As a beauty marketer with experience building emerging brands within larger companies, Alexa Lombardo joined 10 year-old startup FACEGYM as chief marketing officer last summer. She was attracted to the energy around the brand.
“We’ve got a product that just lends itself well to going viral,” says Lombardo. “Being at a brand where that can happen at any moment – it’s not necessarily even orchestrated by us – is pretty cool. My job is to really harness and amplify that.”
Founded in London by Inge Theron in 2014, FACEGYM is a “performance wellness brand” that offers products and services that give customers a face refresh beyond your traditional facial. The company started with one location and now has almost 20 global locations in the U.S., the UK, and Australia, and sells products online. The brand has spas in Soho Farmhouse and Claridge’s.
Lombardo explains that the virality of the brand makes her job easier, but it also adds pressure. “How do we cultivate doing that intentionally? How do we have more control over it when it does happen? How do we make sure that we’re prepared to jump on the opportunity and participate in the conversation or to amplify it even more?”
Prior to joining FACEGYM, Lombardo held senior marketing positions at Estée Lauder, Unilever, Bobbi Brown, and more. Brand Innovators caught up with Lombardo from her office in London to talk about content creation, partnering with creators, and customer archetypes. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
How do you see the creative process transforming?
Brands like Rhode Skin are just skyrocketing to success and their creative looks like it could have been shot on an iPhone. We’re going to see more of that. There is a misconception that it just won’t look as good. But you just need to know how to make it look the way it’s meant to look. That’s what’s challenging. It’s totally upending traditional creative processes. That’s a learning curve for all of us. Before you could never do this lo-fi approach, but now it’s okay. It’s fine to do a big production if it’s a Super Bowl ad, but most of the content that’s being shared today is lo-fi.
I’m really excited, not just for FACEGYM, but to see all brands explore this more seriously. We are cutting, editing, taking, posting organically and then putting that into paid all in real time, all in partnership with a lot of really amazing creators. For a lean team, it’s a lot of hands-on coordination. It can feel a bit like we’re drinking from a fire hose, but that is the trade-off when you enter a brand that isn’t necessarily part of a larger conglomerate.
Can you talk about the mini-brand refresh you did when you joined the company?
What is FACEGYM? When you say, it’s a gym, it’s a workout for your face, people immediately love the concept but then they don’t get what that is. It’s definitely not a traditional facial, but at least it grounds someone’s understanding in what we do. FACEGYM is either a complement to or in place of a facial. The benefit is instant glow when your microcirculation has enhanced your muscle.
We are an aesthetics business and that wasn’t necessarily being fully communicated. We really have amped up the communication around the services. We’ve got the skincare but now we are building how we market the services, the skincare and the tools, which are part of every workout. We have different customer bases and different customer archetypes, not even by region, but really by location.
Can you talk more about what you mean by location?
I had my team go into every location, talk to customers and studio managers, then walk around the neighborhood of every location and hand out starter packs. We want to be the place you go as part of your Saturday or Sunday morning routine. We’ve got almost 20 customer archetypes – The Chelsea Girly, the Upper East Side Girl, etc.
She’s fairly affluent, has a high household income, is well-educated and is a city dweller. She lives an active lifestyle. The ones who have kids have their mom crew and that’s how they share information. There’s a younger demographic that’s really on the rise, especially with our services. She might be in college. She has a high disposable income, but also she’s taking her mom to FACEGYM. Our brand has sort of a cultish following. She likes what she likes, but she also likes that she is in the know and is doing something that’s maybe slightly different from what the other girls are doing when they’re just going for their regular facials.
Can you talk about how you are educating consumers about the brand?
We are teaching her to mimic the moves you would get in our studio. We’ve done this really awesome 28-day challenge in the past that we’re trying to reinvigorate right now. It’s really exciting to figure out why this challenge worked before and what we can do to make it more relevant for today.
We’re starting out with getting our team members to do it. It’s really going to be about showing the results. We haven’t necessarily led with the like side-by-side before and after photos. That transformation is what we really want to bring to the forefront. This is just making it a little bit more fun and playful, but also kind of like a BTS, which we know does really well in that TikTok environment with that customer.
Is TikTok a big channel for your brand?
Before, Instagram was our main focus. Now we’re doing it mainly for TikTok. We are going for that wow, shock factor. We’re trying to do more of it. Before, it was very much about using the moves or just a single product. Now we’re trying to tie them together. The other part of the challenge is we have this 28-day active blast, which is an encapsulated form of vegan collagen. We are now having our team incorporate the product with the moves and show how they complement each other. So you’re getting that whole 360º proposition of the brand, the moves, and the products. This isn’t about product or workout or tools, it’s about all of them working together. The more of these participatory moments or rituals we can create, the more we make consumers want to participate.
Can you share an example of going viral?
Influencer Jake Shane is an original fan of the brand. Our social media manager – who is so fantastic – started this conversation with him organically to the point that whenever he comes in, she not only gives him a gift bag of our product, but builds a very cute personal thing. Last time, she gave him a plushy octopus. It’s a very personal relationship. She doesn’t lead with FACEGYM. She asks him if he has any travel coming up to see how we can fit into his life. It’s very organic.
So Jake comes in. He loves it. He wants to come in again and asks if he could bring in his friend Alix Earle. They come in together and see the best of the best trainers. They then both post about it on both Instagram and TikTok and talk about it on Alix’s Hot Mess podcast. It was all completely organic so we really hopped on it. We created our own content. The more we can cultivate these moments, the better. We try to think about the ways that we could turn this into not just one piece of content, but a storm of content. That’s how I run all of our paid, which is really different from a lot of brands who have a team working on organic and a team working on paid. We have a content creation team.
Can you talk about how the content creation team works?
They are creators themselves. They create content and watch what other creators are creating that mention FACEGYM. We’re all thinking about how we then take that and work it into paid. We very rarely run paid stuff that wasn’t created for organic already. All of our Meta, TikTok, it’s all organic that goes into paid. Maybe we do different edits of it, but I try to embed organic into every decision that we make. If this influencer is coming in repeatedly, instead of reaching out to another one, let’s just bring her in. That’s our approach to building those influencer relationships, whether they’re nano, micro or mega. It’s all done that way.
How has your background helped prepare you for this role?
I started my career in corporate strategy for Estée Lauder working on the transformation initiatives team. We were defining omnichannel for the organization doing a project called Amazing Retail that would become a global retail channel. We thought about designing the stores of the future. What does the future consumer experience look like? How do we connect it with what we’re doing on .com and other channels? It gave me a bird’s eye view of the customer journey. Then I went into brand management and global marketing roles at Estée Lauder, Bobby Brown, Tom Ford, and then at Unilever for Living Proof. All the brands that I was working on started out as acquisitions or licensing roles. I was working for smaller but fast-growing brands within these large corporations.
Then I started consulting on my own, working directly with founders to build their brands off the ground. I had the opportunity to work with some super fast-growing brands to scale the business or to grow the business to raise their next big investment. I joined these organizations at very specific inflection points to build the strategy and then execute. It’s similar at FACEGYM. It’s a 10 year-old startup that was at a tipping point when I joined where we needed to build a strategy to scale the business. It needed to be a sound and stable strategy but it also had to be nimble and flexible so that we could run with whatever worked.
