Following up on the Watermelon Lip launch.
I bought it. On launch day. In the Sephora App. I’ll explain why Sephora won my business:
🍉: 24-hour early access. I literally just went to the app to see if it was sold out. On launch day. It wasn’t. So, I added it to my cart. For fun. I black out like that sometimes. But then once it was in my cart, I noticed I had a $10 discount that I could apply against my order. Which made my $24 product… $14. With free shipping. I had to.
🍉: I actually had planned to wait til the DTC launch the next day to buy it. I was going to use the discount code that the brand texted me (from the popup). But I bought it on launch day (where it was available exclusively) before the brand could market to me.
🍉: But still, on the DTC launch day, I got a text to shop. To remind me to use my 20% off code that I got from the popup (remember, I was on the popup list because I visited the popup in New York).
🍉: Except we have a problem! The code ^ DID NOT WORK ON THE WATERMELON FLAVOR. The text, texted to me on watermelon launch day, with no qualifiers that it wouldn’t work on the new flavor (the flavor I was shown at the popup!!). The place I got the code.
In summary, the Sephora experience was better because it wasn’t broken. And again, LANEIGE is an incredible brand that I just bought from. That I’ve bought from before. And they got me to buy their product, which is great!
What they can work on is the popup to digital experience. Which is not easy to get perfectly but that should be perfect. The discount code that’s sent to popup visitors should work against the product they previewed.
🍉: We can all improve our owned channel experiences, to make them as compelling as possible. It’s hard to compete against Sephora when Sephora offers a $10 off credit against your $24 product. That’s impossible to compete against in a financially responsible way. But I still would have bought the watermelon, with my code, from the DTC site on launch day, even though I bought it the day before from Sephora. I would have bought it and stocked up. Or given 1 to my sister. But the code didn’t work! And that was the end of my watermelon shopping.
It delivers today, from Sephora, and I can’t wait to try it. Again, I’m a fan of the brand! And I love watermelon. And I hope to purchase from the LANEIGE DTC store soon. I’m hopeful for their next launch.
