Beauty is more than skin deep

Building a digital-first brand isn’t for the faint of heart. Creating the product and launching a store are often the most straightforward steps. The challenge—and the opportunity—come from taking your initial audience and building that into a thriving community.

BK Beauty is one of these digital-first brands that is finding success through innovative beauty products, engaging content, and a focus on community engagement. Co-founder Lisa Jauregui started as a MAC Cosmetics trainer and YouTube creator before deciding to create a business around her custom-made makeup brushes. Today, BK Beauty’s product portfolio includes a growing list of new beauty tools and makeup products that help make application effortless and inspire creativity while celebrating beauty inside and out.

Word of mouth is critical to any digital-first brand. BK Beauty co-founder Paul Jauregui likes to refer to the business as “audience-first,” and customer feedback is one of the main ways to connect with their audience.

The Problem

Each positive review is a potential future sale. They’re also one of the best tools to give your audience a voice and connect them with your brand in a profound, meaningful way. The problem for BK Beauty was that their review platform wasn’t delivering the number of reviews they needed to deliver on their ecommerce goals.

Paul said their previous review platform was difficult to manage and use. The result was a bottleneck in making changes to their review request flows, compounded by their lack of integration with BK's marketing automation platform, Klaviyo. Beyond administrative headaches, Paul knew that the platform was difficult for their customers to leave reviews and even more difficult to leave reviews with photos or videos.

“For many months, I knew that we were with the wrong provider. But it was one of those things that was always on the back burner for a ‘right time’,” Paul added.

As a brand owner, Paul said that his main focus was on collecting as many quality reviews as possible—but he had concerns about switching based on how bulky their previous platform was.

Making the switch

Paul said he realized they were at a critical point where their previous provider wasn’t the right fit as their business continued to scale quickly. He was looking for the “window of opportunity” to open when he connected with our team.

“One of the things when looking at Junip and having conversations with the team was that they helped me see that migrating off of a platform is not as daunting a task as it seemed at the time—and that was my biggest hesitation,” Paul said.

Paul said that the Klaviyo integration and customization options with Junip were an improvement over their existing provider.

“We re-engineered our review request flows and redesigned how the emails look when we’re soliciting for reviews. There was a lot of leveling up that we did there that came into play with Junip,” Paul said.

Junip helped BK Beauty remove the constraints driving down conversions, enabling them to prioritize their focus and optimize their marketing automation efforts.

“There’s still a lot more that is on the roadmap in terms of what we want to dive back into to even further increase our conversion metrics,” Paul said.

“Migrating to Junip allowed us to focus on our review collection strategy and gave us the control and the tools to dive in ourselves and really map it to our brand in a very customized way.”

-Paul Jauregui, Co-founder @ BK Beauty

The Result

Paul said that switching review platforms was something he should have taken off the back burner earlier.

“Now that we’re on the other side of it, I’m so happy I did because it was such an easy transition. My expectations for that transition were that it was going to be a burden, it was going to be a tough switch no matter who I chose to move to,” Paul said. “But I found on the other side that it was an easy transition. It gave me the control and flexibility to really dial in and focus on making the best experience for my customers.

Since switching to Junip a year ago, BK Beauty has seen some impressive improvements across key metrics, including:

• 34.10% increase in review submissions
• 307.14% increase in reviews with photos or videos
• 24% increase in storefront conversion rate
• 30% bump in average order value (AOV)

Social proof in action

BK Beauty leverages its positive reviews in its social media content. Their social team selects reviews to embed in posts to turn customers into advocates and help with converting carts into sales.

Paul said that using the reviews in external content is just part of how they help drive the brand’s success.

“Every time a review comes in, we blast it out to the entire internal team. It’s the pulse that we need to keep our finger on,” Paul added.

Today

BK Beauty continues to scale its sales while building meaningful relationships with its audience. Paul said that their success comes from telling the story of their customers’ experiences through their reviews.

Their product is incredible—and the reviews speak to that every day. After nearly 5,000 reviews collected, the average is 4.95 stars, and Paul said they’re scaling that up significantly.

"It’s such a critical piece of the puzzle. Reviews are how we tap into our audience and influence what we do and how we position our products. Junip allowed us to clear the runway to make it easy for our customers to share that information with us,” Paul said. “I’m very confident that the Junip platform will help us collect, curate, and leverage our reviews in a way that will serve us as we continue to scale over time.”