Every other week, beauty brands are in dire need of more creative assets for social media. Traditional photoshoots and hiring models can get extremely expensive for indie beauty brands, so user-generated content has been a lifesaver. However, working with some creators can also be hit or miss. There’s nothing worse than when assets come back, and half of them are unusable.

The barrier to becoming a creator has lowered significantly, leading to diverse content quality. Anyone with a smartphone can create content, but that doesn't mean it's all good. The sheer volume of UGC Creators can make it challenging to identify and collaborate with creators who genuinely understand and resonate with your brand. Here are some considerations to help make the process a little less painful.

A brand's tone of voice is an aspect sometimes overlooked by emerging brands. To define its voice, a brand can start by characterizing its personality, its core values, and the emotions it wishes to evoke in its audience through its copy. Brand tone of voice is the personality and 'vibe' conveyed through your company's communications. It transcends visuals. It's about how you speak to your customers, the words you choose, and the feelings you evoke. A unique brand tone of voice can enhance customer engagement by making each brand encounter feel unmistakably familiar.

As a brand founder, every choice you make contributes to building your brand's legacy over the long run. From the seemingly small to the obviously grand, every nuanced brand touch point ladders up toward cementing your brand's identity, experience and legacy. From the tactile nature of packaging to the visual and auditory experience of a brand's digital presence, these nuances make every interaction with a brands deeply engaging and unforgettable.

For many beauty brand founders, their brand is more than just a business – it’s an extension of themselves. So the process of a brand refresh can be more of a personal journey. As they've evolved as founders, it's natural that where they want to take their brand evolves too.

What Inspires a Beauty Brand's Refresh
From experience working with indie beauty brands, there are two common themes that spur a brand founder to kick off a refresh. Firstly, the branding that cut it at Day 1, may no longer be doing them justice. And with aspirations to scale into new retail channels and attract investment partners, a captivating visual identity achieved through a brand refresh can serve as a critical differentiator, providing the necessary cut-through to set their brand apart.

Every beauty brand identity has critical components that build it's foundations. As an expert beauty branding agency, here are the must-know elements that form a well-rounded beauty brand identity.

1. Beauty Brand Positioning Strategy & Values
Brand positioning refers to the intention behind what you stand for as a brand. It encapsulates, the core values that your brand holds and represents and the promise your brand makes to your customers. Taking control of and being intentional about your brand positioning allows you to set your brand apart and helps you to attract customers that resonate with your values. After a meticulous process of market research, and understanding the brand leader's vision, the positioning strategy and values can be defined. It's important to strike a balance between a a positioning that resonates with your target consumer, can own a unique territory in the market and reflects the vision and values of the founder or founding team.

The day-to-day of growing an indie beauty brand will keep you on your toes. With a never-ending avalanche of tasks crying out your name, it’s often hard to make the time and headspace to strategize and think ahead. In the fast-moving world of the beauty business, taking time to strategize can help give you the upper hand.

Introducing your beauty brand to international markets is an exciting prospect. However, it requires careful consideration of regulatory compliance, understanding local consumer preferences, putting the right partnerships in place to ensure your beauty business is well-prepared for a new market launch. In this article, we cover how to launch your beauty brand internationally, from laying the groundwork to how to connect with your international audiences.

It might sound surprising, but some of the secrets to creating a meaningful connection with your brand's audience draw from the playbook of a therapist's relationship advice. There are 7 key strategies that beauty brand founders can lean on to foster authentic relationships, enhance brand loyalty, and ensure their brand resonates more deeply with their audience.

1. Master the science of storytelling
When you make people feel something, they’ll remember you. A 2017 report from the Harvard Business Review revealed that cortisol facilitates the formation of memories, and that cortisol, dopamine, and oxytocin are released in the brain when we’re engaged with a story. While cortisol underpins memories, dopamine is the ‘feel-good’ hormone and oxytocin is associated with empathy. With this science in play, it’s evident how well-executed brand storytelling can deepen the bond between you and your audience—making them remember you, feel good about you, and better relate to you.

Many brand founders find themselves tearing their hair out when their teams and agencies aren't on the same page. Wasted ad spend, reshoots, reworks, and content that just misses the mark eats into their budgets, tarnishes their brand image, and confuses their customers.

But sometimes this can happen because founders make one mistake – they have no brand guidelines, but if they do have them in place, they often barely scratch the surface, limiting themselves to aspects like logos and color palettes instead of speaking to how to express their brand's essence across different mediums.

Picture this: you're an indie brand founder, and a manager from a global beauty giant buys your products to inspire their next launch. In another scenario, a top Amazon seller has your packaging in hand, sending it off to their manufacturer with hopes of mirroring your unique mold. Or how about this, poor-quality counterfeits are causing complaints, that you have to deal with. These challenges are all too common for emerging indie brands. With the line between inspiration and imitation being razor-thin and blurred.