As the largest waxing company in the U.S., European Wax Center (EWC) believes that revealing beautiful skin is the first step toward revealing the best version of yourself. The brand's mission is to inspire women to be authentic and unapologetically confident in everything they do.
To raise awareness for this message among their target audience, EWC tapped the marketing agency Laundry Service to launch its very first influencer activation, a first-of-its-kind program designed to drive thousands of new guests into centers around the country. Our mission: prove the value of influencers by creating a program rooted in clear and impactful business results.
To deliver these results, Laundry Service created #EWCStrutSociety, a group of 16 digital trendsetters and content creators who share EWC's mission to inspire unapologetic confidence in women. The program launched in August 2017 to bring in new guests during the summer, a key time for the brand, and ran through the end of the year, to retain guests in the fall and winter months when sales historically drop. Influencers were vetted based on their affinities to EWC's audience and their strong female narratives—ensuring that these women would not only serve as authentic ambassadors to represent EWC, but drive meaningful sales for the brand.
We introduced our Strut Society with a 2-day event in August that we produced and managed at a historic estate in Upstate NY. Strategically planned activities were designed to inspire unapologetic confidence, acquaint our influencers with the brand, and create unity among the group. The bonding experiences along with the stunning scenery encouraged an abundance of content creation among the group.
Our Strut Society produced hundreds of assets both at the event and throughout the program duration which we leveraged to cultivate a national campaign around unapologetic confidence that lived across the marketing landscape. This included paid social on EWC channels, amplification on influencer channels (whitelisting), a content partnership with Refinery29, and a media feature with NBC. To ensure measurable and quantifiable business results, unique promo codes were given to each influencer and top performing influencer assets were whitelisted and optimized to convert online reservations. To maximize conversions, ads were targeted at key segments of EWC's consumer to reach beauty, fashion, hispanic, and college markets.
The Strut Society campaign was a major success for the brand in 2017, converting over 30,000 new guests, nearly 10% of EWC's total new guest count during the time it ran. The campaign quickly grew from a brand experiment to become a cornerstone in EWC's marketing strategy in 2018.
On social, the campaign earned over 15.5M impressions, surpassing projections by 35%, and generated 200+ pieces of influencer- and internally-produced visual content.
Through niche targeting, we drove an incredibly efficient CPA as low as $11—45% lower than EWC's benchmark for converting new guests on social in 2017. EWC also saw an increase in awareness levels; 8 points YoY to 39% in Q3.
