Birchbox is a company that started in 2010 and offers a way for subscribers to receive a monthly shipment of cosmetics and beauty samples in the mail. Dubbed “the beauty editor BFF most women wish they had,” the company has recently partnered with the hit CW show Gossip Girl to provide subscribers a special edition box of goodies curated by the show’s makeup and hair department gurus.
This is the first time the company has partnered with a major media outlet to provide customers with a box themed around major events taking place on the show. The Gossip Girl Birchbox will include original content and interviews from the styling teams that bring the looks to life.
Birchbox co-founder Katia Beauchamp said “Ever since we started Birchbox, we had this idea of how it can be an incredible way to collaborate with large brands to reach our customers in an intimate way. So we always had this dream of partnerships where we could take something that isn’t as tangible for a customer, bring it to them, and have an incredible impact for a brand.”
The collaboration campaign also involves viewing parties, hosted in New York and Los Angeles as well as a social media push to generate conversations online. This type of partnership could predict quite a bit about the future of brand integration.
Partnerships such as this one provide brands the ability to come to life and develop an engaging process to customers that is different because they have the context of the brand. The entire landscape of brand marketing is changing and this is just one example of that change. We predict that more partnerships such as the Gossip Girl/Birchbox collaboration will form in the future to position products in new ways and leverage each other’s selling power.
FletcherPR is a national communications firm that specializes in reaching women through the power of media. Headquartered in Knoxville, TN with staff in Nashville & Los Angeles, we are a full-service agency providing strategic public relations, social media and marketing communications services to our clients throughout the U.S.