For Supergreat, the beauty product review platform, livestreaming and video aren’t just integral to community-building, they boost sales conversions, too.
“We see a lot of conversions happening from the short-form videos,” said Tyler Faux, Supergreat’s chief executive officer and cofounder, in conversation with Allison Collins, senior editor, beauty, WWD. “Lives can sometimes be more focused on longer-form, entertaining content versus shorter-form and transactional.”
The app joined the livestreaming wave in the early days of the pandemic, a trend that has been faster to take off in foreign markets like China. Less than 1 percent of creators on Supergreat are live hosts, Faux said, but they do serve a strategic purpose to the app. “We discovered livestream during the pandemic, when we were considering new ways of engaging our users for longer periods of time as they were spending more time in our app organically,” he added.
The brand’s value proposition is simple: connecting users with content creators whose areas of expertise intersect with their own. “We try to connect people based on relevancy and the sorts of things that they have in common, and creating connections in that way,” Faux said.
The app, which has partnered with retailers like Ulta Beauty and Credo in the past, has said that including its videos on product detail pages can also supercharge sales.
It’s “the move from text and five-star reviews as a method of gaining trust and conviction,” Faux explained. “With Supergreat, we have contextual information of all the reviewers, and we’re able to surface that information in these embedded video carousels that some of our brand partners, as well as Credo, have used on their product display pages. Those video testimonial carousels can lift conversion by 30 percent.”
Despite its digital nature — it is an app, after all — Supergreat does have potential in brick-and-mortar environments, Faux said.
“We think there are a bunch of different ways that this might work in the future,” he said, seeing the most opportunity in its vast network of brand partners. “The majority of the brands on our platform are still direct-to-consumer. Some of the leading retailers in our category carry a few hundred brands at a time, so there’s a huge opportunity for more potential customers to experience a lot of these newer brands from awesome entrepreneurs in-person,” he said.
Supergreat does have videos of more than 5,000 brands, and Faux said partnering with the app does come with myriad ways to bolster awareness. “We love getting started and launching for the first time. We worked with Starface back when they were launching originally, and have been able to continue working with them and with some of their peer brands since then,” he said.
“We’ve also done a bunch of awesome lives this year with brands and we try to pair them with some of our great live hosts. We had Jenna Lyons come on, we also have Hailey Bieber with BareMinerals. We have really fun ways to partner and activate our community,” he said.
For more from WWD.com, see:
Beauty Review Platform Supergreat Raises Series A Led by Benchmark
All the Beauty M&A Deals of 2021
Source: WWD