BAKEUP Beauty (2022-2023)

The Situation

BAKEUP Beauty was a new brand, developed by a celebrity makeup artist with a flair for using color as a statement. They were gearing up for their first major product launch but didn’t have the ecommerce infrastructure to support it. I had worked with their CEO previously at Origami Owl, and she hired me to build their digital growth engine from the ground up.

Biggest Risks

Without a well-designed ecommerce site, BAKEUP risked wasted spend on PR and advertising, driving traffic to a site that would not convert. This could also lengthen the time it would take to make back in sales revenue the money invested in producing and purchasing their first products. Finally, if BAKEUP did not have a lifecycle marketing system set up to grow an email list and owned social audience, they would be reliant on paid channels to drive repeat purchases.

My Response

As a fledgling startup, BAKEUP had little digital marketing infrastructure and limited resources. I needed to ruthlessly prioritize the team’s work. I laid out a customer journey map for the business and then used a Six Sigma method to rate each touchpoint along that roadmap – from awareness to first purchase to brand loyalist – by effort and impact. This analysis gave me three key areas of the business to improve.

1. I led a complete website redesign, including page layout, color scheme, navigation and content strategy. I also evaluated Shopify apps and experimented with different content on key landing pages that could lift our AOV and improve our site conversion rate.
2. I set up email automations in Klaviyo to capture and convert the traffic that would be coming to our new ecommerce site. We also needed a more reliable way to grow our list, so I created an omnichannel campaign that funneled beauty enthusiasts from TikTok and Instagram to our website to take a quiz and prompted them to sign up for email in the result.
3. I onboarded a digital agency and hired a social content strategist to begin rapid experimentation and help us unlock efficient customer acquisition. I set up a structured process to test ad content. We’d publish first on organic social, then try each week’s top performer as an ad. Creative insights about products featured, length, video style, etc. were passed back to the team before their next shoot.

My Results

In six months, BAKEUP experienced explosive growth: +150% site conversion rate and +253% revenue. Our email list size grew 700%, and our revenue-per-recipient went up 44%. Finally, our paid digital campaigns became much more efficient: 65% lower CAC and +384% new customer acquisition. This new ecommerce growth engine I had designed was so successful that the last product launch I oversaw actually sold out in the first 24 hours!