Picture the founder of a social media-driven beauty company. Whatever springs to mind, it’s probably not one of a grandmother who launched her business in her 60s. But Tricia Cusden’s makeup brand Look Fabulous Forever, a cosmetics line for the over-50s, has cornered a market that she felt was being ignored by the big beauty companies.
Dissatisfied with the makeup available for older women’s skin, Cusden launched her own brand, supported by parties and online makeup tutorials, and now sells to customers all over the world. The trajectory of Look Fabulous Forever in the last year has been greater than Cusden, 69, could have hoped.
At the end of 2015 the company took on four new investors and funding to the tune of £110,000. Then, an appearance on breakfast TV on 31 December 2015 triggered a buying frenzy, with Look Fabulous Forever taking four orders every minute. “That was both exciting and terrifying in equal measure,” she says. “It showed us clearly that the demand for what we’re doing is really strong. It was verifying what we long suspected.”
In just three years, Cusden has established a solid brand and a loyal community in Look Fabulous Forever. The Facebook page is a 36,500 strong community and some of her online makeup tutorials from the brand’s early days have had more than half a million views. But, she says, her social media channels have never been a place to sell to her customers; it has always been about building the community around the brand.
“All we’re doing with Facebook is trying to find interesting articles or videos, anything that appeals to me,” she explains. “For example, I was watching Strictly Come Dancing and Leslie Joseph did an amazing Charleston. She was 71 the day before. So when I was watching I put a post on Facebook, and that got something like 25-30,000 organic reach, which is amazing for a little post like that. That’s how we’ve built the community: by keeping it relevant and putting stuff on there that really engages our age group in a way that they like to be engaged.”
It might sounds simple, but Cusden’s Facebook strategy is building the trust and loyalty of her customers. It’s working, because she knows exactly what they want. “It’s always positive – I rarely post anything negative on there,” she explains. “And I think that’s why we’ve had so much success; people know they’re going to find something they’re going to like, rather than be offended by.”
Look Fabulous Forever’s demographic – baby boomer women – are increasingly digitally savvy. A study by digital marketing company Fractl found this group was 19 times more likely to share content on Facebook than any other generation of user. “Facebook always say this is the fastest growing demographic”, Cusden says. “A lot of people are on there to follow their grandchildren. I love it because if my children go somewhere they’ll put a post on Facebook and it’s them and my grandchildren having a nice time. It’s like I’m keeping in touch with them without them directly keeping in touch with me. I’m sure that’s why it’s growing.”
The next platform for Look Fabulous Forever is Instagram. “I think if we do it properly it will be really good for us,” she explains. Users on the visually-led platform have already begun responding positively, with the page growing its community to 1000 after just two posts.
The brand is currently undergoing a refresh with a creative agency, and Cusden says the core message will be about, “the art of joyful living. And I think that encapsulates what we’re about, really”. She’s also working on a book, set to be published next year, that will celebrate positive ageing. “This is all part of what I want to do with the brand which is change the perception of what ageing actually means,” she says.
Does she think the way older consumers are viewed has changed since she first launched the brand? “I do think there are signs that attitudes are changing,” she says. “I recently watched a television advert for an ordinary washing product. They were showing an older woman and she was in lycra; she’d obviously just got off a mountain bike, and she was a bit splashed with mud. The implication was she was definitely in her 60s but she was fit and active.
“One of the things I used to feel very strongly about was that adverts never used to feature older women unless it was for a specific product targeted at an older woman, like a chair that lifts you up, or insurance for older people. Whereas washing powder is for everybody, so it’s inclusive to say ‘of course we can have an older woman in this advert’. That doesn’t have to be exceptional. We need to normalise the inclusion of older people as just being human beings.”
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