A new world calls for a new and fast-moving mindset, and Faye Speedie lives up to her surname. Founder of The Brand Book, she has rebooted the traditional way of communicating by creating a virtual community that has turned the way we do business on its head. The Brand Book is a global and digital beauty hub that replaces the hard and driven networking of a trade show. With cut-through introductions, The Brand Book is supercharging sales growth for beauty brands, retailers, and distributors, all from your fingertips.
It’s been tough. The pandemic has undoubtedly rocked the foundations of solid business values—meeting up and shaking hands for one. In response to the virus, more of our lives have moved onto digital platforms, fundamentally shifting the way we engage. But it’s not all bad—far from it. The surge of tech advancement and focus within the beauty and wellness space has created an enormous amount of opportunity, and many of the digital light-bulb moments thrown up by the pandemic are here to stay and are welcomed from a commercial outlook.
Felicity Rew, buyer at Feelunique.com, was one of the buyers that could see the potential of the platform, onboarding at launch. “The team at Beauty Bulb has created a great tool for retailers through The Brand Book. The Brand Book houses brands in one place to make it really easy for myself as a Buyer to review new and upcoming brands quickly and easily.”
Moreover, the dramatic communication shift has, unsurprisingly, included a surge in digital eventing over the last two years. Trade shows, meetings, and business trips were cancelled on a global level. The impact was instant, and beauty brands, retailers, and distributors from all over the world worked tirelessly to find ways to continue growing their sales while it seemed the globe had stopped turning.
During 2020, Beauty Bulb, the UK consultancy that specialize in global sales growth within the beauty industry, saw an opportunity to put their global contact book to work. They created a global and digital trade show platform named The Brand Book to help solve some of the issues that erupted when face-to-face networking was no more.
“Having worked in the beauty industry for the entirety of my career, there is no doubt that there has been a complete shift towards discovery,” observes Emma Thornton, founder of TRUE Skincare. “The Brand Book is the perfect specialized platform for just this. It's built a much-needed bridge between beauty brand and retailer. A great team with incomparable relationships and invaluable advice.”
Launching in 2021, Brand Book’s mission is incredibly simple—to create trade without the show. The aim is to showcase new, upcoming, and exciting brands from all over the word to help buyers build and expand their categories. Additionally, the platform ensures the best and most sought-after introductions and connections for brands. For both parties, the platform is time saving, environmentally better, saves legwork and money, and crucially, supercharges sales for all. Furthermore, unlike a conventional trade show, the platform is open for access all day, every day—the digital doors are never shut for business.
“We saw, first-hand, the challenges being faced by so many in the beauty industry,” observes Faye. “We had the global contact book, so we took a huge part of what we are doing as a business and made it digital. The Brand Book was created to be simple and deliver exactly what a trade show would—those valuable contacts and introductions. The tech platform is at the core of The Brand Book, but there is a human element to all that we do. The world has changed, and the platform was launched in response to this seismic shift with a clear goal of simplifying what is normally a very expensive and time-consuming process for beauty brands, retailers, and distributors. Our team loves going to physical trade shows, but it can be tricky for brands to choose between them all, and it’s not always doable from a time, cost, or travel perspective. The response to the platform has exceeded our expectations in these early months and our long-term goal is to be the leading, global digital service specifically for the beauty & wellness industry,” concludes Faye.
To access The Brand Book, brands pay a one-off annual fee with no extra costs or commissions, whilst retailers and distributors have unlimited access for free. The Brand Book is made up of three platforms—UK, Europe, and Rest of World. The platform boasts one of the best beauty address books on the planet and is already being used by over 185 well-known retailers, e-tailers, and distributors including Amazon, The Hut Group, Boots, Watsons, Zalando, Space NK, QVC, Clicks, Saks, Project Beauty, CO Bigelow, Feelunique, and Liberty.
If you would like to learn more, please get in touch with the team at faye@beautybulb.co.uk and beautybulb.co.uk.
