Cosmetic sales staff use Staff Start app to engage customers…istyle is also on this new beauty bandwagon
Staff Start is a service from Japan that allows sales staff to become online influencers by offering customer service and sales work remotely and it also traces this work and the resulting sales. Among beauty companies, Kosé Corporation has been quick to implement the service. On top of this, with a business tie-up between Staff Start operator Vanish Standard Co., Ltd. and iStyle Inc. having been announced, the utilization of the service in the beauty industry is set to accelerate further.
On e-commerce sites that incorporate Staff Start, beauty staff from offline (real) fashion and beauty stores will be able to post about recommendable matchings or makeup tutorials at any time. Then, based on these posts, the service can output figures representing when a product was sold, what particular product it was, and to whom it was sold.
In other words, Staff Start is an application service that pushes forward the transformation into omnichannel, with the focal point being the sales staff of real brick-and-mortar stores. Currently, while still in the initial stages, its implementation in the fashion industry is progressing. Over 800 brands have incorporated it, including major apparel companies, and it’s being used by around 100,000 sales staff (as of June 2020).
The sales staff simply take a photo of their own coordinated fashion look using the Staff Start app, link it to the respective product information, and select the media to post to, such as e-commerce or their own social media account — and the post is complete. When products are sold via the posts, the sales are linked to the respective staff member, and their sales ranking is updated on the e-commerce site. The resulting sense of achievement helps to motivate staff, and the sales also get allocated to the store they belong to.
According to Yasuaki Onozato, CEO of Vanish Standard Co., Ltd., within 2019, sales originating from postings on Staff Start totaled 41.1 billion yen (US$383.8 million) — a 311% increase from the previous year. In April, the spread of the coronavirus forced many stores to close, but thanks to staff posting coordinated fashion looks daily, some companies achieved e-commerce sales that were 200% of the previous year’s figures of the same month.
The sales made from Staff Start are on average 46.7% of the overall e-commerce sales made by the companies using the service, although for some brands it’s 90%. Onozato explains: “These figures tell us that instead of images of catalog models or hero shots of products taken by pros, these coordinated fashion photos taken by more true-to-life staff are more influential in getting consumers to make a purchase. What gets people to purchase is more a feeling of friendliness and relatability, rather than a feeling of admiration.”
Staff members’ individual pages on Staff Start are also linked to their Instagram accounts, some of which boast over 50,000 followers. Some get asked often about what days they’re in-store, and there are even instances where it’s the Instagram account that inspires customers to visit the real store.
Staff Start’s control screen displays sales achieved through personal social media accounts. Having such incentives can help to raise staff motivation even higher.
In the apparel field, there are already staff members who have sold up to 79.65 million yen (US$743,000) worth of goods in a month, and the number of staff who achieve over 10 million yen (US$93,000) per month is in the hundreds.
One website that has been quick to implement Staff Start is the general beauty info site Maison KOSÉ operated by Kosé Corporation.
Postings about skincare and makeup are contributed by the staff of Kosé’s stores (called “beauty consultants” or “BC”) who have an abundance of knowledge about the company’s products and brands and have a greater familiarity with users compared to influencers. A list of the posts are displayed in the “Staff Contents ” section of the Maison KOSÉ site, and users can filter the posts not only by item or brand but also by attributes such as “generation”, “skin quality”, “skin color” or “eyelids”, allowing them to find posts by BCs who they most relate to.
The contents of the posts are left entirely up to the BCs and are only checked in advance for any inappropriateness. However, they aim for the BC’s unfiltered voices to be exposed to users as much as possible. Kosé strives to make online communication similar to how staff would talk with customers in-store, valuing the perfect balance of formality and casualness.
Encouraging implementation by beauty brands through a business tie-up with istyle
On July 1st this year, Vanish Standard Co., Ltd. announced a tie-up with istyle Inc. , which runs Japan’s largest online review platform @cosme, to have istyle be the exclusive handler of Staff Start integration for beauty brands. istyle, with their business expertise in the beauty field, will be a sales point of contact for Staff Start. In this role, they’ll support the smooth implementation of the service by beauty brands, the revitalization of e-commerce sites through in-store beauty staff, and the integration of real stores with e-commerce.
From here on, they plan to make possible simultaneous postings to istyle Group’s e-commerce site @cosme SHOPPING. Down the road, they’re also planning to link the @cosme product database and Beauty ID database (containing IDs owned by beauty business operators) and visualize all online activity by customers and beauty staff using the marketing tool “Brand Official”, which visualizes user data from the @cosme platform — work on which is currently progressing.
Text: Ching Li Tor
Original text (Japanese): Lina Ono
