Hyper Growth Through Viral Marketing and Custom Website Design

Anastasia Beverly Hill’s exponential success is catapulted by a combination of unique website design and custom coded features.

5 minute read

Who Should Read This?

This case study will be especially relevant for those interested in the following topics:

Magento Commerce
Product Launches
Social Media Marketing
Beauty
Influencer Marketing
Custom Products
Hyper Growth
Unique Design
Shop The Look

GUIDANCE DRIVES ROI

400%

YOY Revenue Growth

600%

YOY Instagram Growth

THE CHALLENGE

Anastasia Beverly Hills turned to Guidance for a website redesign and replatform on Magento to drive their company to exponential success through viral Instagram marketing. Using the Golden Ratio as a central and guiding aesthetic, the website redesign had to include a custom palette builder, Shop the Look functionality and easy Add to Cart features from social media platforms. As product launches were the key to their success,
the new website had to scale for huge traffic increases during product drops and accommodate large order volumes.

THE BRAND

Anastasia Beverly Hills, known by their loyal followers as ABH, is a cosmetics and beauty brand founded by aesthetician Anastasia Soare in 1997 in Beverly Hills, California. Soare’s eyebrow products and her introduction of a new brow shaping technique she named the “Golden Ratio Eyebrow Shaping Method” helped catapult the brand’s success. First released in 2000, ABH has grown into a household name with products sold in over 2,000 stores across 25 countries. The brand has become known for its celebrity collaborations and social media beauty influencers.

Magento: Best in Class Speed & Beauty

In the world of beauty, trends and fashion move quickly especially in the social media age. ABH is the definition of a fast growing makeup and beauty brand. The company requires a lightning fast site that can handle high traffic periods during peak product launches and Instagram collaborator Shop the Look product drops. Guidance replatformed ABH to Magento Commerce for the best in class performance and cloud delivered scalability that has helped them grow their omnichannel sales exponentially.

Magento’s cloud-based solution provides a reliable Amazon Web Service (AWS) environment that supports any size of ecommerce deployment. Magento Commerce offers continuous delivery of cloud-based services with the benefit of instant access to the latest software version, infrastructure improvements and functionality. With high availability and scalability, Magento delivers on the demanding needs of high-traffic peaks. Instead of worrying about site speed or slow page loads, ABH can focus on growing sales and building out their unique brand experience for their customers.

A large part of the brand’s growth is through their viral influencer marketing campaigns on Instagram and other popular social media platforms. The brow studio is based in Beverly Hills, California and frequented by many high profile celebrities. Through the power of social media, ABH would collaborate with celebrities and other beauty influencers to create product launches (also known as “product drops”) that resulted in huge increases in traffic to the website. Using AWS, the website scaled to handle the huge volume of traffic swells and would normalize post product launches. Guidance helped to ensure the replatformed website would keep up with the large volume of traffic and scale to accommodate the influx of users purchasing products during these launches. In fact, many launches resulted in new products selling out in a matter of minutes.

Golden Ratio Design

Inspired by the ancient principle of Divine Proportion, the founder of ABH uses the principles of The Golden Ratio to create a unique and custom brow shape for each face. Anastasia recognized that this mathematical principle of thirds found in nature could influence not only art and architecture but could be applied directly to the human face to create aesthetic harmony. The concept was transformative and she soon patented The Golden Ratio Eyebrow Shaping Method and later the patent-pending Golden Ratio Contouring Method. Just as The Golden Ratio is used to create aesthetic harmony on the human face, Guidance’s website designs had to deliver the same balance and proportion.

The golden ratio appears in some patterns in nature, including the spiral arrangement of leaves and some seashells.

The creative team set in motion a complete redesign of ABH’s website instilling each aspect with the timeless pillars of aesthetic proportion using The Golden Ratio. Inspired by Anastasia's eyebrow shaping technique, Guidance’s designs respect the repetitive patterns found in nature, art, music and the human body. The result is a creative design that provides symmetry, balance and beauty for the customer with a nod to Anastasia’s founding principles.

Guidance began the creative design process with intense user testing with existing and new customers. Not only did this instruct the creative design process, it also helped to inform product improvements and new product innovations. The user testing included in-person interviews, customers interacting with the products (including tutorials and “try-on” sessions) and deep-dive questionnaires. Furthermore, users were invited to test the existing website and recorded using the new designs to ensure intended use cases. The result is an interactive and immersive website experience that has led to exponential increases in their organization.

Omnichannel Growth

To support ABH’s offline business and to encourage loyalty, Guidance designed the new website to accept in-salon appointment requests by service and aestheticians. The company continues to operate the salon in Beverly Hills alongside the tremendous growth in product sales both online and offline. A true omnichannel brand, ABH has grown to sell more than 400 products in over 2,000 stores worldwide and their products are also sold in over 25 countries.

To further widen the scope, Guidance helped ABH create a portal for professional makeup artists and aestheticians to access membership privileges. The Pro program provides membership benefits, product discounts, pre-sale privileges and exclusive access to Pro products only.

Custom “Drag & Drop” Palettes

Consumers are increasingly expecting customized or “made-to-order” products. ABH is on the cutting edge of personalization offering the custom palette builder on their website. One of the many innovations Guidance provided was the ability for customers to create custom makeup palettes with a unique and interactive “drag & drop” technology. Guidance custom designed the feature that allows customers to create personalized palettes from a selection of 20 different shades for countless variations. The tool was designed to discount the product when 6 colors are “placed” into the custom palette and to pre-populate with a different pool of color shades (every shade from Light to Deep) based on a user’s choice.

The Power of Instagram Viral Marketing

ABH’s social media and influencer marketing is an example of viral marketing at its best. As one of the first beauty brands to embrace social media as a brand strategy, Instagram became their primary platform for exponential growth starting in 2013 and they now boast over 20 million subscribers. One of ABH’s top tactics when it comes to social success is the use of branded hashtags to help create a bank of buzz-worthy user-generated content. The most popular ABH hashtag (#ABHBrows) gives the brand their choice of high-quality beauty content to repurpose and the ability to stay in touch with their consumers for increased social attention. Customers feel part of the ‘ABH community’ and can reshare on ABH’s social channels which makes this social strategy a win-win for both brand and consumer.

To extend brand reach, Guidance custom designed a “Shop the Look” solution to display curated images from the ABH Instagram profile on the website homepage, on relevant PDPs and on a gallery page. On the gallery page, customers can quickly add the related product to cart in one-step or the customer can click through to the PDP for more information. Customers can also filter the gallery page by feature (ex. brows, eyes, face, etc) or by hashtags. On the PDPs, ABH can cross-sell individual or bundled products. Through this feature, customers can add one or all recommended products to their cart in just one click.

Results

Guidance helped launch ABH into international success through a combination of viral influencer marketing on social media channels and omnichannel growth.

Guidance ensured the redesigned and replatformed website could handle huge volumes of traffic during peak product launches and it could accomodate large order volumes with zero downtime. The redesign includes a custom palette builder as well as a Shop the Look feature for a seamless brand experience across multiple channels.

Summary

Guidance delivered a Magento Commerce website that is optimized to scale during peak traffic product launches, support their omnichannel strategy and boost online revenue through social media channels. Designed to convert on any device, the new website contains multiple merchandising opportunities on the homepage and product detail pages (PDPs).

By using techniques derived from the Golden Ratio, the Guidance creative team successfully redesigned the website to include a custom palette builder, an easy to use Shop the Look feature and cross-sell/up-sell opportunities throughout the website. As viral Instagram marketing was the key to their success, the new website serves as an extension of the brand to drive exponential growth and brand expansion.

SERVICES

Solution Architecture
Website Redesign
User Experience Design
Visual Design
Custom Code
Data Migration
Customer Interviews

TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS

Magento Commerce
Bronto Email
Amazon Web Services
Amazon Fulfilment
LiveChat Customer Service
HawkSearch Onsite Search

Find out how Guidance can create solutions for your business's complex needs!