Professional Beauty chats to Kate Horsfall, marketing manager at St.Tropez about how the fashion world is the ultimate product showcase for beauty brands.
What fashion collaborations and partnerships have St.Tropez been involved in this year?
Long standing partners Ellery, We Are Handsome and our newest collaborations Alex Perry. We have also worked with Seafolly this year at their season launch party to trade. We recently featured backstage at the We Are Handsome Miami show!
What results/responses usually come from these collaborations?
Aside from building long term, valuable relationships with like-minded friends of our brand, and supporting them with the tools to execute their creative vision, we know our consumers love fashion. So for St.Tropez we find engagement levels significantly increase across our social media channels and continue to do so at a steady pace thereafter. Our consumers can see our products on the runway, in magazines and online, they see how easy it is for our experts to apply, so we find this gets more people making the investment in a quality tan.
Why is it beneficial for beauty brands to align themselves with the fashion world?
It’s no secret that fashion and beauty go hand in hand. For self-tan, it’s the ultimate fashion accessory. The fashion world heavily influences the trends in tanning and inspires us to create bespoke new looks to compliment what our consumers are wearing whether it’s a deep dark beach bronze, or something softer and luminous. Fashion alignments also further cement our positioning as Skin Finishing Experts.
How does it benefit your products?
One of the best things is aligning our new product launches with fashion events or partnerships. Fashion Week is the ideal environment to reveal our newest products, as we did at this year MBFWA with our new Instant Tan. It is the perfect platform to see the product in action and most importantly, its performance to our consumers.
How does it benefit your salon stockists?
St Tropez loves it’s salons. It is where St.Tropez was first born and is really at the core of our brand. Aside from the opportunity of stocking the most awarded tanning brand in the world (95 awards in three years, at last count) that has actually been used on the catwalks by our experts to drive growth in their businesses. It creates a point of difference against their competitors because it allows businesses to have a genuine conversation with their customers and helps position themselves as a credible, trusted salon where consumers know they will get a quality result.
The other main way it benefits our salons is that they can capitalise off the publicity St.Tropez receives. Salons don’t have to invest as much in their marketing because St.Tropez receives organic, consistent coverage in the market through these partnerships. So as long as their customers know they stock St.Tropez through our available collateral, the customer will already have the brand top of mind and already have it positioned as a premium, trusted product.
What are some marketing tips for brands branching into the fashion sphere?
The most important thing is to find a partnership that is mutually beneficial and is directly in line with your brand values and objectives. If you have that, then long term success will follow.
For more information visit http://www.sttropeztan.com.au/