To find brand success in the beauty industry, and to launch a successful beauty brand, you need to solve for a problem that many people experience. Here are 9 tips for Launching a Beauty Brand.

Innovation Is Key – You Must Solve for a Problem

Differentiation between products and what they can do is essential. Utilizing design thinking can assist in becoming an innovator in your market.

Design thinking or “the process,” is a methodology used by designers to solve complex issues posed by clients. The process consists of four necessary steps: empathize, brainstorm, prototype, and test. Business strategists have taken this page from the designer handbook since it is easily translatable.

The best beauty brands begin by solving for one single problem and then capitalizing on the solution. A fully loaded brush set, for example, is a wildly successfully make-up brush kit that nearly sold out the day it hit the market. The success of the brush set came from the need for having many different kinds of brushes all in one place. Before the launch of the brush kit, you would be hard pressed to find a set of brushes that had every single brush you would need to perform any make-up look.

Build Your Team Strategically

At the core of every business is people. Therefore, it is vital that you take the time when hiring the right people for your team. Time may not be on your side, and you might feel the need to hire quickly. Do not give in to the time restraint. Hiring the wrong people simply because they appear to be a “good enough” fit, will be part of the downfall later on.

Make sure that everyone can do what you need them to. Being a new brand, you have no time for assuming that someone can accomplish a specific task. Be the boss now, and make sure that everyone is on the same page about what they need to accomplish.

Curate the Best Infrastructure Possible

When you start the steps of launching a successful beauty brand, you need to make sure that you have the best IT team you can find and the best logistics strategy available. You also want to ensure that your financial and digital processes are up and running flawlessly from the beginning.

There is nothing worse than finding out that your internal systems are keeping your products from reaching consumers. These variables are something you have control over, so lean in and make sure that everything is in tip-top shape at the very beginning.

Identify Your Financial Needs, Then Double That

Find out all of your start-up costs, then double that amount, and then you will have enough money to make this dream a reality. There will never be enough money, and if you can provide as much cushion as possible, it will alleviate some of the strain that will be inevitable down the road.

Develop an Iron Clad Business Strategy

Create your strategy, then review and revise it one hundred times before it is perfect. Once your strategy is entirely iron clad and impenetrable, make sure that your team is all on the same page.

Know Your Market and Speak to It

The market that you are targeting is the most valuable source of feedback for your brand. Beauty brands need to be audience focused and feedback driven so they can thrive. The beauty market is dependent on recommendation and referrals. Once you know who your market is, it is more accessible to elicit input for your specific products. Having that feedback will allow you to use it to better market your products.

Engaging with your audience on digital platforms will give you extensive feedback on which direction to go with your brand. Using social media to call for customer feedback in comments will deliver valuable information about how your customers use your brand products. Brands are utilizing these strategies to meet the needs of their customers. Some brands are even going as far as incorporating customer feedback in the design of their packaging and which products to introduce into the production pipeline.

Learn from Others Within the Industry

One source of education that you cannot find anywhere else is the experience of those who came before you. Surrounding yourself with experienced industry professionals is the best way to gain more knowledge of the industry.

Listen to the past failures of someone that was once in your shoes. Doing so will help you to steer away from those mistakes. Alternatively, it will show you that, even though some errors are inevitable, they’re not damning.

Optimized Branding is The Only Branding That Works

When you’re launching a successful beauty brand, your main goal will be to gain brand loyalty. Brand loyalty is achieved by delivering a great first impression. 48% of consumers report that their first shopping experience is the most crucial moment in deciding if they will develop loyalty to a brand. Since there are thousands of beauty brands on the shelves and on the internet, you must use strategic and creative branding to capture the attention of a saturated market.

Eye-catching visuals and creatively designed packaging are essential for marketing any beauty brand product. The aesthetics are necessary for all beauty industry brands. Attractive packaging triggers a lot of activity in areas of the brain associated with impulsivity compared to neutral packaging. What’s more, excellent packaging triggers reward responses in the brain, as opposed to unattractive packaging, which has triggered areas associated with negative emotion.

Consistency is Key to Attract More Consumers

Brand consistency involves the communication of messages in a way that doesn’t take away from the core brand position. The consistency of your customer’s experience is vital to your brand’s success. 90% of consumers expect that their experience with a brand will be similar across all platforms and devices.

Consumers expect a seamless transition between the web and mobile apps. Making your brand easily identifiable through consistency will allow consumers to see that branding continuously, and inevitably like it as you introduce products that solve a problem for more and more consumers. Consistency starts with a firm business name for your beauty brand and continues with a flawless logo, website, and all other marketing materials.