Skin + Me marketing boss on bringing ‘grit and realness’ to skincare sector

So last week, the brand took its first steps into the world of TV advertising with a campaign featuring real-life users of its products instead of models. Its growth marketing director, Florie Roudet, says Skin + Me’s mission is to make personalized, effective skincare – and, crucially, to make it accessible to everyone.

“In this very cluttered skincare environment, brand is so important, so we want to do more work to strengthen the brand and create an emotional connection to Skin + Me,” she tells The Drum.

Roudet joined the brand from Just Eat, where she served as global head of media, and since landing has been expanding her team, adding more growth roles and, more recently, recruiting for CRM roles as well as a TikTok content producer.

£10m Series B funding allowed Skin + Me to take the brand above the line, starting with a London Underground campaign. “We picked out-of-home as a first channel because it has good reach, but also it’s fairly easy to implement for a startup; the barrier to entry isn’t huge,” says Roudet. But Skin + Me always had its sights set on TV.

Launched last week, the ‘Just For You’ campaign includes three 30-second spots that show individual skincare journeys.

So far, Skin + Me has avoided using models in its advertising and wanted to maintain this for TV. Instead, it put a call out to its social media account to find subscribers who could feature in the ad, going on to cast three women – one who works at a nursery, another who is in CRM and one who works for the Post Office.

It was crucial, says Roudet, for the viewer “to understand that they are real customers and that we aren’t lying to them.” To achieve this, the ads were only partly shot in a studio, with the rest of the footage a blend of personal camera roll footage and self-shot material captured with handheld digital cameras. “We wanted to add a bit of grit and realness to it.”

When conceptualizing the ad, Roudet and Skin + Me’s agency, Snap, created mood boards to reflect on how the rest of the dermatology category was advertising. “All of the ads do the same thing,” she says. “It’s some lady in her bathrobe showing her bare shoulders as she’s applying cream, then you see a lot of numbers and percentages.”

While showing the efficacy of its products is also important to Skin + Me’s messaging, Roudet wanted to “go against the category grain” to focus on the confidence its customers feel when they see the results.

“We feel our products are more efficacious than others, but people won’t necessarily believe that because every brand says that, so what’s the point? We are trying to wade into how it makes you feel and make more emotional ads.”

Although the current focus is on mass-reach channels, social and influencer will remain a key part of Skin + Me’s mix. The brand has a distinct strategy that is a blend of macro and micro-influencers and it “deliberately avoids” only working with accounts that specialize in beauty, to ensure it engages wider niches. ” Another stipulation is that influencers must be using the products far in advance of posting to ensure potential customers don’t feel misled by its advertising.

“What makes our brand strong is the people who are subscribers. When people buy Skin + Me, they want to see someone they can see themselves in. Especially in skincare, where people are being sold dreams all the time, but what makes the brand successful is that we are realistic about what people can achieve.”

The next stage of growth for Skin + Me will be to balance adding products and innovations to retain existing subscribers while growing awareness through mass-market channels. “We know the customers that Skin + Me has acquired love us and part of the growth has come from people referring us to their friends. There is only so much it can grow organically and through word of mouth and influencers, however.“