VIP Luxury Hair Care was founded in 2014 by celebrity hair stylist, Ashanti Lation. Although a veteran in the world of cosmetology, Ashanti had very little experience in online retail. So when her brand began to expand beyond local sales from her salon, she turned to our founder to build and manage her eCommerce efforts.
The project would focus on creating a new brand identity and customer persona, designing and building a stylish yet easy-to-navigate, mobile-first website, as well as managing merchandising, profit margins and marketing on multiple levels.
We worked directly with Lation to identify her ideal customer and designed brand assets that would appeal to them. We also consulted on pricing, packaging and profit-margin to help relaunch the brand with a focus on the correct metrics.
We identified Shopify as the best platform to host the VIPHairCare.com website and installed third-party apps to both enhance the customer experience as well as automate workflows for maximum operational efficiency.
To maximize marketing efficiency, we made an effort to focus on the financial metrics around the products before concentrating on the creatives. We setup accurate web tracking pixels to ensure we were getting a precise look at traffic sources and fixated on the brand's Marketing Efficiency Ratio as a key metric for success.
In recent years, we have made a conscious effort to focus more heavily on building Ashanti's personal brand - realizing through research that social media users identify and engage more with real people than with businesses. This has resulted Ashanti's Instagram following growing exponentially in the past year, allowing her to move to Los Angeles and establish herself as the go-to hair stylist among Black celebrities when it comes to healthy hair.
This increased exposure has also resulted in more visibility and validation for VIP Luxury Hair Care, leading to the brand selling out of their signature product twice in the past year.
