Introduction:

U Beauty was co-founded in 2020 by Katie Borghese and Tina Chen Craig, who’s background includes launching one of the first fashion and lifestyle blogs, Bag Snob, in 2005. So it’s no surprise that her  award-winning, sustainable luxury skincare brand would embrace influencer marketing as a primary growth channel.

We met with Aly Gordon, the Senior Director of Influencer Marketing & Partnerships at U Beauty to understand her approach towards running influencer marketing where driving sales is a key focus of the brand’s influencer efforts. 

Aly is no stranger to driving results for influencer programs. Prior to joining U Beauty, she spent over five years working within the influencer marketing space. While at Village Marketing, she worked with several DTC startups to launch influencer programs. She then spent time at Tula Skincare where she helped an already thriving program by building a process and organization to scale the program further. Through her experience working on these initiatives, she brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise in helping influencer marketing programs scale and drive sales. Since joining U Beauty a year ago, her mission has been to build out U Beauty’s influencer marketing program, increasing both scale and performance.

The Role of Technology and Lumanu

When building their influencer program, U Beauty had to build out a tech stack to support affiliate and fee-based influence partnerships. 

To power their affiliate program, U Beauty decided on Shop My because it is easy for both brands and creators to use. The platform has messaging capabilities, which means they don’t need to sacrifice the key tenet of relationship building. It also integrates with Shopify and allows U Beauty to create lookbooks to support easy gifting and tracking. Prior to onboarding Aly, U Beauty had to take on the process to onboard influencers and affiliates as vendors and initially used BILL. 

“There was a big lift for our accounting and finance team. There were a lot of spreadsheets and lists, exports and balancing from multiple sources. On top of that, you have to make sure everyone is onboarded and passing through W9s. There was little to no visibility as to where the payments were, how long will something take to process, was a specific creator paid? It’s a lot of chasing and running in circles. Regardless of the payment volume, it’s a lot of time-consuming busywork.”

U Beauty chose to use Lumanu because it was a better fit with their process and Aly could easily set up and manage all influencer payouts. That, and the added bonus that the majority of their partners already have Lumanu accounts, so it was easy to switch over. The influencers then get greater visibility, while reducing the support needed through back and forth exchanges with the Finance team. The overall process went from Accounting spending a couple hours per month dealing with influencer onboarding and payments to Aly spending ~30 minutes per month ensuring all influencers were paid what was owed on time and reducing the risk of potential errors.

“Lumanu is a major timesaver and provides visibility into payment status to myself and influencers. I used to get emails from influencers awaiting payment and I’d have to jump through hoops to figure out the status. Lumanu is transparent with payments to our Marketing team and to creators, so there’s never a question of where the money is, which is amazing.”

Setting up Operational Efficiency for Future Growth

Since U Beauty started using Lumanu, U Beauty has observed notable improvements in operational efficiency, particularly in reducing the time spent on processing payments and enhancing overall payment process efficiency.

“Overall Lumanu is a major time saver - it’s reliable. Brands like it and creators like it. Being an influencer marketer, you’re like a salesperson, a relationship manager, a lawyer and an accountant all wrapped up in one. Lumanu makes the end-to-end vendor and payment process easy so I can focus my time on finding new creators, deepening creator relationships and building our broader partnership strategy.”

Conclusion:

U Beauty's influencer marketing strategy, under the leadership of Aly Gordon, exemplifies a performance-driven approach that is both strategic and personal.

U Beauty’s strategic use of innovative tools like ShopMy and Lumanu can revolutionize their influencer marketing strategies, leading to greater efficiency and success in this dynamic marketing landscape. The strategic moves made by U Beauty illustrate the impact that technology solutions like Lumanu can play in helping modern marketing teams streamline operations.

If you are looking to learn more about how Lumanu can help make your influencer program more efficient, set-up time with our team to chat further.