Beauty Barrage has a powerful track record for successfully helping brands grow at retail, counting greater than 300 ambassadors who support brand partners at stores including Sephora, Nordstrom and Ulta Beauty.

On the WWD Los Angeles Beauty event, Sonia Summers, chief executive officer and founding father of Beauty Barrage, joined Jayme Cyk, contributing beauty editor, WWD and Beauty Inc and cofounder of And Repeat, for a conversation about how successful brands are positioning themselves in stores today.

Acknowledging that the Los Angeles Beauty event was live and the way nice it was to be together, Summers said retail could be very much the identical ­— for consumers, with the ability to speak with people in person opens up recent experiences and recent ways to learn.

It’s an enormous pain point for brands who “work so hard to create beautiful brands” but once they achieve being placed in the shop the strategy falls short, said Summers. It’s not enough simply to get on the shelves, brands need to construct a budget and consider the way to support the brand at retail. “Even the retailers want you to do this,” she noted.

“You might have a brand and also you’re spending all this money on digital, and it is advisable to, in order that the brand comes alive on social, but then when a brand goes to retail it’s just sitting on the shelf,” she said. “The most important thing that works is when you’ve gotten someone constructing a signature experience at the shop. It’s not only that we’re doing events, it’s the way in which that you just interact with a consumer.”

Through Beauty Barrage’s ambassadors, consumers are learning the way to use products, key ingredients and the ethos of the brand. It’s this support throughout the retail stores that enables brands to search out success.

Something Summers said she speaks with brands about lots is knowing how a budget will allow them to successfully live in a store. Put simply, it shouldn’t be all the time the suitable answer for a brand to launch into every door of a retailer’s locations. As a substitute, Summers advised, it might be higher to begin small by entering a select variety of stores — supported by data — where the budget is in a position to support them.

“If you happen to don’t have the budget to enter all of those doors, I’d say take a really small approach as for 50 doors,” said Summers. “Then support the hell out of those doors and keep that brand alive on social and digital and grow from there.”

At the identical time, when working with brands, Beauty Barrage leverages the information to find out a focused approach in store. Data can be shared with the brand, allowing each parties to know sales and methods for a complete support solution in real time on the Beauty Barrage mobile app and portal.

Importantly, Summers believes in establishing and constructing relationships in every a part of the business. The philosophy is prolonged to the ambassadors who work for Beauty Barrage, who’re full-time employees, slightly than freelancers, which has grow to be in industry standard.

“For me, it’s providing real jobs that pay them well, opportunities to grow throughout the business,” said Summers. “So just as our company is super high touch with our accounts, because we love our accounts and our brand partners, we’re very much high touch with our own field team.”

This approach, she said, also gives Beauty Barrage’s ambassadors some “skin in the sport,” as they represent brands from a narrative perspective. The corporate’s education department supports its ambassadors, who’re all the time expanding their knowledge, slightly than learning a recent brand with each task.