Building an award-winning beauty business in less than a year

From idea to reality

Division Of/ has extensive experience working with leading fashion and beauty brands – Clarins, True Religion, Skinfood and Too Cool for School, just to name a few. But building a new brand from the ground up? We took on the challenge and drew on our industry expertise and ability to understand customer behaviors to incubate and introduce a digital-first beauty brand.

A simple approach to a complex project

At Division Of/, we take a simple, yet effective, approach to helping our clients shine:

LEARN > BUILD > LAUNCH > REPEAT.

While building a physical product was a new adventure for us, the same tried and tested strategy drove a strong launch of Hero Cosmetics and Mighty Patch.

Learn

We teamed up with beauty expert, Ju Rhyu, to bring acne patches to the U.S. market.

Before we began product development, we conducted extensive market research around product viability and potential customer demographics. This allowed us to visualize where we wanted to take this product, understand the risks and realities, and build a roadmap. We also identified the potential media channels and contacts that we would need to engage for initial outreach and long-term relationship building.

Build

Launching Hero Cosmetics required us not only to build a new brand identity, voice and marketing program, but also to manufacture the physical product, create packaging, and develop an operations and supply chain model for omni-channel distribution. We relied heavily on our research and created a product, packaging and voice that were simple, gender-neutral, and able to ride – but outlast – the K-beauty wave.

Launch

The product was immediately met with rave reviews and we were contacted by interested retailers less than three months later. Within the first year of launch, Mighty Patch was being sold at more than 10 regional and nationwide specialty retailers, such as Anthropologie, Forever 21 and Neiman Marcus.

Repeat

From there, Mighty Patch sales and channels continued to grow exponentially. Through research, tracking and custom-built dashboards, we measured the effectiveness of various sales and media channels, as well as fulfillment efficiency. These learnings drove the development of new fulfillment workflows for multiple distribution centers.

Most importantly, we listen to the customers. Hero Cosmetics reads every single review and has a product testing panel of 200 customers. Each of the five products launched within Hero Cosmetics’ first 18 months was based on feedback from customers and the acne-care needs they shared with us.

Ongoing analytics allow us to visualize, understand and measure performance, and will soon enable personalized campaigns based on what each customer wants to see – and buy.