Not Just Makeup, But Stability
When the war started, the beauty market didn’t “decline” — it snapped. Shelves emptied, prices jumped, logistics broke. People didn’t stop buying; they started buying in panic.
In that storm, Vivienne Sabó was not the cheapest brand, and not the most premium one. It lived in the in-between: a “trusted, affordable Paris story” that women knew from years of use. This “in-between” became our entire strategy.
While conferences tried to explain the sudden rise of extreme-budget brands with vague theories, we went to the numbers and sliced the market by price corridor, reputation, and repeat patterns. That’s where the real anomaly surfaced.
Panic, Empty Shelves & Broken Signals
The first wave hit hard: people saw prices jump and interpreted it as a signal of collapse. Not “inflation”, but “soon there will be nothing”. So they started hoarding. Supermarkets, marketplaces — anything that looked like “stock” was cleaned out.
Brands reacted defensively: some pulled budgets, others increased prices to slow down sales, giving their supply chains a chance to breathe. But the demand spike created a delayed aftershock: after the panic wave, the market didn’t come back to “normal”.
Instead, it polarized:
Most players looked at brands. I looked at how people were migrating between these bands. That’s how we found why Luxvisage, a cheaper brand, suddenly started to take share not only in volume, but in money — and why that surge was not “magic”, but a structural side-effect of the vacuum.
The Segment No One Saw
The data from mpstats, Selmatics and marketplace panels showed something simple and brutal: the mid-zone was unclaimed. Everyone either screamed in the discount pit or whispered in premium.
Luxvisage didn’t “out-market” anyone. It sat in the right place at the right time: cheap, “good enough”, and always present in the new mental model of crisis-saving.
We mapped three things:
1) how price changes were read as signals, not numbers;
2) how reputation (“this brand has been with me for years”) muted price sensitivity;
3) how marketplaces re-ranked brands based on unit sales, not long-term equity.
That’s where Vivienne Sabó had a hidden advantage: mid-priced, story-backed, historically trusted. The task was not to re-invent the brand — it was to plug it into the newly-formed behavioral layer and make this layer ours.
Competing on Segments, Not Logos
At Socialist, I built a new e-com function around Vivienne Sabó. It wasn’t just a “media plan” or “bid optimization”. It was a segment-first architecture:
• we clustered SKUs and lines by price tiers and perceived value;
• we mapped competitors by corridor, not by brand name;
• we redefined campaigns as “segment dominance” rather than “brand campaigns”.
On top of that, we built a marketplace-native performance loop:
• segment-based bidding and rotation instead of generic brand push;
• creative and offer logic matched to corridor, not to individual SKUs;
• continuous monitoring of share and CTR shifts via mpstats/Selmatics as our “radar”.
The key constraint: we didn’t go all-in on deep discounts. The job was to protect economics, not just win headlines.
Winning Without Burning the Brand
For almost six months, the market tried to explain what happened using the wrong language. Panels invited experts to talk. Hypotheses flew: “new generation taste”, “TikTok influence”, “mystical product-market fit”.
The reality was much colder and much more useful: a structural vacuum in a price band. Once we aligned Vivienne Sabó with that band — with the right SKUs, the right pricing, and the right marketplace posture — the numbers followed.
We didn’t ask people to betray their instincts to save. We simply argued that: “in a crisis, a brand with history and proven quality is not a luxury — it’s insurance.”
Re-framed the market from “brand vs brand” to “price corridor vs behavior”. Identified and named the mid-tier vacuum.
Selected and prioritized SKUs slightly above the cheapest players to occupy the trust-based corridor without collapsing margin.
Built an e-com engine around marketplaces: segmented bidding, creative logic, and continuous share tracking via independent analytics panels.
Switched from “cheap vs expensive” messaging to “trusted vs risky saving”. Positioning shifted from price to reliability and brand history.