Case Study: Frilliance
Frilliance is a clean skincare and makeup brand built for Gen Z with a mission to create unique, affordable products in a saturated, expensive beauty industry.
We sat down with Fiona Frills, Co-Founder and CEO of Frilliance, and Kim Ruby, fellow Co-Founder and Fiona’s mother, to hear how Novel elevates the brand’s community building.
Our conversation covers topics like:
How Frilliance uses Novel to create community-based NFTs
Novel’s role as an entry point to web3 for CPG brands
Why brands should leverage influencer-led growth
“We’re excited to be working with Novel, especially since their team has been so helpful in explaining things accessibly. They’ll take Frilliance very far with web3.”
Leveraging Influencer Marketing for Younger Demographics
Since launching, Frilliance has seen nearly 100% year-after-year growth, having just launched in 500 Walmart stores and entered negotiations with another retail drugstore.
To continue this impressive growth trajectory, the brand is zoned in on social media marketing. After all, Gen Z, their target audience, is notoriously best reached online.
Frilliance leverages several social platforms for unique marketing angles, including:
YouTube — Fiona's career began eight years ago on this platform. There's a natural bridge between the content she continues to upload and her skincare brand.
TikTok — As the platform and Frilliance both only continue to grow, the brand is concentrating efforts here with snappy, attention-grabbing content formats.
Instagram — This app remains essential for visual ads and influencer marketing.
How to Cultivate Positive Brand Experiences for Influencers
In 2022, influencers have become essential for countless brands. Their content regularly causes products to go viral — a level of brand excitement that’s hard to recreate elsewhere.
Having worked as an influencer for nearly half of her life, Fiona’s gained firsthand insights into what makes certain brand partnerships stand out to creators.
With this, Frilliance’s top priority in influencer marketing is cultivating positive experiences for all of their creative partners. This then leads to more premium content for the brand.
To strengthen your brand-creator dynamics, start with these baseline recommendations:
Treat influencers and creators as human beings — not cash cows
If they’re interested, give them opportunities to learn about the brand
Make them feel seen, heard, and included with consistent communication
Below, Fiona also outlines some typical pitfalls to avoid.
Stop Forcing Scripted Influencer Ads
In her experiences on both ends of the deal, the worst move a brand can make is giving influencers a strict script to read while recording branded videos.
This strategy never works because it simply does not translate well on social media. An influencer's currency is their authenticity, and fans will see right through a script.
A script will also make the influencer seem disingenuous in their advertisements or as if they don’t understand the brand enough, which then makes the brand seem inauthentic.
If the influencer is prominent enough, a scripted post could still garner engagement, but it likely won’t convert well into customer interest and purchases.
For ideal results, Fiona advises brands to genuinely look out for their creators and allow them to say what feels genuine in their sponsored content.
That transparent brand-creator relationship will, in the end, generate better marketing than any script. Forced enthusiasm rarely drives returns on social media.
Send More PR to Micro-Influencers — Not Just A-Listers
As Fiona puts it, there’s a sweet spot for influencer partnerships in terms of the number of followers they have versus the amount of engagement they receive.
An A-list influencer with massive social followings may reach millions of people, but they’re likely to receive countless boxes of PR each day and overlook your brand’s.
Meanwhile, smaller accounts are able to take the time to understand and engage with the products you send, which is why Frilliance focuses on sending PR to micro-influencers.
Regardless of the influencer’s popularity, brands should never expect PR recipients to publicize them. If a creator dislikes the samples and posts about them anyway, that’s a net loss for you.
“We believe the most important aspects of relationship building, whether it’s a friendship or a business partnership, are communication and understanding.”
The Frilliance Playbook: Building Organic Ambassador Relationships
Like any connection, it takes time to cultivate honest, productive partnerships between brands and influencers. Frilliance approaches this with a no-pressure strategy of three steps:
The team sends PR to creators (typically micro-influencers)
They’ll tell the creator to reply with questions at any time
The creator decides if they want to partner up or not
Ultimately, a creator will decide to become an ambassador if they love the brand and can understand or directly resonate with why Fiona started Frilliance.
This no-pressure strategy curates influencers who are genuinely engaged.
Beyond this, the company runs a rep program with classes to teach Frilliance ambassadors best practices in social media and marketing.
The course fosters a symbiotic relationship where reps gain industry experience, and the brand gains passionate reps who already have the tools to market well.
Driving NFT Strategies with Novel: No web3 Experience Required
When it comes to online teen communities, there’s a huge amount of white space to work with — which is why the Frilliance folks have plans in the works to launch a community-based NFT.
The NFT will grant rewards based on user engagement levels, ranging from free products and sneak peeks at upcoming releases to involvement in beta testing and product dev input.
Kim notes that NFTs are ultimately about utility and translating digital tokens into value in our current economy. As such, Novel has been the ideal tool for baking real-life value into NFTs.
“Novel is a very trusted resource to us. We love working with this team because they’re genuine experts in this newer space. That matters a lot.”
NFT Options for All of Your Marketing & Engagement Needs
Fiona was quickly struck by the number of NFT offerings within Novel. As a vendor, they bring a great deal to the table, while still simplifying their more complex products for non-experts.
Meanwhile, as a founder within the digital space for decades, Kim was also floored by Novel’s range of options, such as how users can actually AirDrop NFTs.
This tech will be integrated into the Frilliance NFT currently in development.
Consumers will be able to scan product packaging and access token-gated benefits (i.e., membership in the Frilliance community Discord) AirDropped to their phones.
Next Steps: How Novel Fits into the Future of Frilliance
Looking forward, the Frilliance team is in development with new products and expanding to more stores — all while aiming to remain as accessible and affordable for teens as possible.
Influencer marketing and NFT efforts have, therefore, become key pipeline priorities.
What Do NFTs and Influencers Have in Common?
Much like influencer marketing, NFTs engage users and can create branded communities.
That’s why the Frilliance team is laser-focused on trying out varied NFT use cases in the near future, while considering potential integrations between web3 and existing marketing functions.
In the end, that’ll be determined by testing results. But that clear throughline between creator partnerships and NFTs leaves the door open on potential influencer-centered web3 projects.
