Beauty Store Business

AUG 2015

For beauty business news, beauty store owners turn to Beauty Store Business. Beauty business trends, beauty business profiles and more!

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30 August 2015 | beautystorebusiness.com What categories are doing well right now in your stores? Skin care is always very hot. Within skin care, customers are always looking for a quick, effective solution and the next best thing, so innovative products in the skincare category are always of interest to our customers. Right now the men's and suncare cat- egories are also big. In men's products, the beard trend is continuing to grow, so grooming is one of the hottest growing segments. Finally, products for hair loss— for both men and women—is a very exciting and innovative current category. How do you increase visits to your stores and encourage loyalty among customers? Our loyalty program is designed to create an added value proposition for our cus- tomers and entice them to keep coming back to Beauty Collection for their beauty needs. It's also a tool to create a point of difference and a way for us to facilitate direct communication with our customers through emails, our monthly newsletter and social media—a way to be continu- ously available to them. We offer quarterly events that are designed to create an experience for customers. They can come in, see prod- uct demonstrations and experience the products with a brand representative. Usually, the events are based on a partnership with our brands; they come in for these exclusive events, and cus- tomers enjoy interacting with the brands on a personal level. They really have a fun experience with the brand. Finally, all of our locations do beauty services in-store. Mainly we do haircare and skincare services, including facials and waxing. How do you use technology to educate, entertain and interact with customers? Our social media has been a great brand platform. We have Facebook parties every Wednesday night. Brand ambassadors log on to Facebook; we provide a mod- erator from our end; and our more than 30,000 Facebook followers can log in and post questions, having an interactive conversation with the brand ambassador. They become informed about the solu- tions we provide and about the brand. Again, it's part of that experience we offer to customers, educating them and helping them find a solution that best fits their needs. We also use YouTube videos as part of our Web presence. We partner with beauty influencers in the area who help curate products for our customers based on their own favorites. We create videos with them, which we post on our You- Tube channel, allowing our customers to become educated about what L.A.-area influencers like and then learn more about those products. The influencers can be bloggers, celebrity stylists and others in our community. We also have email promotions. We contact our customers with content— product launches, our monthly newsletter and beauty curator picks, for example. So we use email, social media and YouTube to stay in front of our customers. Finally, our website [www.beautycol lection.com] is an extension of our brand and allows customers to become educated about the brands we represent—including their benefits and the solutions they offer. As a beauty retailer our website is criti- cal for the customer experience, and we continue to try to improve that experience on an ongoing basis. We launched our new website about seven or so years ago, and we continue to grow it and enhance its benefits and performance so our customers have a better experience. In what other ways do you work with brands to engage your customers? We look to our partner brands to support us through our quarterly events and Face- book parties as well as mini events in our stores that happen more frequently such as product demonstrations in the store. We might do a facial event with some top customers who are loyal to us and shop that brand as a reward for them. We're always looking for brands to support us, and it's a two-way street; we want to support their goals as well. It's a true partnership. We have a very vigorous process when launching new brands, and part of that process includes establishing the quality of the relation- ship that the brand values. What other criteria do you use to select the brands that you carry? The quality of the products is critical. The packaging is critical. We look at "By Terry is a great makeup partner for us, and Dermasuri provides a great solution product." Continued on page 128 All images courtesy of Beauty Collection

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