The Subscription Boom by Adam Levinter

Author:Adam Levinter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Figure 1 Publishing
Published: 2019-12-18T17:20:27+00:00

How Phan Found Her Fans

Phan’s passion for beauty started as a child, when she spent a ton of time in beauty salons. Phan’s mother was a nail technician, so tattered beauty magazines and fumes from polish remover were part of her upbringing. In 2005, when she was still a teenager, she began blogging about makeup on a photo-blog site called Xanga under the alias Ricebunny, and cultivated a dedicated following.12 Here’s a sample from an early blog post: “Midterms are over! Wow! I now have a week to just relax and enjoy myself... meaning I will be working on my Skincare’s line website and assigned homework during break... there are no vacations in this world of mine. I am an assiduous person.”13

Though her mom tried to persuade her to pursue a career in medicine, Michelle instead enrolled in art and design at Florida’s Ringling College. During her first semester she applied for a job at a Lancôme counter and was rejected, in spite of her evident skill, as too inexperienced—so she launched her own channel on YouTube, which was then barely a year old. Perhaps to her surprise, her first tutorial was viewed 40,000 times in its first week.

When Phan had to drop out of college after one semester due to a lack of funds, she figured her YouTube videos might help her land a better job than waiting tables. After a year, that first tutorial video had notched 1 million views, and by the fall of 2008 she was averaging 600,000 views a month. As the income from YouTube’s partner program grew, Phan decided to move to L.A. to work full-time on her channel.14 In 2010, she struck a deal to create video tutorials using products by, ironically perhaps, Lancôme. Phan called the deal “delayed gratification.”15

As karma would have it, her corporate partnership with Lancôme took a backseat to Phan’s bigger ambition—the launch of IPSY in 2011. Within five years, the company was valued at half-a-billion dollars.16 Notwithstanding some iteration along the way, the company’s core strategy has remained constant—a commitment to growth via online influencers. In staying true to its roadmap, IPSY has linked Phan’s brand to other prominent online vloggers with big followings, such as Bethany Mota, Jessica Harlow, and Andrea Brooks.

The company’s strategic turning point came in 2015 when it received $100 million in funding, part of which the company used to fund its Open Studios (OS) initiative, a strategy true to its influencer roots that would grant an all-access pass to thousands of nobodies looking to be the next Michelle Phan. By providing studio space, production, lighting, editing technologies, mobile tools, apps, and mentors to inspire “Ipsters,” these budding content creators now had access to all the resources they would need to become the next big cosmetics celebs on the web. Moreover, as IPSY OS highlighted, the program was free of commitments, exclusivities, and fees; the creators themselves would retain 100 percent control of their channels and applicable revenue. For a small group of lucky

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