Meet your customer where they want to shop.
On the latest episode of the Omnichannel Marketer, I had the pleasure of talking with Sarah McNamara, Executive Vice President & General Manager at Peter Thomas Roth Clinical Skin Care and Naturally Serious Skin.
Sarah is a beauty industry veteran, having worked at Unilever, L’Oreal, and grew her own beauty brand, Miracle Skin Transformer to $35M in revenue before selling it.
Now she oversees Peter Thomas Roth.
Peter Thomas Roth started in a doctor’s office, but is now a retail powerhouse.
It was one of the first brands to launch with Sephora when it came to the US market, and also is present in Sephora locations around the world.
Other key channels for Peter Thomas Roth are Ulta Beauty, Amazon, and QVC.
Sarah’s philosophy is that you need to be where the customer is.
That is highly dependent on demographics.
PTR is a legacy brand that historically skews to an older demographic.
So retail and QVC are big channels for them.
Each channel has a unique offering for the demographic that frequents it.
And the spread in Ulta is very different from Sephora.
She loves department stores herself, but sees it as a shrinking business.
Beauty is constantly evolving and experiencing unprecedented digital change.
As Sarah says, “You snooze, you lose.”
To that end, PTR also has a DTC presence and is active on social media to cater to some Gen X, Z, and even Alpha customers.
Her team is actively tinkering with Tiktok shops.
She was also relatively early to Amazon, compared to Clinique, another legacy brand that only launched on Amazon a few weeks ago.
Sarah views the DTC site as a window into the brand and is in midst of an exciting website revamp going live in August.
The PTR website serves loyalists, but she also realizes that every channel has its loyalists.
“Some people really just want to buy on Amazon. Others only at Sephora.”
At the end of the day, Sarah shares that good marketing is about “understanding where your customers are and making it easy for them to buy in those channels.”
Thanks Sarah for sharing your experience and insights.
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