Many direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands are turning to TikTok to boost ecommerce sales. But Bushbalm is also using TikTok to encourage people to buy its products in stores.
Two Shopify vets, David Gaylord and Tim Burns, launched the niche skin care brand Bushbalm in 2016. Until 2021, roughly 90% of its sales were DTC, Gaylord told AdExchanger. The brand also sells products via Google, Amazon, Facebook and Instagram.
When social media usage exploded at the peak of the pandemic, Bushbalm, which makes treatments for razor burns and ingrown hairs, multiplied its marketing budget tenfold over the course of two years.
Most notably, the brand started marketing on TikTok in 2022.
Since then, Bushbalm’s sales have been on the rise, culminating in its first major US retail integration with Ulta Beauty in March. Its products are now available in 990 Ulta stores.
Ready, set, retail
Until now, Bushbalm’s in-store presence was limited to local waxing salons throughout the US and Canada. The brand was more focused on building brand awareness and online sales than tackling major integrations with national retailers.
Prior to the Ulta launch, smaller retailers would reach out about partnerships, but Bushbalm declined those offers because it was trying to build up enough branding and sales momentum for an exclusive relationship with a bigger fish.
It’s also not easy juggling supply chain management across multiple retailers, Gaylord said.
Since getting more serious about social media in 2020, Bushbalm has seen over 600% revenue growth tied to sales, which now drives an average of 1.5 million weekly impressions across social platforms.
TikTok in particular has been a significant driver of sales growth, Gaylord said. Bushbalm’s reach and engagement on the platform has even inspired the brand to create new products for purchase online, including a vajacial mask. TikTok now makes up roughly 28% of Bushbalm’s overall media spend.
Although it’s too soon to say how much TikTok is driving in-store sales, doing so is the goal.
The brand is working with influencers to create what it calls “Ulta Hauls,” or videos meant to increase brand awareness of specific Bushbalm products now available in Ulta stores. These “Ulta Hauls” have already generated roughly 1 million impressions within the first month of the launch.
Sales uptick
Bushbalm uses a mix of paid and organic content on TikTok.
The brand often zeroes in on highly viewed videos posted by influencers and customers using their products. It boosts those videos using TikTok’s whitelisting feature, Spark Ads, to turn them into ads, with permission from the creators.
In some cases, Bushbalm has been able to generate 7 million net-new video views just from whitelisting, Gaylord said.
Capitalizing on organic content and on TikTok trends such as, say, body hair positivity, which has a large following on TikTok, tends to be the biggest driver of engagement. For example, Bushbalm created viral videos that link to related hashtags, including a recent video called “How To Shave Your Butt” that generated over 20 million views.
Although whitelisting is technically paid, it involves curating and combing through a lot of organic content, which can be a tedious process, Gaylord said.
For that reason, it’s taken a lot longer to build an organic following on Instagram, where paid ads drive most of the activity.
Today, Bushbalm has active communities of around 150,000 followers apiece on TikTok and Instagram.
Oh, snap
But something has to give.
Bushbalm spends most of its social marketing budget on TikTok and Instagram today, and some of that money has come at the expense of other social media channels that weren’t performing, such as Snapchat and Pinterest.
The brand has pulled a lot of its Snapchat budget, for example, because users have lower purchase intent compared with other channels, Gaylord said. Bushbalm also found, based on its attribution models, that Snapchat was bringing in far less revenue from sales.
Still, Meta and TikTok aren’t smooth sailing.
Even though Bushbalm doesn’t consider itself to be part of the sexual wellness category, it runs into a lot of the same censorship problems as those that do because most of its products focus on skin and hair care near bikini lines. According to Gaylord, the brand has had hundreds of ads flagged and removed from Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
Censorship problems aside, ad campaigns that err on the risqué side perform better for Bushbalm, he said, not to mention the sales uptick the brand typically sees around Valentine’s Day.
Now that Bushbalm has its products on the shelves of a major US retailer, it needs to up the ante on branding campaigns to get more customers in stores.
Bushbalm’s next step is planning a break into television, Gaylord said, because TV is the best way to “unlock the level of scale” that makes sense for a heavier in-store presence. “We want to make a bigger splash in brand marketing.”
