Dibs Beauty’s goal is to achieve “desert island beauty status” with consumers, but securing that coveted spot in shoppers’ makeup bags requires a deep understanding of the consumers themselves.
The brand, known for its dual-ended bronzer and blush sticks, was co-founded by influencer Courtney Shields and CEO Jeff Lee, former president of Alex Rodriguez’s ARod Productions, in 2020. It operated solely DTC until last August, when it entered select Ulta Beauty locations, and has since expanded chainwide with the retailer.
Austin, Texas-based Dibs is a “50-state brand,” Lee told Retail Brew, reaching customers far beyond the core beauty cohorts in New York City and Los Angeles, which “requires a bit more testing and understanding your customer base,” he noted. We caught up with Lee to discuss how Dibs collects and utilizes customer data at a virtual Retail Brew Checkout event. Watch the full conversation with Lee here.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
I’d love to hear a little bit about the marketing strategy for Dibs and also how AI plays into that.
We believe that when we use AI, it should be for a couple things. First, our marketing is generally product-problem-solution-oriented. We start with—when we do integrate AI into our research—using solutions like ChatGPT deep research to survey the broader field about a specific problem and how it can be integrated. For example, is a customer intimidated by purchasing both blush and bronzer? Does she need to have that solution presented for her? Is that a major friction in her life? We take the broader insights that you get from the larger data pools that AI solutions can offer, and then we also pair it against what we have on the third-party credit card data side, or our own in-store and online insights, as well as industry insights, which, in our case, tends to come from [Circana]. And that way, we have multiple inputs that we’re using in order to craft the marketing angles that we’re going for.
How has the strategy around using consumer data shifted as you’ve made the move into brick-and-mortar retail?
Being such a 50-state-focused brand, we have a keen understanding of exactly where we’re performing well in the country. With that in mind, what we can do is deploy more resources towards our in-field team, to have them do surveys on top of selling and to gain a higher level confidence about what the specific communities are resonating with and that flows through into our marketing across channels such that we are able to segment even our retention channels and our communications by geographic market.
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[Data collected online and in Ulta stores] tells us that the New York customer is frequently overwhelmed with choice, more heavily influenced by Ulta’s major competitor, which is Sephora, and that she frequently resonates with a lot of very glamorous, we’ll call it imagery in makeup and that would ostensibly tell you that you could compete in that way. Instead, what it actually instructed us to do was to try a different approach. Rather than compete with the noise of brands that message the beautiful mood board or the elevated nature of their offering, we tried to compete here in the city with routine products, the ease of the product, messaging that first and foremost. That leads through not only our retention efforts, but even our new customer acquisition efforts, whether that’s in store or with paid marketing.
In-store events are important to Dibs—what data are you collecting from these, and how are you adjusting to such a wider swath of consumers shopping experiencing Dibs for the first time in those stores?
We believe that Ulta has a true advantage in that they have much more flexibility for eventing. So we’re able to do volume.
We’re able to get this uniform read across all these doors across the country on a monthly basis, and the in-store events tell us a couple things. We like to say that, especially for Sephora, they’ve seen a huge growth of younger customers who are just coming in and driving a lot of the sector’s growth. [Ulta is] geographically inaccessible to this demographic in many ways. Tweens can’t drive and it's generally the moms that are coming in, and now actually the moms that are bringing their younger children in and introducing them to the brand that we’re finding. And that was something that we had to see in person, that not only are we a millennial brand, but that the core customer, the customer that is most passionate, is going to affirmatively come to a store to attend your event is squarely upper millennial, and that the way the brand is being propagated for the future and perpetuated is via mother-daughter relationships versus the other way around. And so that was something that was really hung into us by hosting so many hundreds of events.