muppets, Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande — no matter who or what someone is a fan of, they can likely find a beauty brand or collab for it today.

Over the past year, makeup and skin-care collabs and brands have been launching practically every week for anyone (or anything) with a following. The power of social media and devoted fandom have been coupled with easier-than-ever means of lining up distributors, giving an ever-lengthening list of creators, agencies, and even film and television studios an opportunity to turn beauty products into a new sub-category of celebrity merchandise.

“The way that we approach it is more as a collectible. And we want it to be an experience for the fan,” said Jeff Sellinger, the co-founder and CEO of collab-focused makeup startup HipDot. Enthusiastic fan groups have led it to launch makeup collabs in the past year with singer Kesha, the movie Clueless and the band My Chemical Romance, to name a few. “A lot of people order multiples because they don’t want to open it up; they want to have one that they keep that pristine.”

For traditional beauty giants, that means competition not just from startups with disruptive branding, but a growing number of influencer, celebrity and collab-focused brands with a built-in fan base at launch. As these labels fill the shelves of Sephora and other retailers, established beauty brands have been adapting with increasingly creative collabs to stay relevant. For buzzy new brands with collab-reliant business models or famous founders, the key has been to position themselves as more than just merch — instead of the next viral gift, these startups are hoping to create the next Fenty Beauty.

“Merch as we used to know it, I would say, seven years ago, was logos on t-shirts,” said Ronak Trivedi, the co-founder and CEO of Pietra, a platform that helps celebrities and influencers develop their own product lines. With the rise of social media, “traditional merch” has evolved to “full products and brands,” he said.

An Uber alum, Trivedi co-founded Pietra in 2019 to offer a centralized online platform where users can link up with service providers including suppliers, warehouses, e-commerce facilitators and designers to launch their brand. Pricing varies by service: for sourcing and product development, Pietra takes a 10% fee for each sample, while product assembly and warehousing costs $99 for up to 500 units. The company also operates its own e-commerce marketplace where creators can sell their brands, collecting a fee of 5% plus $1 on each purchase. Backed by VC heavyweights including Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, TQ …read more

Source:: Digiday