Indie Brands vs Celebrity Brands

Is there any chance of survival?

It’s a celebrities D2C world, and indie brands are just dying in it. Let’s be honest.

Every second day I open Instagram to see one of two things: another celebrity has launched a brand. Another indie brand has closed its doors.

Let me preface this article by saying I don’t think celebrities shouldn’t start brands — they’re just as entitled as the rest of us.

What I want to point out is that it’s becoming increasingly hard for indie brands to compete with these celebrities, by sheer way of numbers.

How can Fluff’s 44,000 followers on IG compete with Hailey Bieber’s 52,500,000? Or Selena Gomez’s 426,000,000? How can Bread Beauty’s 60,000 followers compete with Beyonce’s 318,000,000? or Rhiannon’s 151,000,000?

10 years ago celebrities were only seen as the face of brands, or specifically, campaigns. They could support the founders and products they cared about. Now, they’re running the show (or are the face of running the show) of products and messages that seem to bare no uniqueness or integrity — despite how rare they claim to be. Even when they’re advocating for mental health, at the same time they’re advocating for customers to eliminate under eye bags and cover up blemishes, because they’re obviously… imperfect. The contradictions are wild.

I get it, why be paid a fraction of revenue for one campaign when you can have it all? Celebrities want their cake and to eat it too. Maybe they’ve earned it.

I think Rhode are doing a good job (at brand) — they know what works.

I think Fenty changed the game for beauty and lingerie. I don’t know if Beyonce or Rhiannon had to go into hair — and I’m curious if it was their suggestion, or their manager’s or a VC incubator.

Aside from the loyal, original fans, I can’t see how indie beauty products will be chosen by customers in retailers like Sephora alongside these celeb brands. How will they ever pull the foot traffic that retailers demand?

Maybe we have to adjust our expectations.

Perhaps gone are the days to reach Glossier like status. What indie brand can we say has done the same in the last five years, without a celebrity or influencer backing?

At Fluff, we’ve seen the needle move with mid-tier celebrity and influencer endorsements, but we quickly lose traction with these repeated audiences, particularly when said celebrities are posting about other brands (our contract is understandably not exclusive.)

We can’t afford the likes of the Kardashian family as an ambassador, nor do we think our values are aligned. So how do we gain access to a similar following of people?

We’ve seen some promising traction with organic content on platforms like Tik Tok, with our best performing video reaching 21+ million people. But did this convert? Let’s just say we wouldn’t be writing this piece if 21 million people bought Fluff.

So the next thing we can do is pay to play, and run ads (most celebrity brands still do).

But all this does is eat into our profits. It’s becoming increasingly more competitive and expensive to acquire a customer.

But scale will help us negotiate our minimum order quantities and unit costs, as well as our shipping rates, and packaging costs. The more we sell, the more we can buy, the cheaper it becomes (if we can maintain steady growth).

Steady, organic growth, from the likes of a celebrities’ following would allow us to reduce our paid spend and marketing efforts, especially if it meant that all I had to was record a 30 second lo-fi Tik Tok on my phone and watch the sales stream in.

TLDR: I’m not famous and nor do I want to be.

I believe founder stories are interesting and important to the success of a brand, in building consumer connection and differentiating one brand from the next, but I don’t believe that a founder should have to be in every piece of brand content. I think this is exhausting and unsustainable.

I guess this is the tradeoff — if I don’t want to be famous, I can’t expect to grow like celebrity brands.

I’ve sat in investor meetings and not been able to answer the question as to how I’ll bring in tens of thousands of customers through retailers doors, or how I’ll be able to consistently get millions of views on every reel, or hundreds of thousands of followers in a matter of days.

It’s taken Fluff 7 years to get to where we are today, with 45,000 followers on IG. It takes celebrities a night to post about their brand, and shift 3x as many followers over to said brand account.

And yet some of the brands I have resonated with the most have been ones without a celebrity or influencer connection. Ones that I can see myself in, and feel comfortable being myself in. When I’m not aspiring to be like the founder or someone else.

After all this, I’m still left with the question: who is going to buy all these beauty brands?

Is a celebrity brand going to outlive the celebrity themself? Or will it dissolve along with their lip fillers, as they age?

This is the hard thing about hard things.

I used to think the marketing campaign ‘support local’ was slightly contrived, but with each year in business I understand it a little more. Perhaps this could be revised to support indie, or support story, I don’t know. Spreading the wealth out, perhaps.

Fluff’s next drop is live on Tuesday July, 23rd, for 7 days. It’s your chance to support indie, and a message about beauty that I don’t think any other brand can claim:

It’s ok to feel more with makeup, so long as you don’t feel less without it.

If this article resonates, I’d love you to share it, or tell me what you think.