After exiting brick-and-mortar retail at Ulta seven years ago, Laura Geller is doubling back — and this time, wants to do it right.
The makeup brand — which was sold to AS Beauty Group after its previous parent company, Glansaol, filed for bankruptcy in 2018 — is now launching in Sephora at Kohl’s, entering 854 doors nationwide with its Baked Balance-n-Brighten Foundation, $38, and Kabuki Brush, $26. It will also continue its global expansion plans in the U.K. and launch in Canada later this year.
On why Sephora at Kohl’s was the right partner for its return, Joey Shamah, cofounder and chief executive officer of AS Beauty, said: “We feel the Kohl’s customer is a great overlap with the Laura Geller customer. It’s more of a mature woman, a little higher on the age demographic than what’s in a regular Sephora.”
Laura Geller Baked Balance-n-Brighten Foundation, $38, and Kabuki Brush, $26.
Laura Geller pivoted to focus on the 40-plus consumer in the wake of the AS Beauty acquisition. Before Shamah’s team stepped in, the brand was chasing a much younger demographic, focusing less on complexion and more on lip.
“When we first got involved, and that’s almost eight years ago now, our marketing team did a lot of work on understanding the LG customer. We learned that Laura herself, obviously, is a mature woman, and we made the decision to own that demographic, and that’s how we’ve been guiding this business over the last few years, both on a product development as well as a customer acquisition standpoint,” Shamah said.
Part of its plan to unlock the over 40-year-old market has been to leverage Geller’s power as a spokeswoman for her generation and invest in social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. For the brands that claim the bulk of Gen X isn’t on social media, Shamah said: “We can say with very strong certainty that she is. She’s discovering it.” The key, he continued, is to cast a wide net of talent, from the Bethenny Frankels and the Fran Dreschers to the micro, MomTok influencers with maybe a couple thousand followers.
The strategy seems to be working; Laura Geller is one of the buzziest beauty brands on social media today, with just shy of 1 million followers. The brand has also reported a spike in consumer reactivation, up 152 percent compared to last year, along with a 5 percent increase in year-to-date revenue growth.
On whether the brand felt like it needed to build back its core consumers, post-mortem, Shamah said: “They may have been there, but they weren’t there, meaning our website business when we bought the business was about $2 million. We closed last year over $200 million. So we’ve built her, we found her, we’ve messaged her.”
Asked what the secret sauce is to effecting a brand turnaround of this magnitude, Shamah said a key is to start by inviting the consumer behind the proverbial velvet rope. “That’s when they feel like they’re part of it, so they feel ownership of it and they feel great about it,” he continued. “But it’s a learning process, and we want to make sure we’re growing with [them] and where it makes sense for [them]. It’s a lot easier to buy a brand that has a history and resurrect it and invest in it, then start from scratch and build it from scratch.”
Looking ahead, Shamah believes Laura Geller could lead more on the innovation front, though it did just enter hair for the first time with its Root Touch Up Hair and Brow Concealing Cream and Powder. Hailing from E.l.f. Beauty, where product development operates at warp speed comparatively, the beauty executive knows which categories can be fast-tracked to market and which need more time. “I don’t think we’re overdeveloping,” he said. “But it needs to be a balance across the portfolio.”
That said, the decision to enter Sephora at Kohl’s with its bestselling complexion product first was intentional; foundation is the brand’s sweet spot.
On the the possibility of going full fleet at Sephora in the future, Shamah said: “When we first bought Laura Geller, we were full chain in Ulta, and it was not profitable for the business, and we exited very early. If we could come up with economic terms that make sense for us and for them, then yeah, we’d love to be in it.”
The brand also is shoppable on sephora.com and ulta.com now.