How Topicals Cracked Beauty Storytelling in Sports
Since Glossier entered basketball and changed the game in 2020, many others have tried and failed to gain a foothold. But Topicals' sports marketing playbook feels promising.
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When a beauty brand wants to launch a campaign to promote a new product in 2025, where does it turn?
To sports, of course.
In this instance, the brand in question is Topicals, the popular beauty industry disruptor founded by Olamide Olowe in 2020.
The LA-based brand, which raised $10 million in a Series A funding round in 2022, quickly built up a reputation for its masterful storytelling and super-identifiable products, which double as marketing and brand discovery tools (see Topicals’ ubiquitous pink eye masks, as an example).
I’ve long seen Topicals akin to a brand like Aimé Leon Dore — equally adept in product development as it is in marketing.
Not only Topicals’ products compelling, but the brand has an aspirational aura of cultural relevance that oozes from everything it touches, from its billboards to its digital campaigns to its sold out fashion week pop-ups to its proud connectivity to Black and West African diasporic culture to the carefully curated list of friends of the brand it frequently works with or brings on its famous influencer trips.
It was only a matter of time, therefore, before Topicals dipped its toes into the world of sport, which has been the single most alluring cultural arena to beauty brands over the past year.
“Smoothest In the Game”
I’m often asked by brand leaders or marketers how they can activate in sports if they can’t afford/don’t want to pay ridiculous money for an official team or league sponsorship.
This is how.
Sport provides myriad storytelling opportunities that brands can leverage in their favour. One thing that increasingly drives consumers mad is when brands are lazy. A brand knows sports bring positive associations, so they release a tacky sports-related product like a football jersey or some imitation sports equipment and think they have done their job.
But the smartest beauty and fashion brands enter sports with intention. Topicals decided to use sports to help launch its latest new product, a bar of body soap under its “Slather” product line, which is a “retinol-infused exfoliating body bar which scrubs away dry skin, texture, and bumps associated with KP, revealing softer skin after just one use,” according to the brand.
Who better to market this skincare product than professional athletes, whose skin and bodies are continually on show, being pushed, tested, scratched, bruised and stretched on the floor, night in and night out.
Topicals tapped WNBA star Lexie Brown of the Seattle Storm, already a well known fashion and beauty lover, along with Jarred Vanderbilt of the LA Lakers (a fashion cool kid in his own right), for a campaign rollout to spread awareness for the new product launch, titled Smoothest In The Game. I like both of these picks because they’re not necessarily the first basketball players who come to mind when you think of the NBA and the WNBA. But they are both players with cultural relevance and natural fits in the Topicals ecosystem.
The brand also decided to go a layer deeper, including college hooper Rian Forrester (USC Trojans) in the campaign rollout, in a post that showed before-and-after images of the product in action.
College basketball remains such a fertile marketing environment which beauty brands still haven’t seemed to fully crack effectively. Certain schools (like USC, Duke or UConn) have such avid fanbases for their women’s programmes and have teenage players who are genuine global stars and social media phenomena in their own right that it seems odd how underutilised they are as marketing partners by beauty brands.
Topicals waited to enter sports until it had a good launchpad to do so. I wish more brands — across beauty and fashion — would consider doing the same.
Why Beauty Brands Flocked to Sports
Sports like basketball now represent a critical marketing arena for beauty brands to compete in.
Up until recently, professional sport was a completely untapped market as far as beauty companies were concerned. All of a sudden, brands woke up to the fact that athletes were indeed some of the most compelling and versatile ambassadors when it comes to marketing the appeal and effectiveness of a range of beauty products.
Whenever I discuss the role the beauty industry plays in sports, particularly basketball, I always draw attention to Glossier, which was an early mover in partnering with the WNBA in 2020 (the league’s inaugural beauty sponsor) and later with USA Basketball Women’s National Team. The brand has activated those partnerships in thoughtful and innovative ways, which I have previously explored in this newsletter.
Since then, there has been an influx of brands, including Sephora, Il Makiage, CeraVe, e.l.f. Cosmetics and NYX Cosmetics, following in their lead with partnerships of their own across different sports, though some of these brands have struggled to cut through the noise in an increasingly congested marketing environment.
It’s not just other beauty brands they’re up against either: fashion brands continue to flock into the sports sponsorship market, as do a range of other corporate entities, all looking to cash in on sports’ booming cultural relevance. Naturally, beauty’s role in all of this has been covered on SportsVerse in previous newsletters, too.
As mentioned earlier, I’m excited to see beauty brands explore the opportunities presented by NIL in the college sports landscape, in a way that goes beyond gifting athletes products. I want to see the next generation of college stars (women and men) show up in campaigns and help brands craft products and marketing efforts that align with their audiences.
This is still a space in sports which is ripe for a disruption.
I’m not surprised that Topicals is the brand at the forefront of this push.
That’s all for today, friends. Thanks for being here.
See you Thursday,
DYM
They remind me of Vacation, whose storytelling and world-building have always been so on point.