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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Hello and welcome back to the Bareface Podcast, a beauty business podcast hosted by me. My name is Lily twelve Tree. I am a beauty analyst and now founder of Unfiltered, a mobile app that we're building to connect beauty shoppers to real reviews and beauty brands to authentic customer voice. And this is part two of the story of Sephora, an episode that comes alongside a huge apology and quite a couple updates about the show. So where on God's green earth have I been? I disappeared for a second. I have recently stepped into the world of raising pre seed for that startup I mentioned in the intro, Unfiltered, a job I decided to take on whilst I was completing my computer science finals and freelancing. And this is not the first time in my life that I've tried to do way too many things and the walls came crashing down. But anyway, you might have noticed in the intro I did not refer to myself as a data science or computer science student. Much to the delight of my mother, I have paused my tertiary education. Once again the joys. I have officially gone full time in building unfamiliar, tilted and mostly pulled back on my consulting work which has done terrible things to my bank balance. But we are all aboard the startup train. So right now, this realistically means taking a whole heap of meetings. If I have to edit my pitch deck one more time, I will scream. My life is applying for grants, applying to incubators, building a data room, coding a demo. All before very excitingly I head off to San Francisco and New York to get in front of investors and the beauty industry at large. So PS if you're listening and you're based there, want to grab a coffee while I'm there? Please do slide into my LinkedIn DMs. But yeah, this is not me complaining by the way. I bloody love this job. I low key think I was born to do it, but I'm giving the context and excuses that you did not ask for around where this podcast has been for four months. I was also kind of forced to take some time off over the holidays. Something came up in my personal life which was honestly kind of great. By the end of it I loved having time off. I forgot what that was like. I hope you all had a wonderful holiday break. But what we're really here to discuss today is the second half of the story of Sephora. So in episode one we looked at the story from 1969 to 2015 and today we're going to look at the last 10 years. Specifically, this was the decade that Sephora really transformed into the behemoth that we know them as today. Their revenue grew from 4 billion to to 17 billion. And I wanted to zoom in on this period for obvious reasons, like the fact it's in a more recent history gives us a lot more direct insights to where the retailer is heading. The rise of the digital culture also makes it far easier to find and track receipts and source insights, but it's also the period that I lived. Damn, Daniel. Back at it again with the White man. The year 2016 was a very monumental year for beauty generally, to the point that 2016 makeup has its own style and look that leans on the heavier side. You can think full coverage, foundation, carving out the brows, blinding highlighter and contouring were all features of this look. And it was really during this era that I fell in love with beauty. It's also hilarious that since kind of scaffolding and outlining this episode, we now have a trend on social media that's popped up in 2026 of everyone posting their old photos from 2016. And I wonder if in retrospect, I should have just made Sephora one long episode and then done a separate video on 2016 makeup, because I think that is the topic that I was most interested and excited to talk about. But the core of today's episode is really looking at influences and all their different evolutions and how Sephora was able to ride each of those waves. For me in 2016, I would get home from school and practice one eye look on one eye and another eye look on the other. And I very, very vividly remember saving everything I could for 8 to 9 ish months before going to Melbourne on a swimming trip. Because fun fact, I spent the majority of my youth in the pool. I managed to save about $800 and I dropped it all on a single trip to Sephora, which is insane. I was like 14, 15 and we didn't have Sephora in Adelaide or even a Mecca Maxima, which of course is the young fun version of Mecca with the slightly more affordable brands before they have now combined into one store. But my point being is that I remember planning a entire trip interstate around going to Sephora. 14 year old me went in with a list and she knew exactly what she wanted because I had already been trained by the beauty gurus on YouTube and it's that dynamic that, that I really want to explore. It's the dynamic of how Sephora was home to all the big Internet brands. Cover effects Kat Von D, Becca Benefit abh, also better known as Anastasia Beverly Hills, Huda, Beauty, Glam, Glow and so many more. And this chokehold that they had on Internet brands is really fascinating because I think that's the heart of this story. And at the heart of the growth of Sephora in this period, I really think is beauty Internet culture, which is my favorite topic of all time. It's the reason that the 2016 story gets wound up in the Sephora story because they are one in the same. Sephora just wrote it better than anyone else. So as always, today's episode will follow a three part structure. We're first going to look at the digital evolution outside of influencing. I want to start off by hearing from Bridget Dolan, who was the Vice President of Innovation at Sephora, who gave a presentation at WWD Digital Beauty Forum back in 2016 and mapped out how Sephora was approaching innovation. We'll then try and decode this corporate speak to talk more tactically about what that meant. In part two, we will look at Sephora's early work with influencers, mostly across their organic efforts before part three where we'll zoom into their ambassador program and the Sephora squad, an initiative that has frequently been credited as the move that secured them their number one spot as American's leading prestige beauty retailer over Ulta. Sephora has done a lot in the last decade. Obviously as they got bigger they had more money to expand, more money to reinvest, and that went to so many different areas of the business that we could be looking at. But what I really want to zoom in is in these digital and media efforts because I believe it's that that gave them so much power over the last decade. So many of the topics from part one which were more rooted in international expansions and changes in the business in terms of ownership, which we won't look at as much in this episode. This is primarily because, like I said, I do think the digital and media innovation is the core of the business story here and I do think it's the core of beauty's growth over the past decade at large, even outside Sephora. So today we're talking about Sephora and influencers. So without further ado, let's get stuck into part one. So part one, let's call it like the digital revolution. As we spoke about briefly in episode one, Sephora was extremely early to embrace new innovations. They launched their own website in the 90s, they launched an app in the early 2010s, and then they had this color IQ technology in 2013 to help match people perfectly to their complexion products and really that's probably the main takeaway from the first episode. That willingness to experiment is the main thread connecting their success story. But the mid 2010s is where those early bets really started paying dividends as we entered peak Internet culture. And we get to set the scene with insight directly from one of Sephora's leaders. At this time in 2016, Bridget Dolan, the Vice President of innovation at Sephora, gave a presentation at the WWD Digital Beauty Forum. I'll link it for you on Substack because it really is an interesting watch. But Bridget gave this talk about how exactly Sephora was gaining market share of the global beauty retailing space so quickly. Like, how are they doing it? And how on the nose is that as a topic? So if you're able to lock into the fact that this is from 2016, it's really interesting because you can hear how the company was trying to take more and more calculated risks in attempts to become a cultural leader rather than a trend chaser. But if you can't clock into the fact that the year is 2016 when this is recorded, it can be a hard listen, because so much of what Bridget says is quite obvious in our present, which of course was her future. And all the signals that she references are totally accurate of the years that followed, to the point that they almost again seem obvious. But Bridget states that Sephora's innovation philosophy is think big, take risks, test fast, iterate quickly and do it cheaply. And on one hand you can really see that in their decisions. Like even the fact they decided in 1998, when they opened up operations in the US to be headquartered in San Francisco. They really immersed themselves in the tech scene.
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So our mantra in the Innovation Lab is to think big, take risks, test fast and rapidly, iterate. It's a small team, and starting scrappy, we all got to start scrappy. And the reality is, if the entire fate of the company's innovation rested on me and my tiny team, my days would be a little bit more stressful. It can't all squarely fall on me to innovate the entire company. We really are hiring innovative people and we are bringing them along this journey.
- [10:13]
A
Bridget refers to the fact that Sephora in this time period was working with the big tech giants, the Googles, the apples, the YouTubes, all very closely, but as well as early stage startups, often even pre commercialization. And how that very proximity of being in the Bay Area gave Sephora so many advantages that helped them become a key digital player, a strategy that in 2026. I feel like so few beauty brands and retailers are still yet to adopt.
- [10:42]
B
We also really get in the kitchen with innovators large. So we're talking to the Googles and the apples and the YouTubes and making sure that we are first to market on all the crazy things that they're cooking up. And then we're also, because we're in the Bay Area, so lucky that we get to speak with all of these little teeny startups and see every different technology that's out there and really evaluate which ones make sense. And then to that end, we are testing a lot of these crazy technologies. And I have the distinct pleasure of really learning all the things about digital and then being able to bring them into store and into mobile. Mobile and really considering how all of these create one journey for our client. This moment in time is such that we know stuff and other people don't. But soon this is just what marketing is going to be. This is just what experience is going to be. And we are just the pioneers and we are the ones bringing everyone along.
- [11:34]
A
So in 2015, Sephora formally opened their innovation lab in San Francisco's Dogpatch district. It was a dedicated space where executives from marketing to product development and technology could all collaborate and test these emerging, emerging technologies. What the lab actually was was a complete model of a physical store purely for experimentation, which is incredibly cool. And I can't imagine anyone else having that amount of money to even invest in something like that. What's interesting and should be unsurprising if we think of Sephora as like a tech company rather than a beauty company, is how many of these tests during this period didn't ship. But the fact that that was intentional and it's easy for that to feel like startup buzz because Remember in the mid-2010s, this is a multibillion dollar retailer willing to test fail fast and in service of finding what worked. And something that Bridget said in her presentation, which feels obvious in 2026, but was pretty bizarre in 2016, was that customers don't buy products, they buy content. Of course, we had Instagram and YouTube really thriving in the beauty space at this point, but she said that when you go to the product page, you can see a video, read an article, and see hundreds of photos of real clients. Weari I totally feel like I just tried it on because I have so much content. This idea of content emerging with commerce and e commerce was the core of her entire presentation and the core of what Sephora was publishing a lot about in this Time, which we can really see in where they were investing their money. But where this gets a little bit weird is how Sephora also partnered with this company called Modiface, an augmented reality technology firm. And they'd been working with this company for nearly a decade before they actually had their first successful product which was called the Virtual Artist which launched in 2016. This was an AR powered tool which allowed customers to try on thousands of makeup products like lipsticks, eyeshadows, false lashes, blushes right from their phones. And I feel passionately about these try on product innovation things that were plaguing my social media. Maybe not 2016, but late 2010s, early 2000s. I feel passionately that they suck and they are utterly useless. And honestly I thank the AI bubble for killing the VR bubble. But the fact remains that the Virtual Artists had seen over 200 million shades tried on and 8.5 million visits to the feature. And with numbers like that, it's no surprise that Sephora doubled down. They launched complementary AR tools like Color IQ scanning skin to assign unique color numbers, matching foundations and concealer Skincare IQ a quiz providing personalized skincare recommendations. Recommendations I made one of those in my first semester of cs. And then the Skincare IQ launch which is particularly strategic. Sephora identified skincare has a major growth category and through this tool skincare sales eventually surpassed makeup sales. I feel like we are stuck in a loop with beauty tech, particularly hard tech hardware. I should say with stuff like this where Skincare IQ launch I would bet so much on the fact had nothing to do with the uplift in skincare sales. It was more the fact that we went into Covid. But I feel like these retailers just want to validate the amount that they are spending on hard tech. But anyway, by 2022 e commerce net sales had grown from 580 million in 2016 to over 3 billion. A 4x increase of online sales over 6 years which again they credit to these digital innovations. But personally I think it's all bs. The last thing I want to talk about in Sephora's digital push outside of influencers is their chatbots. In 2016, Sephora became the first major retailer to chatbot which they launched inside Kik, the Canadian messaging app popular with us. And I can also testify also Aussie teens to reach younger demographics. Mary Beth Lawnton, who is the senior VP of digital marketing, revealed that once a Kik user starts a conversation with their Sephora bot, they're engaging deeply, averaging 10 messages a day. How crazy is that? It's like chatgpt before chatgpt but beauty version the bot offered makeup tips, how to videos, reviews and product recommendations. And customers could even purchase direct directly within the Kik app. What I want to call out is another contradiction. How would I perceive to be a contradiction? Because of course those are impressive stats. But I thought we had all really agreed post Pandemic that beauty's power in its experience is how it's deeply human. So it's interesting to see how pre Pandemic, what was this 2016 they launched this chatbot thing, how hard beauty was pulling itself towards the tech world, towards the social media world. When I've been talking to users in unfiltered user research, for instance, and I have found time and time again the only product recommendations that people really trust are from people in their real lives. Your family and your friends. This isn't to say they are discovering products directly from people in their real lives, but those are the people that are affirming whether or not is a good or good product. They're the only people they will really trust. For a testament towards efficacy, maybe these chatbots help discovery because that I can believe. I just don't believe that you are purchasing something purely because an AI or a chat told you to. AI or chat is a replacement for search. Absolutely. Comparing alternatives to find discounts, but nothing fundamental like what do I need type questioning. I don't think you're taking that to a girlfriend over you're taking that to a to a chat model. But there is a truth in the personalization thing. Because what I've again found in unfiltered research is that when I spoke to a bunch of teenagers, they would discover a product on TikTok, they would immediately assume that that creator had been comped in some way that either been sent the product or they were being paid. So instead they went to the comments and then once they got to the comments where they understood these to be real people, unincentivized reviews and comments on the products, they would begin this vetting process of trying to find people that actually looked and lived like them. Like there was one girl that I spoke to who had chronic skin picking. So she was really on the hunt for someone that experienced skin sensitivity. So it's interesting with that insight to think about how social media was being used so much more literally in the 2010s because we didn't have that media literacy. We didn't have teenagers that were so well trained and understood of the PR dynamics and the marketing dynamics of the industry that people like myself have now made content about online and kind of democratized how these industries work. So that media literacy piece is really fundamentally changing the landscape that these chat models could ever have made sense in. If you really think about it, media has been the backbone and the driving force behind beauty's power. In the last 10 to 20 years. We've not really seen that many revolutions in manufacturing and brands aren't producing drastically different products now than they used to. Of course, There was the D2C boom and changes in how we actually buy from brands, but that has really been spearheaded by social media and Sephora keeping up with that change in media as well as the change in like E commerce, which I feel like those two areas could fall under one umbrella term, but the word is not coming to me. But alas, they had that clunky website which we spoke about in episode one, but they also had this understanding of the role of celebrity in the 90s. And possibly my very favorite thing about beauty is how it's this conduit for culture. I'm always using the example of how you could rarely wear the same top or jacket as Kylie Jenner, but you can wear the same blush. And I think it's exactly for that reason that we see it trend so well on social media. But my point for mentioning this in the context of Sephora is that we kind of experience the celebrities and then bloggers and then influencers pipeline at fashion weeks first, and then we always see it trickle down from luxury and into the broader fashion and beauty. But it's interesting when you think about Sephora and LVMH and how LVMH is primarily luxury and they're primarily hosting those same fashion week events. So what Sephora did was they quite intentionally shrunk the time between something being cool and new at Fashion Week in the luxury space and getting it to beauty. So in 2002, ish, they launched Sephora Collection. And by 2009, Sephora made its first major influencer move by launching a makeup collection with a beauty YouTuber Lauren Luke, who had around 300,000 subscribers at the time. 2009 to paint a picture was the year Dolce and Gabbana made headlines for filling their front row with fashion bloggers and even equipping them with laptops, pushing buyers from major retailers like Neiman Marcus to the second row. That all started a war. But Sephora moved with the zeitgeist quite organically by beginning to work with beauty YouTubers right at the time that we were seeing this in the luxury fashion Space. That's my point. And most of these efforts were organic, although I doubt the differentiation of organic and paid had been quite established yet. I don't know if we had the terminology for the unacquainted. Organic is considered anything where the talent is not directly compensated via cash. Eg, they are sent the product and they post it organically on the socials versus them being paid to post about it on their socials. But to better situate you with how insanely early this was for influencer collaborations, this Lauren Luke Sephora Collection collab. Have a listen to Lauren's announcement video on YouTube to get an idea.
- [21:14]
C
Hi, everyone. This is going to be a sneaky peek. Look what I've got. It's a Sephora key. We're going to go and open the door and have a little sneak peek around the whole store and see if we spot the end cap, which my makeup's going to be on. Okay, let's go. I'm in the middle of Times Square. I'm going to walk you around and show you.
- [21:32]
A
I will have you know that the background noise that you can hear in that clip is directly reflective of the camera quality. It's pixelated as can be. And it's literally, literally just handicam footage of Lauren walking around Times Square and trying to open the Sephora door. Barely any cuts, a couple of zooms. But like on the camera with buttons, there was nothing done in post.
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C
Couldn't even get the key in the door. I'm so nervous. My hands are shaking.
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A
Wow.
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C
I feel so privileged to be here. But they're coming here. I assure you, anybody gets in, this is just absolutely fantastic.
- [22:11]
A
I feel quite sick. This clip. My God, I love the Internet. I have linked the full video on substack because it actually, it makes my heart sing. It is just. I forgot what the early days of influencing were like. I feel like every other day influencers get online and they tell you that you can't create content to get views or get money. And you just have to love the act of making videos, which feels like a crock of shit in 2026 when it is such a fully fledged and understood business. Like, this isn't a new space anymore. But this clip of Lauren just reminded me of the rudimentary. Is that the right word? The rudimentary beginnings of influencing. She's just so bloody excited to be there and she just loves it. But anyway, I couldn't actually find any documentation or reports on the performance of this collaboration. There was actually very little about it. Whatsoever other than what was posted by Lauren on her own channels. And something else is that she's by no means a huge macro influencer now. She's not drastically blown up, she's still around, she's still present. But Sephora were really on the forefront of this idea of community and tapping into people's audiences. And it's from this point in the early 2010s that they start sending YouTubers and eventually Instagram influencers product gifts and event invitations. Again, there is sadly not a lot I could find surrounding this decision or strategy, but I feel like we have enough evidence to assume that Sephora really did have a culture of just jumping on things and seeing if it stuck. I also wish we had present day media coverage on these brands and companies because I'm conscious that I'm making this story sound like every decision they made was not only like the right one, but was super genius in some way. Like it just because we're getting a highlight reel. By seeing all the things that worked, I'm sure they failed as many times as they succeeded. For instance, if I had to place a bet on the performance of that first influencer collaboration with Lauren, I would guess that it absolutely flopped. But what actually happened during this time, which I think is is really worth noting, is how they were sending influencers product at the same time as the birth of the infamous whole videos. Product reviews and tutorials were around also and they really came into power into influence in the mid-2010s. But the start was this real whole flexing of having stuff. It was like a marketer's dream because Sephora was being associated with this desire of flexing how much you bought, even more so than whether or not those products were any good or efficacious in any way. We learned how to do our makeup in the mid 2010s, but it was really the early 2010s where people were getting online and it was about having the latest and the greatest and like multiples of everything. People would do bronzer collections, people would come home from the mall and purely just show you what they bought while they were there. Not even their opinions about such thing, not even like the first impressions. But the content was about what I got at Sephora, what I bought at Sephora. Sephora was the destination. And in fact, actually just a couple days ago, on February 2, Claudia Saluski, an OG YouTuber turned celebrity, she's now very famously engaged to Phineas O', Connell, Billie Eilish's brother. Although Claudia is incredibly successful in her own right as both a creator and then a couple years ago she launched this brand, Cycla. They're a body care brand and on February 2nd it was announced that they'll be launching into Sephora in the US and Claudia made a compilation of her old YouTube videos. Talking about Sephora. Start with Sephora and we also went to Sephora. Sephora. We're going to Sephora from Sephora. Next up I went went to Sephora from Sephora AKA my favorite and only makeup store that I ever. All these clips are such a great example of this early YouTube type content where the retailer was the destination. This is of course during the peak mall era where shopping was an event and it really made the retailer front and center over the brands. Which is such an interesting flip of where we're at today, where in 2026 it feels like you go into Sephora to buy X brand rather than visit Sephora simply because it's Sephora. This whole mentality, this kind of flex culture, although we didn't see it as problematic yet, we weren't really criticizing it yet. It was very, again, all of this is with hindsight, like very new money vibes, very Kardashian esque, very early Instagram, but it was just a total different dynamic. Sephora being early to position themselves as a destination really capitalized on that. So they were kind of quite quickly exposed to the impact and power of influencers. We then get to the mid-2010s and we're jumping forward a good amount of time now post the whole type content. We start to get still a lot of long form video because YouTube was primarily the platform, but it became a lot of tutorials which algorithmically this made a lot of sense because how you would grow as a creator and get discovered by new audiences was really through search. It was very rudimentary SEO where people would search things like beginner eyebrow tutorials or how to do a smokey eye. And that was how you grew as a creator. As opposed to the homepage on YouTube where it was just those nine squares or to this day is just those nine squares. Although now you'll get served stuff from new audiences. It used to just really be the latest content from creators you already subscribe to. That's why subscribers was so significant, because that was really someone stepping into your community. But how you reached new people and were discoverable was through these tutorials. It was through search. And these tutorials meant that the general population, the beauty guru population that was forming was getting really damn good at Makeup on a technical level. This was what introduced a whole new appetite for talking about products at a granular level and almost like a scientific manner because it became about color payoff and pigmentation and fallout and longevity and hydration and like brush bristle density and so on. It was, it was this moment that, that the hype around Sephora as a destination starts to wane and the retailer focus really starts to shift towards brands and towards products. Of course we also have to footnote that 2016 is really this point where we have the entrant of the lifestyle brand. The the D to C movement is a whole other conversation. So what Sephora does at this point in time with this product obsessed Internet culture and phase, they start to launch influencer founded brands onto shelves and launch a formal Sephora Collection ambassador program. So influencers Mariana Hewitt and Lauren Gore's Ireland launch Summer Fridays. With the support of Sephora, they launched with a singular skew, the Jet Lag mask which became the number two best selling face mask at Sephora within a week. And honestly, it's a damn good product. I use it nearly every day. So it's not like the success was baseless, but it was meticulously timed by the world's most powerful retailer. And so it's this point in which they go from understanding that they need to test with creators to really investing in creators slash influencers. So part three is all around Sephora ambassadors. And so Sephora started working with creators in this ongoing ambassador ship type capacity when they went to reinvent and rebrand their Sephora collection. And this reinvention is truly carved into my brain because their front runner was none other than Ms. Olivia Jade. And before I rant to you about the significance of Olivia Jade being the face of Sephora Collection, let's look at why Sephora rebranded their Sephora collection and why did they do it in conjunction with the launch of this ambassador program? So Sephora Collection had existed since 1998. It launched right when they entered the US which is interesting. We spoke about it more in episode one, but it never really had this clear identity. Deborah Yay. Sephora's SVP of marketing and brand told Glossy that the brand didn't have a clear enough point of view, which prompted this overhaul around 2016. They then launched a at Sephora Collection Instagram account, the hashtag Beauty Uncomplicated campaign. They partnered with collectively an influencer network to have beauty experts try select products and then spread the message of Beauty Uncomplicated. They were trying to build the brand beyond something you would stumble across when you go into Sephora and into something you would actually seek out and buy from. The beauty uncomplicated thing is also very indicative of the time where you had like Kim Kardashian with her KKW contouring ones where everyone was trying to sell you that you could get this full beat and perfect glam that you were seeing a lot on on social media but in less steps and with less less effort. Up until this point the brand had worked with influencers on short term and intermittent basis, usually highlighting one specific campaign or product launch. Very typical of influencer marketing work. But they then brought in this company, Style Hall, a content marketing agency to help build out a tiered system. They wanted in house makeup artists, a core group of ambassadors and a wider pool of micro influencers to try and extend the reach of brand and into the culture, so to speak. So 2017 it started with just four ambassadors who I could not for the life of me actually find the names of. And then 2018 they expanded to 10ambassadors which included none other than Ms. Olivia Jade. And when I tell you I was a loyal Olivia Jade watcher, I really need you to believe me because because her life events feel like my personal life events. They are so ingrained into my life. But if you are unfamiliar with this diva Olivia Jade on YouTube or legally Olivia Jade Giannulli is an American YouTuber and daughter of fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli and actress Lori Loughlin. It's usually her mother that people know because I think she was Aunt Becky or Rebecca Donaldson on Fuller House, which means means nothing to me. But her dad started Mossimo Clothing which in Australia was being sold at Target. I might still be sold at Target, but I swear I remember in primary school every man and their dog wearing one of their like hoodies or shirts. But anyway, this family is much better known for their infamous college scandal where Ms. Olivia Jade, my beloved YouTube girly who would do these extremely entertaining Christmas haul videos where she would show you everything she was gifted from family only after like a five minute disclaimer about how she was super grateful and recognizes she's really privileged. And it was luxury bag after luxury bag after luxury bag. Zero hate. It was deeply entertaining. But that Olivia was made by her parents to pose on a rowing machine as they then paid off the rowing coach at UCLA US$500,000 to falsely designate her and her sister as crew recruits to get her into the school. All of this happened while she was the face of Sephora Collection it is. Is brilliant. There has been Netflix shows made about it now, but it just did not do this time in pop culture justice. I've been wanting to talk about it for years because, again, as a loyal Olivia Jade viewer, I can testify she hated school. Like, that was a common thread of her YouTube videos. She would vlog her days at high school and come home and go to town about how much she hated it. She couldn't wait to just be an influencer. But her parents were forcing her to go to uni. Oh. Anyway, obviously, when all of this scandal happened, Sephora dropped their contract with her and they published a statement that they don't, don't support this. Obviously, Olivia's parents, you know, got a slap on the wrist with a fine and a handful of months in jail. But the best part is that you would assume her career is over, right? You would assume that she's going to lay low for the rest of her life. But no, six months later, she goes on Red Table Talk, the talk show that was hosted by the three generations of the Smith women. I don't actually think it's still around, but it was Jada Pickett Smith and her daughter Willow, and then her mother, Adrian. Olivia goes on, and she basically says nothing. But then Jada is like, you're going to be fine. Though Olivia just doesn't believe her because obviously the Internet was in very rightfully in an uproar. But I so vividly remember watching this episode and recognizing this coded language Jada was using, as if, like, you know, darling, you are filthy rich, white, gorgeous. You're gonna be fine. Anyway, fast forward to today. Olivia is essentially right where she left off. Creating videos on YouTube and working with brands. And she's dating none other than fucking Jacob Elordi, of all people. Like, arguably the biggest heartthrob in all of Hollywood. And she does these interviews where no one is allowed to mention her boyfriend and no one is allowed to mention the call of scandal. I find it deeply hilarious. I just. I had to give you that sidebar, that pop culture sidebar. But she was the face of this Sephora collection ambassador program and clusterfuck, and let the record show that she definitely had, like, under a million subscribers at the time, and I want to say more like half a million, but even that feels really high. Sadly, I could not find a way to confirm that number. But alas, the ambassadors were regularly invited to Sephora's corporate headquarters for tours and information sessions and the opportunities to brain Tom with a product development team. Whether or not that Eventuated into anything. Olivia came out with a highlighter palette. I remember that much. But this was kind of the first with its time outside of just like influencer trips. Like, you know, we've all seen them, the tarts, the nas of it all, where they would go on these luxury holidays and talk about the brand. This was kind of the idea of taking creators into a brand, but the criteria of how they picked who these people were and who these creators were was supposedly quite specific. It focused primarily on millennials or people who had audience who were primarily millennials and they were beginning to play with beauty and supposedly the style hall edge that content agency was in. The data is they were able to make measure cross channel whether someone's expertise was in a certain segment. So it really helps Sephora ensure that their reach was spread across different consumer profiles, which is interesting in 2026 as data is the new currency. But that said, the early program was never really about massive numbers. It was a learning exercise, another theme of Sephora. So you had makeup artists and Olivia Jades as the official ambassadors, but it was this massive kind of micro influencer reach that, that third tier of the structure that this agency supposedly constructed for them that was most interesting because it wasn't the final evolution of their ambassador program either. This laid the foundation of what went on to become the Sephora squad, because what they learned was that what this ambassador, 10 people type thing and a bunch of micros was doing was there was no community element, there was no application process. And again, that typical branded way of working with influencers, where you find the talent that you love, you reach out to them and negotiate rates. And it didn't really have a way of regular beauty lovers to get involved. And the Olivia jade situation in 2019 probably didn't help their confidence in picking a big name and hoping for their best either. So in February 2019, they announced hashtag Sephora Squad. The squad was basically Sephora, saying that the old model was too narrow, too transactional, and doesn't really reflect who actually buys beauty. Deborah Yeh told Glossy, and I quote that we see see social behaviors constantly evolving. And in order to stay relevant, we felt it was time to take influencer relationships to the next level. We wanted to amplify the beauty community in a larger way and expand the number of voices and perspectives we're using in our work. The changes were significant because instead of Sephora picking people, they opened it up. The brand held a contest that in the first year drew 16,000 applicants, where they asked creators to get testimonials from their social media following to basically advocate for how this person should be a part of the Sephora Squad. It was a marketing effort in itself, but in that first year they received 250,000 testimonials, which is a pretty wild twist on crowdsourcing. But they partnered with influencer platform FOA F O H R to manage this at scale. Participants gave their social audiences calls to action to foster a new two way dialogue so that Sephora could pass follow accounts or conversion data and try and get people that had, you know, engagement. That's been the buzzword for five. But from May 2020 to May 2021, Sephora Squad members saw 18 increase in follower size on Instagram, a 15% increase in total growth on YouTube, and the TikTok Squad's combine follower count increased by more than 93%. You'll notice how so much of this coverage is like creators first. We'll get into why Sephora did this in a second. But when reading about Sephora Squad, it's so interesting the PR angle of it all where it's about about like what Sephora does for its creators and it's like, well no, the creators are in service of you. But anyway, the bigger story was the organic ripple effect beyond the squad members themselves. So according to Tracker data, since the beginning of 2021 there were 1650 Instagram posts mentioning Sephora Squad from influencers alone, compared to just 275 with the hashtag for alters equivalent program. Tracker's VP of Marketing put it bluntly where she said that the Sephora Squad just garners a huge amount of organic activity that goes well beyond the squad members themselves. It's really this ripple effect where a few dozen individuals are able to create this groundswell of activities throughout the year, which you don't see with Sephora. Again, it's like the marketing of even just the Sephora Squad application process. Like I've seen so many creators throughout the years jump online as they're trying to get their communities to advocate for them. It becomes this huge marketing effort around Sephora combined with this press language of like we're so creators first. It's just fascinating. It's just fascinating. But the program kept snowballing year after year. So they grew up from 27 individuals in 2019 up to 72 in just three years. So what Sephora Squad enabled for the retailer themselves is really content at scale for almost nothing. Sephora Squad members supposedly put produce 6,000 plus pieces of original content per year according to Marketing Scoop and this is across tutorials, unboxings, reviews, hauls. And for a retailer, that's an enormous content library and that was all created by creators themselves. Sephora then gets to repurpose this content across their own channel. The real win of the Sephora Squad activity is in the usage rights. I could not find official documentation about what those usage rights actually are. But if you've worked in marketing in or in beauty or in fashion, you'll be well aware that it's the usage in content that's actually the doozy. It's not how long it takes for someone to create the content, but the cost that they decide to associate with their face being used across channels. For instance, like a 20 second TikTok with Sephora collection, you could charge like 1K, but if that clip is going in the window of a store or on a website, that number is going to 3 to 10x. And what happens as social media has evolved is that firstly it's so much more about quantity as much as it is quality now. So having 6,000 pieces of creative to work with across different people and different professional creators, might I add is fascinating. And this is the idea of User Generated content or ugc, where brands pay people who are not necessarily notable in any way. This is like a new take on the micro influencer thing that would have been the target of that lower tier of the original Sephora Ambassador program. But UGC is where these retailers and brands need so much content to circulate on organic or even in paid assets to just circulate enough faces to build up the brand online that it's so much cheaper for them to do this via creators and you know, give them the Sephora experience than produce that amount of volume in house or through agencies. It would cost a fraction producing it internally. Although again I could not find anything publicly disclosed about the usage agreements. I imagine there is a clause where they have to let Sephora use something for some amount even if it's just on social. I'm not sure, but the program has been credited by the company to drive a direct purchase intent lift. So in a 2021 earnings call, Sephora CEO revealed that the company's influencer marketing efforts drove a 63% lift lift in conversion intent and a 48% lift in brand awareness. Brand awareness is kind of eh, but purchase intent is kind of this metric closest to actual sales, so it's less of a vanity metric. And it's people saying I'm actually going to buy this, which is really interesting. So lefty actually tracked this and also cited in 2023, that Sephora's strategic collaborations with micro and macro influences led to a 1013 increase in ROI on a TikTok campaign, Campaign for Sephora collection specifically. And that is so far from an industry average. That is only one campaign, but it was tracked through the lefty platform with real attribution data. So this creator program is really interesting. I'd only ever really rolled my eyes at it before. I'd never really dug my teeth into it. I didn't really get the point. I don't really find it all that engaging, personally, in terms of like someone being, you know, in the Sephora squad. I just then kind of trust that creator a little bit less because I'm like, okay, now you're entirely compromised. But that's not really fair. It's just a different take on hashtag ad, which was the second episode I ever did of this podcast, which is the evolution of ad. And I would way rather someone be in the Sephora squad than, you know, go on a brand trip where. Now I don't really trust anything you say about that brand now because there's that gray area of are you just saying something polite in hopes of copying an invite? So I shouldn't complain about someone being in the Sephora squad because it is so much better. Better than other alternatives. It is just influencer marketing is really interesting and I think the way that has changed and Sephora has kept up with that in kind of creating these new dynamics of how to work with creators, these new models around usage, around repurposing, around ugc. It's really fascinating because it's, it is a UGC program, but at the Sephora scale, where they're working with creators with like 10 to 80k followers, which for, you know, so many other brands that that's, that's their big creators, that's their big gets. I think stories of companies this large, this huge, particularly when they're backed by the LVMHs of the world, can make them quite boring stories to listen to. I am a much bigger fan of the underdog story or a rivalry rather than a company that's just been number one in so many markets for so long and continues to gain space on pretty much much all the competition. But the reason I tell it is because of how much Sephora's success can be attributed to jumping on things early. I think I mentioned in the first episode about Sephora that I thought them moving to San Francisco and having their American headquarters there was kind of random, but I think it's obvious to me now that they're running this retailer as a tech company over a beauty company. And I cringe at me even saying that out loud because what in the court probably it, but there are so many signals of how this company approaches innovation that actually cannot be found in any other beauty company of this scale. So that's why I think it's worth listening to. I hope you got something out of it. That's all for today's episode. Thank you so much for coming back after such an insane amount of time off. I have said it once and I'll say it again, that I am incredibly proud of this show. So as the format does change a little bit towards becoming more chatty and more conversational in an effort to actually be able to get these episodes out to you bi weekly, I do want to promise that they will still always be rooted in pretty deep research because that's how we got here in the first place. That is what I felt like was missing in beauty media. An audio show that was entertaining, but also not just people talking about recent marketing happenings off the cloud cuff. I don't even hate those shows, there's just a lot of them. So if you do enjoy this format, you do enjoy the effort we go to with all the research. Pretty please do leave us a follow rate the show wherever you're listening. Huge shout out to Kelsey, our wonderful producer, who is able to warp my yapping into something kind of cool and worth listening to. I can actually promise that I'll see you back here in two weeks because I've already recorded that episode. How about that adhd. But we are back publishing every other Wednesday and on the Wednesdays that we're not live here, you'll receive a piece of analysis over on Substack, so be sure to head to bareface.substack.com to subscribe there and get all the industry juice and data and analysis you can't find anywhere else delivered right to your inbox. So see you next time.