When a brand seeds products to creators, it’s often clear from the packaging and labels who sent the product.
That wasn’t the case for K-beauty-inspired skin-care brand Peach & Lily’s latest product launch. Instead, the brand chose to send its newest anti-aging serum, the MiniProtein Exosome Bioactive Ampoule, to creators sans brand name, product name, or even instructions to post.
The goal, CEO Alicia Yoon said, was to generate intrigue among its creator set, which ranges from dermatologists to makeup artists, and to encourage them to review the product and educate viewers in an honest and engaging manner.
“This could be a launch that you do in a very boring, dry way, where it almost feels like a lecture that nobody asked for on the science,” Yoon told us. “We thought, ‘What can we do where we don’t sacrifice on the things that we need to do at launch, while keeping engagement super high?’”
Seeding products anonymously seems to have paid off for Peach & Lily. Within the first two hours of the MiniProtein Exosome Bioactive Ampoule’s official unveiling at a reveal party in Manhattan that was attended by around 60 creators, the brand generated 1 million impressions and five times the engagement of previous campaigns, Yoon said. Since then, she said, engagement has remained more than double that of past launch periods across social media and in inquiries across email, DMs, and customer service channels.
“We really were excited about that as a win because it shows that there’s a lot of passion and excitement about the product, and that was our initial challenge,” she said.
Element of surprise
From a marketing perspective, there are some risks to sending out an unbranded product and asking for feedback. For one thing, a reviewer may be inclined to be harsher in their review without having any brand affinity to consider.
While Yoon said there were some nerves before launch, the years of studies about the product instilled some confidence that creators would like it.
“There was a lot of excited nervousness around the team because [the creators didn’t] know the brand,” she said. “It’s not like they were given a brief, or we had any control over what they were going to share, so it was actually really exciting to see what kinds of things that they would notice and talk about.”
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Of the 14 creators who received the product, Yoon said only a handful had worked with Peach & Lily before, although many had posted about the brand organically, which put them on the brand’s radar. There were also creators who had never posted about or worked with the brand before, but had the level of skin-care expertise the brand was looking for.
“We wanted to select experts who could talk at the level of depth that we know that we needed for the product and still have very high engagement with their audience,” Yoon said.
To get the products to the creators anonymously, Yoon said Peach & Lily used an intermediary agency that sent creators a product ingredient list and a few details about the science behind the product and asked if they were interested. Creators who said yes then received the product from the agency in unmarked glass bottles.
After several creators posted organically, a few also did paid posts about the branded product on social and Substack following the afterparty reveal.
Makeup artist Erica Taylor, who has more than 2.2 million followers on TikTok, was one of the creators who posted about the product in pre- and post-reveal videos, the first of which has racked up more than 320,000 views and 13,000 likes. She told us this was the first anonymous mailer she’d received.
“I’ve been in this industry for 30 years, and so much of the stuff is the same,” Taylor told us. “It was just really exciting to be a part of that and experience it like a blind date.”
With blind unboxing videos growing in popularity, it’s perhaps no surprise that some creators were intrigued to post about an unbranded skin-care product. Taylor said the intrigue contributed to the level of engagement she saw on the video, and that she also enjoyed the simplicity of the mailer, which helped it stand out among other brands.
“I find the really big PR packages very wasteful and excessive when it’s a giant box and shenanigans and one little product,” she said. “I like that it was a small box to just try the product and let it speak for itself.”