Ange Gardien Paris is a beauty brand known for its range of perfumes and colour cosmetics owned by Singapore-based company SCGE International.
The brand was launched in late 2019 and faced the uphill task of building up the brand in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The brand has had to adapt to the shifting ground beneath its feet and rethink several aspects of the business, including the way it sold its products.
“Since we launched, we’ve always been on a passive mode, through e-commerce and Tangs [department store]… It was about running ads and waiting for customers to come – that’s about it,” said brand director Claudia See.
She told CosmeticsDesign-Asia that conventional marketing approaches, such as influencer marketing, were no longer as effective.
“We drove traffic with influencers and all, but this doesn’t work anymore. People know the trick now.”
The changing landscape pushed the brand to tap into the growing popularity of social commerce, a rising and important force driving the development of e-commerce.
Social commerce is the process of utilising social networking platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, to drive e-commerce sales.
Often, brands hire influencers or celebrities to talk up their products on a livestream, for instance, giving them access to their base of loyal followers.
Unlike a Facebook advertisement or an influencer's Instagram post, these social sellers are self-motivated to convert their followers into paying customers.
“Honestly, I have to invest a lot of money into marketing because consumers need to see an advertisement at least seven times before they buy. With social commerce, it's completely different. Social sellers make the ads come alive and they become the brand’s little trumpets and social commerce helps to elevate the fact that you’re buying from an individual person, not a store,” said See.
The company started to explore opportunities in social commerce in August 2021 and has since seen sales grow by around 50%.
One of the social sellers Ange Gardien has partnered with is Jeraldine Chan of My BKK Shop. The first livestream they collaborated on resulted in five-figure sales for the brand.
“It was tremendously effective. That first time was just under an hour, and we managed to hit five digits. It was amazing,” said See.
See firmly believes social selling is the future of e-commerce, noting that it has already taken over China and will soon become mainstream in the rest of the world.
“People are catching on and social selling is already catching the attention of researchers, the technology world – they know it’s more than a trend. We just need a shakeup.”
