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00:00up next we have an explosive and intense workshop coming in hot we're going to be hearing from CEO
00:16of topicals alamide aloe please give her a round of applause as she comes hi everyone can you hear
00:27me okay okay so like they said my name is alamide aloe I'm the founder and CEO of topicals and we're
00:35a skincare brand that is transforming the way people feel about skin so I'm going to take you
00:39through a deck around brand marketing I think brand marketing is extremely important it's the
00:44reason why people care about your product because anyone can create a skincare product a hair care
00:49product a food item but really getting people to understand the brand and fall in love with the
00:54brand is how you really build a generational business before we start I'd love for people
01:00to be really interactive so can you yell out what you think a brand is a brand is you
01:09a brand is a service you provide someone
01:15differentiation it's a feeling so I think a lot of people have a lot of different definitions of what
01:26brand is and so I'll give you a little bit of a background about myself I went to UCLA and graduated
01:32in 2018 I was a pre-med student I thought I was going to go to medical school become a dermatologist
01:38I studied political science with a concentration in race ethnicity and politics and I also used
01:45to work at Shea Moisture which was a really really great experience on truly how you build a brand for
01:49an underserved community so my company topicals we are the fastest growing skincare brand at Sephora
01:56currently we sell one product every single minute this year so far and we've donated over $50,000 to
02:06different mental health organizations so the big question here is what is a brand so people yelled
02:14out a lot of different things that they thought a brand was but I believe a brand is a storytelling
02:18exercise that lives in the mind of your audience and takes the form of voice visuals function and social
02:26give back we're going to go through exactly what each one of those means but when I think of a brand I
02:32think of creating a world that your customer lives in so this customer should know what kind of lingo
02:38they should use to be in your brand world they should know what it looks like they should know why they're
02:43there they should also know why it matters and so when we break down a brand when we look at voice
02:51I like to liken that to the copy the tone of voice what kind of lingo does your customer have to know to
02:58be able to interact with this world when I think about topicals you know you're someone who has
03:02to be somewhat of a skin intellectual which is someone who really really understands skin science
03:07you maybe have a skin condition so you understand what hyperpigmentation is or you understand what
03:13eczema is you you have that lingo so you understand what we're talking about when we are you know have
03:19a brand marketing campaign when you see a product people have to have a language that they interact with
03:24your brand visuals is how it looks so you know when you go to walmart or yeah walmart you know the blue
03:34star the yellow star with the blue background you know that as soon as you walk into a store you see
03:38something mcdonald's if you walked down the street you would see the golden arches you know burger king
03:43you would see the king and so brand also is about how it looks how it shows up to people
03:49what colors they associate your brand with what fonts the next thing is function so function typically
03:57is what the product actually does so in our case it's about helping people you know get rid of dark
04:03spots or you know moisturize their dry skin if you have a food product that's feeding people if you have
04:09a hair care product it's about length retention i think function is usually takes the core of what
04:15people think about when they're starting a brand you think about i want to make the best product for
04:20you know 4c hair i want to make the best you know candy bar that everyone has ever seen and so function
04:27is important but it's only one of the things that make a brand i think the next is social give back i
04:33think we live in a time right now where people are really really looking to brands as kind of what we
04:39look to the government as right we think that the government is supposed to give us access to care give us
04:44access to financials give us access to different things that right now we don't we aren't getting
04:50and so we see a lot of brands now stepping into this social give back era where they're the ones you
04:54know donating to mental health organizations they're the ones providing access to health care because
04:59we're not getting that from you know the government or our jobs or from different other places that we
05:03think we should get it and the last thing is community which is a word that i feel like has been
05:08overused a ton but really what community means is who it's for you know once you have these
05:14arc these pillars you really start to build kind of the skeleton of what it means to have a brand
05:23so i'm going to take you through topicals and how i came up with the brand world that is topicals
05:29so i love to do things as a problem solution and so for us when we were thinking about skin discourse
05:35which is kind of the conversation around skin we saw that it was really defined by insecurity if you
05:41were someone who had a chronic skin condition let's say you had eczema or you had dark spots it was
05:46extremely embarrassing to have the condition you would usually hide under a ton of makeup for some
05:51people with eczema if you know the flare-up is all over your arm you're wearing long sleeve in the
05:55middle of the summer and so what we noticed is that a lot of people thought that their skin was a
06:00problem to be fixed and then we saw on the other side of the pendulum we saw a lot of people starting to
06:06embrace themselves and embrace their skin but almost in a way that was extremely preachy right
06:10people would say just love yourself don't worry about what anyone else has to say but i think
06:15everyone knows that that's impossible we live in a world where that is extremely visual and so having
06:20a skin condition whether on your face on your body even if people tell you to love yourself it's not
06:25just that easy to say to love yourself and so for us we really felt like skin conditions were either
06:30extremely cold and clinical think of a doctor's office or extremely preachy and almost activism
06:36in a way that felt exhausting and so for us we asked the question what if your skin was fun instead
06:43you know what if having a skin condition instead of being embarrassing instead of being something that
06:48you wanted to hide what if we took that and celebrated and made that extremely fun and so what we believe
06:54the response is is the brand topicals we're a brand that makes skin conditions look cool we make products
06:59that you're proud to pull out of your bag we don't take ourselves too seriously and we mix the rough
07:04with the smooth which we know in beauty everything is about being smooth clean perfect and we know
07:11having a skin condition sometimes can be extremely rough and hard
07:17i think it's really really important as you're thinking about your brand to understand the landscape
07:22and so this slide really does a great job of breaking down where skin conditions have been
07:27where they are now and where we want to take the industry so when you look at then you see that a
07:32lot of skin conditions were talked about in a way of shame so a lot of people saying things like i don't
07:38like talking about my skin or my skin is a problem to be fixed then we saw the pendulum swing to what we
07:45call skin positivity or skin warriors which is this exhausting thing of it doesn't matter what your skin
07:49looks like just love yourself which again it's extremely difficult when people are saying that to you
07:54because it almost belittles how you feel with having a skin condition and where we're going and what we
07:59believe is next is this idea of skin neutrality and anti-beauty this idea of it really be like that
08:05sometimes which basically just means that life just like your skin will be extremely messy and fluid
08:14and so i think it's extremely important when you're building your brand and really introducing it
08:19into the world to have a simple statement that people can hear and know exactly what your brand
08:24does and so reading this we say meet topicals our mission is to transform the way you feel about skin
08:31and we do that through effective science-backed products and mental health advocacy i'm going to
08:37break it down really quickly and hopefully in your own minds you're thinking about your brand and how you can
08:42put your brand in this kind of sentence and so it's really important to have a mission people need to
08:47know why you exist and i think your mission is something that's a little bit more higher arcing
08:51right it's not something that's extremely specific we say transforming the way you feel about skin
08:57that is a really really vague way to basically tell people that we want the industry to change the way
09:02they talk about skin conditions the way they treat people with skin conditions we want that to change
09:07right we want to see people who have full-blown acne be on the cover of vogue we want to see people who have
09:14eczema or psoriasis or other different skin conditions we want to see them represented on
09:18runways that's what we think about when we say transform the way people feel about skin we want
09:23to completely shift what has been known about skin conditions and beauty and the industry and we want
09:28to rewrite that narrative and i think it's really important to do this to through two things so one of
09:34them as i mentioned earlier is a function right effective science-backed products is how it works right
09:41what kind of products do we sell what is it that we're selling in general and again does the product
09:45work is it effective and the second half here is mental health advocacy which we've talked about
09:50as the social give back right we talked about people really caring about not just the function of
09:55your product but also why it matters
10:00i'm also going to break down our brand name and how we feel like that also kicked off this idea of the
10:07topicals brand world so the name topicals has both a functional and emotional definition again you'll
10:14see and hear me say this again everything is two pronged there's always a functional definition of
10:18something or a functional reason why something exists and then an emotional reason so for us
10:24the definition of topicals literally means applied directly to an area of the skin or a specialized
10:31product created for a targeted issue we wanted people immediately as they heard our brand name to know
10:36exactly what the product did right we wanted them to think of it kind of in a medical sense but we
10:42wanted people to know exactly when you heard topicals you could kind of get around the fact
10:45that it's probably for a skin condition or it's probably medicinal in a sense the second is we really
10:51wanted people to understand the emotional definition of topicals if someone says something is of priority
10:57it's it's a topic of conversation then you know that it's immediate temporal important significant
11:05and so we wanted to build our brand attributes around our name so we're a brand that sues you
11:10now via self-care we never wanted to promise to fix you we didn't want you to come to this brand
11:15world and think as soon as i experience topicals all of my problems are going to go away when you have
11:20a chronic skin condition you can't be cured so we'd be selling you a lie if we told you that as soon
11:25as you buy our products everything is going to go away instead we promise more about this journey and
11:30going along with you on your skin journey we're a brand that's tackling vital issues around skin
11:35shaming and representation and we have an attitude we're sassy spunky and provocative we're not like
11:41you know the brands of yesterday where you would go to the prescription and pick up a tube that is black
11:45and white our tubes are and our packaging is extremely full color in the same way you'd see a
11:50skincare brand that's for you know or a makeup brand that isn't for a skin condition we wanted a brand that
11:55was extremely online and reactive we believe that you can galvanize people online and really change
12:01what the industry looks like when you have community online and the last is that we really wanted to
12:06feel futuristic and fresh and we wanted to feel like it was for the next generation our promise we
12:13understood that mental health was extremely important for us as a brand because people with
12:17chronic skin conditions are two to six times more likely to experience depression and anxiety
12:22because of the misinformation of different skin conditions and also the alienation when you have
12:27a skin condition while maybe everyone else is using bath and body works and the very fun fragrance
12:32products you can't use those products you you're othered from that industry so we wanted to create a
12:37brand that felt like you could have a home where you belonged but it could still help with your skin
12:42conditions like i mentioned earlier we've donated over fifty thousand dollars to different mental health
12:47organizations and we continue to create resources and partner with different organizations actually
12:53on the ground here in nola yesterday we hosted all of the mental health therapists in the city
12:57for a lunch so they could meet each other and we also at our booth 2341 and beauty carnival
13:02we're passing out cards with contact information of mental health professionals in the city of new
13:06orleans we know a lot of people from new orleans are coming to the convention center we want to meet them
13:11with resources and so we always build things like that into our brand so that people really do
13:16see that we believe and care about mental health lastly i'm going to take you through one of our
13:22most successful launches that happened in january of this year ingrown hairs is a product in a category
13:28that people thought was really sleepy a lot of people like myself a lot of black women deal with ingrown
13:34hairs when you shave but it was a category that really hadn't seen any kind of innovation so we launched
13:40a product called high roller ingrown tonic and i'm going to take you through how basically everything
13:44i've laid out of a brand story and how you do brand marketing how it rolled out for us in a campaign
13:50so what's extremely important to us is product design so we think about the product not only as
13:55the function but how it shows up on someone's vanity how it shows up on instagram when they take a picture
14:01this particular product was super interesting because the name of the product
14:07inspired the whole campaign so the product actually comes in a roller ball which is a super
14:12effective way to apply this product versus maybe putting a tonic on a cotton swab and then having
14:18to apply it to your skin we had it in a roller ball that you were easily able to roll onto the area
14:24and so from that i came up with this idea of high roller high roller being linked to a casino and so
14:29we decided to build a brand world around that again who would think to connect ingrown hairs to casinos
14:35nobody but topicals but it was really really fun for this audience because if you're someone with ingrown
14:40hairs typically your experience with buying that product isn't fun at all and so we did some
14:45iterations of branding we looked at colors to also see what would pop really well with our current
14:50assortment what would pop on instagram i think it's really important to think about if you want
14:55people to do the marketing for you you need to make packaging that makes them want to take a picture
14:59of it and post it online we then took that idea of a casino and we took it to an experiential pop-up
15:07we did complex con at the end of last year which is similar to essence fest and we did a booth
15:11designed as a casino and then our packaging also connected to that and so we had our pr packages go
15:19out and it said welcome to fabulous skin city we did a lot of really fun coffee around ingrown hairs
15:27and then we also this video right here is from one of our ambassadors on tick tock who then took and
15:32unboxed the video and the video went viral of people asking where can i get that packaging what is
15:37that about and so again you want to create packaging and create experiences that can go viral
15:43so making sure your community really enjoys the packaging and the unboxing is super important
15:48on our social we had a rapper named smino who signed to motown records he was the first ever guy
15:55we've ever worked with and he was awesome a lot of men have always asked is topicals for them can
16:01they buy the product and by bringing a model like this into our fold not only did we get
16:06um a lot of visibility we also got a lot of men who you know maybe typically wouldn't buy the product
16:11i think social media is extremely important in making sure that the way you show up on these your
16:16timeline is cohesive and people understand what the product does as you can see from this product at
16:21the this shot at the bottom you can see that it's to be applied in that area and so we also made
16:27sure that our product packaging images really shown through on social media lastly we had content tie
16:33this all together so we did a dating show called find your high roller where we picked from our
16:37community and we basically did for valentine's day did a um dating show and it was really well
16:44received by the community again because ingrown hairs and this whole brand marketing and brand world
16:49typically isn't something that people with chronic skin conditions get to be a part of
16:52but we made it extremely fun so dating has nothing to do with ingrown hairs but because
16:58we wanted this to be really fun for our audience we built things outside of just product function
17:05this is the product tie roller that we launched and it has quickly become one of the best sellers
17:10at sephora the number one ingrown hair product at sephora currently and you can see that this
17:14is not just because the product works but because the storytelling really captured people's attention
17:20lastly here are some key takeaways that i have from my presentation i think a really big one is that
17:26good product is table stakes everyone thinks that if you have the most effective product you're gonna
17:31sell the most in units but really great storytelling is essential second one is that you don't have to
17:38be everything to everyone but you do have to be everything to one you need to deeply understand your
17:44customer and build around that customer build holistically number three is psychographics over
17:50demographics psychographics basically means um kind of the way people think about a product or a
17:56brand i think gone are the days of everyone just being clear black and white if you are this age
18:01you like to buy from this brand if you are you know live in this region of the country you like to buy
18:06from that brand really because of the internet all of us like a lot of different things that maybe don't
18:10fit our demographic or our age and so you really need to understand again the psyche of your customer
18:15versus just the demographics i have two last questions that i want to leave you with one is who does your
18:22customer become once they've experienced your brand world right if i'm a customer and i come into your
18:27brand world what has changed for me how do i see the world in a different way and my last question is
18:33if your brand was a movie would you watch it and if so why thank you
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