A little over a year after Fusion Brands rebranded to Clean Beauty Collective, the company has finished its transition and is now looking to carve out a name for itself within the clean beauty category.
After changing the company name and divesting from its makeup brand Fusion Beauty to focus solely on clean products, Clean Beauty Collective has streamlined its product portfolio and social media strategy. It also recently launched home fragrance in 50 Macy’s doors in November.
In 2020, the company will look to understand its newfound customer base and what communications are resonating best with them before investing in more brand awareness advertising initiatives and creating digital campaigns. Additionally, by the fourth quarter of 2020, Clean Beauty Collective will launch into the face, hair and body categories. The brand expects to earn approximately $80 million in global sales for 2019, a 10% increase year-over-year and is on track to grow by 20% in 2020, according to Gregory Black, Clean Beauty Collective CEO.
At the time of October 2018 rebrand announcement, Clean Beauty Collective migrated Fusion Brand social handles to Clean Beauty Collective. The company followed that up in March with the relaunch of its site using the URL CleanBeauty.com to host all of its three Clean fragrance collections together. Cleanbeauty.com sales have increased by 149% since March, Black said. While the company is clearly in growth mode, Clean Beauty Collective has seen clean beauty become a more mature category and, at the same time, its pre-existing differentiators are now “generic,” said Black.
“One of the challenges we face is that the clean beauty movement is now a category that’s here to stay. It’s very crowded,” he said. “Our core values are no longer unique. What we have to do now is distinguish ourselves.”
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To begin with, Clean Beauty Collective has been adding to the “Clean” name for its various collections, including Clean Reserve, which features sustainable perfumes, and Clean Space, for the home-fragrance products. This allows the company to trademark the “clean” phrase, but also to keep the brand name from being nonspecific.
For current brand awareness, Clean Beauty Collective has also heavily relied on its main wholesale partner, Sephora, by leveraging the retailer’s reach in-store and across social media. Clean Beauty Collective meanwhile lends an air of credibility to Sephora’s own clean efforts, Black said. In-store gondola signage and digital graphic animations for social and Sephora.com have doubled, and overall Sephora sales have grown 27% in 2019, he said. As the brand evolves, it will spend 400% more on digital ads across Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, and also quadruple its output of editorial and video content production on those same platforms.
“We will focus on advancing the digital growth strategy in areas such as influencer marketing, paid social, affiliate marketing and email marketing in order to increase brand awareness,” said Kristin Spinn, Clean Beauty Collective senior director of global marketing.
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Specifically, the brand will look to work with as-yet-undetermined influencers in the wellness and food space; the belief is that the audiences following those types of people would find Clean Beauty Collective relevant. The brand currently works mostly with micro beauty influencers through affiliate links and also with Sephora’s own influencers. These influencers will link back to CleanBeauty.com, which will act as a central hub for editorial content and information about product ingredients and the brand’s ethos.
“It was a surprise that clean beauty grew so quickly, but it does light a fire under us,” said Black. “We want to go heavier on brand awareness because as a smaller company, we didn’t previously have the resources to do it at all at the same time.”
