Case Study: New Paths For Breaking Into Beauty

Few industries are as competitive as Health and Beauty, dominated by global brands with seemingly endless budgets and massive retail chains. Competing head-on is impossible. For new brands to be successful, they need a refined strategy that generates the passion that has dripped away for these large brands.

Passion is a tricky beast to tame. A great product inspires your customers and makes them want to shout out to the world. Many brands started with a passionate audience, but kept cutting corners to improve their margins until they extinguished even their most diehard followers. There will always be open doors for new brands to emerge and relight that fire.

DeRose Health was launched from Sandy DeRose’s obsession with skin and health. A passion so consuming that it drove her as far as a public library *audible gasp here* to dive deep and learn from every source of knowledge she could find. 

That is the first step of creating passion in others: Start by solving the needs of an audience of one.

As she satisfied her hunger for knowledge, Sandy started sharing that knowledge across her newsletter and self-help books. From there, it was a natural path towards experimenting with crystallizing her expertise into products. When you create a product that delivers tangible results, it sparks passion, especially when it comes to health and beauty. 

What great products don't do is provide the same margins as cheap knockoffs. DeRose Health shouldn’t compete on advertising spend. That is why they built their outreach strategy around performance marketing, where self-care high converting products perform better than copycat products for affiliates. Implementing the right infrastructure for scaling their performance marketing opened up its challenges.

When Ease Makes Things Harder

DeRose Health was built on Shopify, which provides the core features they need and the flexibility to add critical integrations. For some of these integrations, like Bold Commerce, the choice proved right and solved massive headaches for handling their subscriptions. On their performance marketing side, the solutions they found opened up new problems.

The first options they found in the Shopify App store for managing affiliate programs ended up having severe limitations. Those conveniently discovered solutions lacked basic features including postbacks, which are used for sending performance data directly to the affiliate's system. Without this capability, they were unable to work with many of their more exciting affiliate opportunities. 

It quickly became another distraction, pulling them away from focusing on helping customers. The search for the right performance marketing solution became a new priority. 

The Right Ingredients 

DeRose Health chose the Everflow platform after a short but rigorous scrutiny. They needed a platform for performance marketing and managing affiliates that would be easy to set up and integrate with their two existing solutions: Shopify and Bold Commerce. 

For the initial setup, the process was immensely straightforward thanks to onboarding training and support from Everflow's Customer Success team. After DeRose's team went through the full onboarding and training process, they were equipped to handle the process of growing up their performance marketing through affiliates. Everflow's integration into Shopify took only a few minutes, completing all of the tracking setup needed to launch on the new platform in just a few clicks.

The other key piece was an easy integration with Bold Commerce. BoldCommerce allows them to offer subscriptions for their products and automatically handle the processing and shipping. As subscriptions make up roughly 30% of DeRose's revenue, they knew this was a critical piece that had to be integrated into their performance marketing platform. 

Thanks to the easy setups and integration, DeRose was able to return to building up the affiliates needed for amplifying their passionate users.

Bringing Smart to Passion 

Creating something great is tough. Every distraction from what matters saps more of your attention, creating little holes in the experience. When a customer slips through these holes, the magic and affection gets shattered. Something as simple as choosing a platform that works without stress or hassle lets you focus, preventing those holes from ever opening up.

The key to breaking into Health and Beauty is creating passionate customers. That means crafting a level of product experience that makes customers spontaneously share their results whenever they get a chance, anywhere to anyone. By amplifying that passion, you propel your brand to be easily found when intrigued prospects start looking. 

Amplification by being smarter, rather than spending more, by leveraging performance marketing experts that benefit from being able to promote something great. A clear strategy of simplifying out the hard parts and stoking the fires through knowledge and experience. 

Choose solutions that don’t create distractions.

For DeRose Health, every new customer joins Sandy's dream of making the world happier with the way they look.