Hi! I'm Kieran, founder of National Beauty Distribution. For a day job, I build brands within the hair & beauty industry
Sign up for access to behind-the-scenes content including my learnings from the week gone by, articles that have taken my interest, projects I'm working on as well as the good & the bad about running a 60+ person distribution company in the hair & beauty industry that is trying to grow internationally!
Our biggest launch event to date… and how much it cost 💶
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Hey Reader, I’m back with my second email in this series. If you are a new subscriber and would like to read the first email, you can do so by clicking this link. As always, the purpose of this is to expand upon the information I share on Instagram and to be open and honest regarding the good and the bad of running a business. Here we go… 👉 Our biggest launch event to date… and how much it cost 💶Some of you might have seen the social media surrounding our official launch of ELEVEN Australia Permanent Colour which was held in the Cork City Gaol on Sunday, February 19th. The event exceeded all my expectations – hats off to the National Beauty marketing and PR teams on the incredible job they did with pulling it off. Many of you might have wondered what it cost to put an event like this on. Never shy of sharing data and numbers, here are some of the key costs that contributed to the event:
All told, the end to end cost of putting this event on was €49,573 (not including the hundreds of hours of my teams’ time). We ended up with 185 guests plus 22 from National Beauty and 12 of my own guests from ELEVEN, as well as the distributors from Belgium, England and Scotland. We have booked more than 45 colour demos now as a result, and some of these are six-figure accounts who I can honestly say would never have taken us seriously before now. We have already opened 40 colour doors this year so the momentum is very much building. To say we were happy with how it went is an understatement. It’s somewhat of a ‘moment’ for National Beauty, that I feel symbolises our arrival as one of the ‘Big Four’ distributors in the haircare industry (along with L’Oréal, Wella and Xpert). I’m pretty sure that we turned heads in those offices that night and they better believe that this is just the start of it. We had a chuckle to see a competitor have a launch in Dublin the following morning which looked like a proper snooze-fest on social 😆. The timing was absolutely perfect. Our strategy from here? 💡When we were working out a launch strategy for the ELEVEN Permanent Colour, we obviously looked at our competitors, two of whom have an eight-figure colour business. One of those does education quite well and this is a key focus. We are investing more than ever before in this side of the business. We already have a great team, we just need to continue to build on our national structure and wrap this into the European education platform from ELEVEN Australia. We are also shopping for a building in Dublin to open our second academy. More on that in another email. I tried to put myself into their shoes and ask ‘what would we be fearful of National Beauty doing next?’. I landed on one thing: Consumer Marketing. We have a history of being able to take unknown brands and make them household names, and we often do this through consumer marketing. By having the consumer repeatedly ask for a product in salon, we will eventually drive the leads to being inbound. Actually, I can now admit that in 2015, I did this tactic myself to launch KEVIN.MURPHY, having family and friends ring hundreds of salons asking for KM! The other thing that they should be fearful of is how strong the ELEVEN story is. It is certainly one of the coolest and hippest brands in the market right now. Also, none of the major colour brands in Ireland are built on modern technology. ELEVEN was formulated and developed from the ground up in 2021 and 2022 and uses naturally derived ingredients. It is completely vegan and cruelty-free. The other key features are that it is free from Resorcinol, PPD and Silicone. Those are the pillars we are going to focus on, and once consumers start realising the downsides to these (particularly Resorcinol which is in most colours) they will start demanding a change. And without a new colour, there’s not a lot the competition can do to defend that 🔥 In Other News… 📰I will be announcing one of the most exciting haircare brands we’ve ever signed very soon. I’m just at contract stages now but the A-grade salons in Ireland are going to go WILD for this one. It’s been in the international market for a while and they are known for having some of the best aerosols in the world. I hope to be able to include it in my next email but keep an eye on Instagram for when the new breaks... Any guesses? What I’m Listening to This Week 🎧I found a gloriously long (3 hours and 34 minutes) podcast on LVMH which is a company I’m a little obsessed with. I’m also a bit in awe of Bernard Arnault. Whatever industry you work in, there’s so much to be learned from Bernard and LVMH’s complete reshaping of the luxury sector over the past three-and-a-half decades. I have listened to half so far but I have a five hour drive to the north tomorrow and this will be on the radio 🤲 Click the image above or here to have a listen. That concludes my second email – again and as always, I would love your feedback by hitting reply. If it’s to tell me anything you’d like to hear more about or what I can do to make these emails more interesting, I’m all ears. Next time...In the next email, I will be covering Zolo Beauty, a new e-commerce site we have launched (see it here). I will be brutally honest about why, after resisting it for years, I have launched a multi-branded site. For those of you who think it’s a cash grab, you couldn’t be more wrong. All will be explained very soon. Take care, Kieran |
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Hi! I'm Kieran, founder of National Beauty Distribution. For a day job, I build brands within the hair & beauty industry
Sign up for access to behind-the-scenes content including my learnings from the week gone by, articles that have taken my interest, projects I'm working on as well as the good & the bad about running a 60+ person distribution company in the hair & beauty industry that is trying to grow internationally!
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