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In 2021, celebrity Internet celebrities with goods to monetize is not a new thing, domestic Wei Ya, Li Jiaqi, the company behind the two want to sprint IPO. The United States has Jin Xiaomei and Rihanna, the former selling his beauty brand to instantly obtain billions of dollars of wealth, the latter did not release an album for 5 years, but with a net worth of 1.7 billion US dollars, he topped the global female singer wealth list in the latest issue of Forbes.
Yes, the famous 33-year-old singer Rihanna (Rihanna) answered another chart, the Global Women Artists Wealth Chart, and the only one who beat her was the famous host Oprah.
What's even more surprising is that the vast majority of that $1.7 billion has nothing to do with her dozens of record-breaking hits: About $1.4 billion comes from fenty beauty lipsticks, mascara, blush brushes and lingerie that Rihanna sells.
It is not uncommon for celebrities to stand on their own consumer goods brands. After all, it's a clearly profitable business. The founder of the star with his own influence can bring basic guarantee to the income of the brand, which is equivalent to a way of monetizing his influence, and the star who wants to start his own business can also get income from the "side business" of selling goods.
In the past decade, with the continuous growth of the "net red economy" and "celebrity effect", many popular stars have also been attracted to the business of their own new cosmetic brands such as lipstick and foundation liquid. In addition to Rihanna, Lady Gaga's makeup brand has also received investment from lightspeed ventures. But now it seems that the dark horse that has run the fastest in the past few years is fenty beauty.
In an era when celebrities and influencers are monetizing their own brands with goods, we want to know what kind of secret Rihanna has to create a ceiling for celebrity self-created makeup brands with annual sales of 550 million US dollars.
Rihanna and her family and friends celebrated her rise to the top of the Global Female Singers' Fortune Chart
Over the past few decades, Rihanna has become more widely known as a popular R&b singer in the United States, releasing dozens of hit songs and becoming a global hit. According to the data, in 2016, she made about $22.3 million in music alone.
As the popular fried chicken Rihanna, naturally can bring traffic protection to the initial development of fenty beauty, but relative to traffic, the brand story is the "first language" of the contemporary cosmetics world. Today's consumers want to buy brands that align with their values more than ever. Even for Rihanna, it's not easy for a new company to stand out in the highly competitive, multi-hundred-billion-dollar cosmetics market.
After the establishment of fenty beauty, the outside world has speculated about how this superstar with a strong personal style will shape his brand values.
At the fenty beauty brand launch in September 2017, the mystery was revealed. The most eye-catching, and most revealing rihanna's mind, was the foundation collection on display at the press conference. This series launched 40 color numbers in one go, completely breaking the traditional span of foundation product color numbers.
Because Rihanna wants her cosmetics to be "beauty for all." In the cosmetic world she created, people of all different skin tones have the right to become beautiful.
In fact, in the United States, cosmetics for people of color have been in short supply, and when fenty beauty did not come out, only some smaller brands launched a series of dark-tone foundations, but top retail stores or mainstream brands often have few choices.
The fenty beauty foundation released in 2017 has more color number options than any best-selling product Image source: pudding
At that time, Rihanna herself was fully grasped and enjoyed the trend of social media with goods. In order to create a voice for her products, she will specifically record beauty videos from a non-professional "user" perspective, and there is no star shelf at all.
Beauty blogger Rihanna Image source: youtube
In the end, the sales of this series of foundation liquid exceeded 100 million US dollars within 40 days of sale. That same year, Fenty Beauty was named the Best Invention of 2017 by Time magazine.
The success of Fenty Beauty has given Rihanna an unprecedented sense of accomplishment. Today, she has been running this brand for 4 years and has successfully turned her side business into her main business.
Admittedly, the success of fenty beauty must be accompanied by Rihanna's own efforts and talents, but in this case, we must not ignore the important role that stood behind Rihanna in the early days of the brand's founding - lvmh's beauty incubator kendo, whose mission is to "build and acquire a global beauty brand." ”
Kendo has solved rihanna's many of the challenges of building a brand, for example, by providing the network of channels needed to immediately launch fenty beauty globally. Lvmh called fenty beauty "the first global beauty product launch in history." With its help, Fenty Beauty was able to sell in nearly 2,000 stores in about 20 countries around the world at the same time, and without this partnership, Fenty Beauty's sales network would not have been built so quickly.
Counting a large number of new consumer brands that are quickly making a name for themselves in the market, it is not difficult to find that some of them are not short of "stepping stones" like kendo that can help solve some necessary "dirty work".
Because the wave of digitalization has mercilessly involved the consumer industry, whether cosmetics or other types of consumer goods, it is important to quickly and quickly establish new brands.
Signalfire's survey statistics show that with the expansion of social media, more than 50 million people around the world have profited from their podcasts, text, art stores and video streams, of which about 2 million people use it as a full-time job.
Whether it is a star or a kol in the vertical field, the entrepreneurial barriers are lower than ever, but once involved in the personal personality and content branding and monetization, it still requires a lot of work in detail, whether it is distribution, operation, payment or project management, these jobs are important and necessary, but it is easy to occupy the time and energy that stars and kols could have spent on creation.
That's why many new startups have emerged specifically to provide this group of people with the tools and services they need to act as "enablers" in the industry.
Among the new batch of "enablers", there are companies that provide small and beautiful services for a certain link or a certain vertical field, as well as companies that cover large categories and the whole process.
A company called Lifo is particularly noteworthy (there are many Chinese faces in Lifo's founding team), and they found that Chinese celebrities such as Wang Jiaer are almost "unimpeded" in their shift to personal brand creation and selling, and there are many e-commerce tools or payment platforms that can be leveraged, while most American celebrities and kols can find support when opening their own brands, which is far inferior to that of Chinese celebrities and kols.
Therefore, lifo hopes to fill this gap in the market and provide complete solutions from supply chain (procurement tools, quality management tools), website construction to customer management (marketing tools, logistics tools, etc.). In their own words, "enable influencers at scale."
It is reported that although it was founded not long ago, the company has successfully won customers in fashion beauty, household goods, pet supplies and other popular consumer areas.
A startup called Pietra focuses on helping customers connect to the supply chain, with a particular emphasis on being able to shop around in a network of suppliers. The company raised $15 million in Series A investment earlier this year
Pietra says its ultimate goal is to "find the best suppliers in the world and talk to suppliers about the lowest MOQ whenever possible, so as to help more people create their own brands." "Its Series A funding is led by the founders fund, with andreessen horowitz, tq ventures and abstract ventures participating.
At present, whether it is lifo or pietra, their fees will vary depending on the size of the customer's brand operation, and each order completed through these tools will charge a certain percentage of the fee.
There are also companies that want to solve the problem of celebrities and kol self-built brands going to the global market. In July, Glance, a subsidiary of the SoftBank-backed inmobi Group, said it had formed a joint venture with talent management collective artists network that would help celebrities and social media kols interested in entering global markets create and operate brands and earn income by taking partial ownership of the brand.
Of course, no matter how easy the tools and services offered by these companies are, celebrities and kols who choose self-built brands still need to face the fiercest competition. Creating your own brand with tools and platforms is just a good start.
As these "enablers" promise, what they can do is to allow celebrities and kols to focus more on product development and creation, rather than guaranteeing that you will succeed like Rihanna.
Rihanna has done exactly the above, she has been fully engaged in the development of the fashion industry in the past few years, and her social media accounts are almost all her own "business" figure, resisting the pressure of not producing a new album for 5 years - just hard work for her loyal fans, who are still in these fashion pictures, painstakingly searching for clues to the next new album.