Through customer feedback, Laura Geller Beauty identified a significant portion of its core audience – women over 40 – were fans of the popular show, Wheel of Fortune. To leverage this unique alignment, the brand partnered with the game show for their biggest launch of the year. Unveiled on October 9, the Laura Geller Beauty x Wheel of Fortune Collection featured Vanna White as the face of an exclusive makeup line, which included six beauty essentials curated to make fans look and feel like a million bucks. The goal was that the Wheel of Fortune audience would become fans of the Laura Geller brand as well, and that with media exposure society at large would gravitate toward the nostalgia of these two brands coming together. With this campaign, Laura Geller Beauty's goal was also to continue leading the conversation around aging in the beauty industry demonstrated beautifully by the iconic 66-year-old Vanna White with a new product offering for customers to enjoy. The brand set out to deliver the magic of makeup to each of its customers ahead of the holiday season with a timeless partnership inclusive of compelling visuals and messaging that demonstrate the brand’s core values and its consumers' interests.
After bringing glamour into America’s homes for over 40 years, Vanna White was looking to join the conversation around celebrating beauty after 40. With the launch of this campaign, Vanna spoke about her decision to collaborate with Laura Geller Beauty for her first-ever beauty campaign (at the age of 66!) in an array of press placements on notable media outlets covering the news of the collection release.
To celebrate the launch of the collection, Laura Geller Beauty released a short film that showcased Vanna White on the set of Wheel of Fortune, where she shared how this one-of-a-kind collection brings the beauty of makeup to life for everyone to enjoy.
With White starring as the face of the campaign, Laura Geller and the team spared no details in producing this limited edition collection. Taking cues from the beloved game show, iconic elements such as the vibrant wheel, the million-dollar wedge, and the puzzle board were leveraged to reimagine the brand's best-selling products with limited-edition designs and packaging.
In addition to a limited edition collection for sale, the campaign included a sponsored wedge on the Wheel of Fortune show, accompanied by a 10-second video feature of Vanna White presenting the collection. This segment appeared on the show five times during the first two weeks of launch. Wheel of Fortune also featured the collection in five social posts across all platforms and three emails to their Wheel Watchers Club email database. Vanna White posted the collection herself on her personal social media three times and participated in multiple press interviews across digital, print, and broadcast. Our press initiatives resulted in 121 media placements resulting in 1.8B impressions. Laura Geller Beauty produced a photoshoot on the Wheel of Fortune set with Vanna White to create the campaign video and shot still shots to then create custom website assets, marketing emails, and 46 social posts across Laura Geller Beauty’s channels. We also sent out a custom mailer with the entire collection to 250 top editors, influencers, and makeup artists, and hosted two bicoastal launch events for top influencers.
A recurring challenge Laura Geller Beauty faces is being a family-owned business working with smaller budgets compared to some of its VC-backed and/or corporate competitors. Therefore, the brand relies heavily on its community, originality, innovation, and company strengths to entice talent like Vanna White to partner with the brand.
Another challenge that presented itself to Laura Geller Beauty is the beauty industry's obsession with youth. As Laura Geller Beauty focuses on makeup for mature skin and features only women over 40 in its marketing, the brand is fighting societal ageism through every campaign and product release. As the brand continues to overcome this challenge, it is fostering a much-needed discussion on authentic representation in the beauty space.
Engaging Laura Geller Beauty's core demographic - women over 40, this campaign emerged as the brand's most successful earned media initiative to date, boosting social engagement and customer traffic to the site during launch week.
The launch of the new collection sparked an immediate surge in the percentage of visitors proceeding to checkout, more than doubling on the launch day compared to the site's average, indicating a significant increase in site traffic to purchase.
Following the launch, Laura Geller Beauty also witnessed rapid expansion and engagement across its owned social media platforms. Overall, social views went up by a whopping 833% on Instagram, with a particularly significant increase in engagement on Facebook, one of the most important media channels for the brand and its target audience, growing by 102%.
On the press front, the campaign and collection secured over 121 digital and broadcast placements, totaling over 1.8 billion+ media impressions in top-tier outlets such as Kelly & Mark, ABC7, People, Town & Country, Oprah Daily, Women’s Health, and more, amplifying the brand's visibility and reach across prominent media platforms nationwide.
