Founded in 1995, UK cosmetics brand Lush has built a global empire on an ethos of innovation and ethics. The creator of hand-made products including its iconic bath bombs, has long taken a strong stance on animal testing and responsibly sourced ingredients. In 2021, the company again made global headlines by announcing the closure of several of its social media accounts in response to whistleblower revelations about their impact on young people’s mental health. In an interview with Kolsquare, Lush Communications Manager for France, Belgium and Luxembourg, Chloé Chazot, outlines the company’s approach to KOL Marketing and the impact the closure of its accounts had on its activities.
Our strategy is to create very privileged and authentic relationships with content creators. We have internalized management of these relationships. We don’t work with agencies, our team manage our influencer relationships directly. Strong relationships mean we can control who we send our communications to, how we communicate and to have a community that corresponds to Lush. We are a very diverse brand and we need to have a community that will represent our values, our DNA.
We work with content creators on all product launches and seasonal collections. We present them our new products and if they’re interested we’ll send them a portfolio of test products. The goal is to combine an ambitious and dynamic influence strategy with our values and DNA. We don’t want to generate additional waste. We want to target the people who will be interested in our products. We communicate with them daily.
We are very connected with our influencers and our community and we have a large palette of experiences that we can offer to our influencer community.
We also work with our influencers on ethical campaigns that we organize with various associations around causes such as the environment, animal welfare and human rights. We have a very federated and engaged community of influencers who know our values well, who are committed to Lush and who give visibility to the associations we work with. They allow us to engage their own communities in campaigns, petitions, and to generate awareness. We know it has a very positive impact on traffic in stores, on the website, on sales, but also in terms of notoriety to show our values, our ethics to the general public. We are a committed activist brand, so it’s important for us that other actors carry our messages and our commitments.
The choice of influencers is strategic and crucial because we have an organic approach. We don’t do sponsored posts. We do test our products with the influencers who ask, but we don’t pay for posts or stories with specific wording or captions. We focus on finessing the relationship because if we want the right message to be broadcast, we have to find the influencer who will perfectly match our campaign. The criteria is not necessarily community size. It depends on the subjects, the products. We work with nano and macro influencers. We have a very large and diverse community, so look for influencers with very specific communities. We need to finesse the targeting because we launch a lot of products.
It’s really about knowing the influencers well. If you have a personal relationship with that person, you know if they’re going to like the product or not. You know their editorial line and how they talk about products. It’s an extremely meticulous job that requires a lot of time and very precise targeting.
Data is extremely important. To evaluate the success of a campaign we look at the number of posts, and the audience reached. We also look at the quality of the photo, the influencers’ interactions with their communities. We analyze feedback from the stores who often tell us about the direct impact of influencers’ posts on people who come in saying ‘I saw such and such post’. Have there been more requests from customer service? Are there more interactions with our chat on the website? There are many metrics to analyze that will give a global view because numbers do not necessarily mean everything. Kolsquare helps us a lot because it allows us to find relevant profiles in relation to our campaigns, to really target and get to know the profiles. It saves us a lot of time.
We look for influencers on Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest. It’s very diverse. It could be people who have podcasts. We see influencers as Key Opinion Leaders.
YouTube is the platform we want to push and we are currently overhauling our channel. YouTube gives us more time to explain complex campaigns, to invite guests and to give our associations a voice. You don’t have to have an account on YouTube, you can stop at any time, there’s no infinite scrolling. But if we want to talk about our new collection with its glitter and color we will go to another platform. The goal is not to copy and paste campaigns.
We are planning our first livestream shopping event in October for Halloween. We have created our own video studio and are recruiting our brand ambassadors internally to be presenters. At the moment, we’re going for a short format of 30-40 minutes with questions, presentations of our collection and product demonstrations. It’s going to allow us to talk about our ethical sourcing of ingredients. We’ll program it for the end of the day and stream it on our website. People will be able to click directly to purchase the products we present. The aim is to make it a friendly, convivial moment. It’s super hard to say [how many people will watch]. We don’t know at all. We want to make something that looks like Lush and that will please our community. The goal is to start to establish a good framework to be able to gain a community. We know that it will take time to improve and to achieve the affluence we want.
We still have YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter. We closed those networks almost a year ago now. It’s a reflection that we had already begun a few years ago. With the revelations of Frances Haugen and the Wall Street Journal investigation, it seemed obvious to us that we had to mark the occasion, to show our opposition and our desire to protect our community. The influencers completely understood our decision because we have strong, sincere relationships with them.
Kolsquare is Europe’s leading Influencer Marketing platform, offering a data-driven solution that empowers brands to scale their KOL (Key Opinion Leader) marketing strategies through authentic partnerships with top creators.
Kolsquare’s advanced technology helps marketing professionals seamlessly identify the best content creators by filtering their content and audience, while also enabling them to build, manage, and optimize campaigns from start to finish. This includes measuring results and benchmarking performance against competitors.
With a thriving global community of influencer marketing experts, Kolsquare serves hundreds of customers—including Coca-Cola, Netflix, Sony Music, Publicis, Sézane, Sephora, Lush, and Hermès—by leveraging the latest Big Data, AI, and Machine Learning technologies. Our platform taps into an extensive network of KOLs with more than 5,000 followers across 180 countries on Instagram, TikTok, X (Twitter), Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat.
As a Certified B Corporation, Kolsquare leads the way in promoting Responsible Influence, championing transparency, ethical practices, and meaningful collaborations that inspire positive change.
Since October 2024, Kolsquare has become part of the Team.Blue group, one of the largest private tech companies in Europe, and a leading digital enabler for businesses and entrepreneurs across Europe. Team.Blue brings together over 60 successful brands in web hosting, domains, e-commerce, online compliance, lead generation, application solutions, and social media.
