In a 30-second video filmed in what was visibly a dimly lit bedroom with the help of a ring light, content creator Meredith Duxbury, 24, raves about her new staple lip products everyone must try: the latest line of Infallible Matte Resistance lip colors from L’Oreal. In less than a minute, Duxbury was able to capture the interest of 5.8 million users on TikTok, a feat that any advertiser would deem a successful campaign. Boasting an audience of close to 19 million followers as of writing, Duxbury is one of the most popular beauty influencers on the fast-rising Chinese short-form video app.
For the past few years since its emergence, TikTok has held great influence in social commerce and Gen Z has driven this impressive shift. In 2022, Insider Intelligence reported that 4 out of 10 TikTok users in the U.S. will make purchases through the platform. Brands are turning to both influencers and Tiktok to advertise their offerings, and with good reason, too, with the arrival of the Tiktok Shop earlier in September. The app vies to change the e-commerce landscape and woo its 150 million users into clicking an alluringly pink “Checkout” button and parting with some of their cash.
Armed with this and many more data that back this assertion, marketers are working double-time to be seen on the app and go viral. And though many try, only a few will truly succeed.
A Lifetime of Experience
In the Philippines, one product that has captivated online audiences is the Microblade Pen Perfector produced by brow master Momoi Supe under his homegrown brand, Strokes Beauty Lab. Three years since its launch, Strokes Beauty Lab’s best-selling product has made it into the feeds of dozens of beauty influencers whose talents of persuasion have hooked hundreds and thousands more beauty watchers and have converted them into beauty shoppers.
Influencers would not praise the product without a sound basis. Behind the success of the Microblade Pen Perfector were years of study and development and hours of practice perfecting that sculpted brow.
Strokes CEO Momoi and his team of brow artists began a brow studio business in 2016, wanting to fill the need for innovative eyelash and eyebrow services. But the beauty studio was just the tip of the iceberg. Supe had a vision to make his services available for Filipinos at home, where everyone would be handed tools and could be professional brow sculptors like him.
Thus in 2020, he launched the cosmetics arm of the brand with a five-piece collection aptly called the Brow Artist Collection. As brow masters, Momoi and his team knew what it took to replicate the fineness and detail of real human hair and to create their star product, the tried and tested pens that would later become the Microblade Pen Perfector. “Its 0.5mm brow detailing pen fills in and defines your brows by creating the thinnest hair-like strokes for microblade-worthy effects but without the blade,” says Amber Tumanan, a representative from Strokes Beauty Lab. So for Strokes Beauty Lab, the team’s expertise had led them to carefully develop this bestseller and many others.
An Accidental Hit
Some beauty brands bank on gimmicks and trends, while others stand apart for having a strong sense of distinction and branding. Precisely four years ago, Hana Kirchhoff of Filipinta had a vision. A designer by trade, she worked on beefing up her branding and package design portfolio by creating a mock beauty brand called Filipinta, and had a few hundred eyeshadow palettes actually developed for a photo shoot. She stumbled upon unexpected online fame when she posted about the palettes and selling out in an hour. She did the logical thing which was to have more palettes made, which then kept selling out. The rest is history.
Then it became time for Filipinta to manage its newfound success. “When we first started, I had no idea about the business side of a business. I’ve been a career designer and have always worked with other companies, so I never thought I needed to look into it,” says Hana. “We were thrust into this industry so fast that I was not able to keep up with the demand and didn’t have time to figure out the legalities of it at the time. It was a very costly lesson to learn!”
But Filipinta seldom faced challenges with its marketing efforts. The media darling has since been featured on the likes of CNN, GMA, Business World, and other media outlets. “There really is no secret to [the publicity] because I’m just putting out videos and products at a leisurely rate and don’t really think about it becoming viral,” she shares. She expresses immense gratitude to the online communities that have propelled the brand to fame, sharing Filipinta’s posts on social media, spreading the news of their product launches, and ultimately, reaching the ears of news editors.
Apart from juggling a budding business, Hana is also a full-time mom to two active boys.
Luckily, she has help from co-founder Jasel Donato who is skilled in color theory and expertly matches a skin tone to a color profile. It’s a family affair when the two businesswomen test their products, as they gather their friends and family members with various complexions and skin types to evaluate their products and make sure that they perform well against all types of skin.
Meanwhile, Hana manages the creatives and branding side. She says she created five years’ worth of concepts before she began the business and drew inspiration from her childhood in the Philippines. It takes three to six months for a product to go through the different stages of conceptualization, testing, and research. The finished collections range from lip glosses with Mang Tomas and Datu Puti-inspired packaging to lumpia-shaped wax melts to ube eyeshadow palettes. She says proudly that their bestsellers include the Banana Ketchup Lip Gloss and White Balm-It Lip Balm, apart from their other food-inspired balms. She dreamt that the New York-based Filipinta would highlight Filipino culture and pay homage to her home country, and she has succeeded in doing so in a novel way.
Tuning Into Tiktok
Social media has birthed its own culture and its people (or users) have created a language native to it. Slang words and acronyms are commonly used to communicate among the “POV” or point-of-view generation, and this is where one local cosmetics company gets its name. Get Ready With Me Cosmetics, or GRWM for short, takes its moniker from the act of preparing to face every day, and in the process, prep one’s face every day.
The three-year-old beauty brand led by Mae Layug stands by the philosophy of “beauty on your own terms” and makes sure it stays tuned into the changing needs of women using social media listening. Targeting the millennial shopper, GRWM actively taps content creators and forges partnerships with influencers to get their message out there. This generation can smell an ad a mile away and is drawn to raw and authentic content. “Because of our collaborations, we can push GRWM Cosmetics to produce real and relatable content. Since we let our influencers express their creativity in their own ways, we make certain that the videos they produce all align with the content creators’ authenticity and therefore, our brand,” says Mae.
As a testament to their promise of allowing everyone to be beautiful on their own terms, GRWM produces its signature Milk Tints in an array of shades to match your mood and style. The Milk Tints are spread across social media and news articles. For GRWM, it has always been about their customers telling their own stories and sharing their own experiences, maintaining that word-of-mouth is still king. “Collaboration and social media work hand in hand to help us amplify our brand presence and reach a wider audience.”
GRWM stands by the saying that the customer is always right, so much so that their strategy lies in swiftly catering to the customers’ feedback to enhance their products. “We know it solidifies brand loyalty and attracts new customers,” says Mae. They do this apart from offering vouchers, and discounts, and carefully detailing their product descriptions to make their products attainable and customer-friendly. Collaboration, genuine content, and customer centricity are just some of the many draws that make GRWM Cosmetics stand apart from the fold.
These beauty brands and their stories are just some of the many ways best-selling products are born. TikTok may not be forever, but it does provide a platform for remarkable products to be talked about, tried, and tested in the public eye. The business and science behind these products validate the hard work, hours of experimenting and conceptualizing, and testing completed by their developers. They have been and will continue to be hit products to watch out for.
