Podcast transcript
Introduction
Hi, and welcome to another live episode of Marketplace Masters, sponsored by MerchantSpring, your go to for marketplace analytics. We dive deep into the world of ecommerce, addressing the challenges and opportunities that agencies face as they try to improve the performance for their clients.
Paul Sonneveld
I'm Paul Sonneveld and today we're exploring how to succeed in premium beauty on Amazon. Today, I'm thrilled to introduce two esteemed guests from Invinci, Renee Parker and Maria Dane.
Renee is the Co-Founder and Director of Strategy at Invinci, where she offers advisory and specialized execution services to premium consumer brands and investors on Amazon globally. Previously, she led Amazon's UK premium beauty business and has an impressive background in impact investing. Renee is also actively involved with the British Beauty Council advisory board and supports startups as a Huckletree ambassador, angel investor and advisor.
Now, Maria, on the other hand, serves as the partner and head of North America at Invinci. She's the founder and CEO of Amplified Solutions Group, a consultancy that aids companies in enhancing their digital market presence. With a rich experience spending over seven years at Amazon, Maria played pivotal roles in projects relating to packaging innovation and design. She launched luxury beauty globally and headed the emerging brands' program for the consumer category. Known for strategic prowess, Maria is frequently sought after to devise strategies for expanding market presence and ensuring operational efficiencies.
That was a long intro, but, very well, positioned because we truly have at least. Two phenomenal beauty experts with us today, Renee and Maria, thank you so much for joining us today. It's great to have you.
Renee Parker
Thank you for us.
Maria Dane
Thank you.
Paul Sonneveld
I know one of you, Renee, it's late for you. You're based in the UK, and Maria, you're in Seattle, so it's, it's sort of mid-afternoon for you. So thank you, Renee, for staying up late. I hope you have some caffeine going to keep you going throughout this podcast.
So let's dive right into it. And actually, before we do that, I just want to remind our guests that this is a live event. So if you do have questions, we have a little bit of time at the end.
So feel free to throw your questions in the LinkedIn or YouTube comments section and we will try and get them before the end of the show. Right. So let's dive right in. Rene, let's start with you. Let's talk about Amazon 1P versus 3P. What are the fundamental differences between those two platforms? And I think we've covered that in quite a lot of depth but it's specifically from a beauty brand perspective.
Renee Parker
Sure. So if we take a step all the way back and we think about how Amazon wants to be the everything store, I mean, that lends itself to lots of categories and the consumer space and beyond. If we take a look at beauty, Amazon, I mean, here I am describing a category that Maria played a stronghold role in building and creating, but Amazon got 10 plus years ago, starting in the US realized that they were coming up against some blockers and attracting what they would consider premium beauty brands and professional beauty brands to the platform.
And they want all of those categories on Amazon. In particular, premium and professional beauty are the ideal online products. Small, light and expensive. So those are the types of margins that Amazon was hoping to attract, but it took time. So Amazon tried to think about, okay, how could we mirror our business to more look like how the premium beauty world sits out there, the beauty world in general, which is really divided into kind of some significant categories such as consumer, professional, and then premium.
And in some cases, kind of active division, which would sit under professional. So Amazon went ahead starting on the 1P side and created a new category, which at its inception was actually called luxury beauty. Today, we call that premium beauty and luxury beauty is something different. So, they went out and they offered what we would call a gated environment.
So they said, okay, what are the biggest blockers in our conversations with brands? It's kind of a topic around unauthorized sellers, not having a premium enough look and feel from a customer perspective. And what type of service are we going to provide these brands as Amazon? Because they're not like us.
So they created premium. A brand in the U. S. they meet the 1P kind of hurdle of having a brand. So the rest of their distribution of a flight retailers, especially in order to play in. Are they another premium retailers? What is their price point? And what's their overall positioning? If they came to Amazon and they provided enough selection and they met the legal requirements around distribution, Amazon, in some cases, then Welcome them or invite them into this 1P premium beauty program.
So in exchange for kind of higher margins or premium margins, the more reflective margin segment outside of Amazon as well. Brands are welcome. They receive at least some type of limited enhanced service from Amazon in the form of kind of limited account management. They have unauthorized sellers removed on their behalf by Amazon.
And then they receive, kind of a higher treatment. So you'll notice on a premium beauty brand page, you'll see that brand's logo above their product title. When you click on that, that's what takes them to the brand store, not just the byline. They have a higher definition, larger images. rather than bullet points, we're going to see, product description, benefits, uses. And then it's even gated in the sense that there is a lot less, there's almost no advertising allowed on a premium beauty page. So that was luxury beauty now called premium beauty. And that exists globally on Amazon, but starting in, I want to say 2019.
So I helped. Bring this program to the UK and Europe. Amazon was realizing, God, it's taking us a long time. You know, I, me and the Maria's of the world were out knocking on the doors of the big conglomerates and, you know, people still are, trying to bring and attract premium brands over to Amazon but one of the big hurdles. But Amazon was facing as they're trying to penetrate this market was brands wanting to have control over their price. So brands would say, yeah, we'd love that you help us clean up this channel. We're buying into the storytelling and the premium look and feel, but I'm not comfortable with you owning my price.
And so Amazon created something called 3P premium. It's become really big in the US actually. So it exists outside of the U.S. the UK and Europe. It's really popular in the US that's where Amazon actually almost mirrors the 1P version of premium beauty, but on the FBA side for an incremental fee.
But on that 3P premium side, brands are able to gain most of the benefits they would on 1P, but they can remain sellers. And I guess the last much more niche and more recent option that was launched in 2020 in the U.S. And more recently in 2022 in the U.K. Europe is something called luxury stores that actually sits on the 3P side.
I think it was in a lot of ways. Amazon's answer to Alibaba's luxury team all, which is also from a customer perspective, is how can we create a more gated and even in more premium environment. So the detail pages there look even more beautiful. There's no advertising. So if you search for a brand either in high-end fashion or high-end beauty that participates in the luxury beauty stores section, it will actually take you directly to that brand store.
I have my doubts, honestly, about the longevity of that program or really the use. I think it sits so far outside of the customer use case and the customer journey, but I think it could be a good option for brands who are really looking at Amazon from a defensive strategy and wanting to just neutralize kind of any threat that Amazon could propose and really improve kind of their brand equity on the channel. But premium beauty 1P and premium beauty 3P are both very viable options, both commercially and from a brand protection perspective.
Paul Sonneveld
That's great. That is a fantastic overview, Renee. And it's really Interesting to hear how Amazon has really tried to build its proposition to really, I guess, convince those luxury beauty brands to come onto the platform and trying to cater to both kind of the marketing aspect of those brands, as well as the pricing and control thereof, as you mentioned before, through, the 3P program.
Just a clarification question from my side for you, Renee, which is, you know, we're talking about luxury, we're talking about premium beauty, we're throwing sort of terms around. What's Amazon's definition of those terms? You know, for those, it might be beauty brands watching and going, well, am I considered to be a luxury or premium beauty? Or, you know, am I in that? Can I get access to this exclusive kind of part of Amazon? And what's the definition there?
Renee Parker
Sure. So from a premium beauty perspective, so not luxury stores, but the premium beauty perspective, it's interesting. I remember the tenants when I was at Amazon in the UK for four years, starting six years ago.
And even some of the definitions that we had to serve as a tenant of whether a brand qualifies for premium or not probably wouldn't hold today. Amazon used to look a lot at distribution kind of understanding that, okay, we, as Amazon are probably not going to be like the credibility marker out the gate.
Is this brand premium or not? So we would really look to that brand's existing distribution. Are they in Harrods or Selfridges? Are they in Nordstrom or where are they? That said, I would just say since then distribution has become so, you know, the pyramid has been disrupted and disjointed.
So beyond, I think it's one factor that they look at beyond that they're going to be looking at price point and some of that feeds into the positioning of the brand, but it also speaks to the margins that that category commands. So a brand needs to be able to play with it within that scope. And I guess the last bit is where, you know, who would that brand consider its competitors?
What's the look and feel? So that's premium beauty. In terms of luxury stores, that is really some of the skincare brands that play in luxury store are ReVive, Dr. Barbara Sturm. So these are definitely going to be brands that are super, super high-end, sometimes independent, but wouldn't have to be Amazon would love to be working with LVMH.
LVMH would probably not love to be working with Amazon and is not. So I think it's a bid to go after the super, super high-end on conglomerates, but they've had more success so far and really high-end from a price point and distribution perspective, indie brands, but it's, it still remains quite niche. It actually started, so the brand that started luxury stores was actually a fashion brand. It was Oscar de la Renta, so it's talking super, super high-end.
Paul Sonneveld
Very interesting. Yeah, I was going to ask just sort of the last sort of high level question around. You know, Amazon's always big on building the catalogue and giving people choice and assortment.
Where do you feel they are on that journey to offer luxury beauty? You mentioned, obviously, they're not working, or premium beauty. They're not working with the likes of LVMH yet. Do you, sort of an outside in point of view, do you see, still big gaps in terms of their assortment when it comes to premium beauty? Do you feel like they're a little bit underweight in certain areas?
Renee Parker
Absolutely. I think they're not working with the Estee Lauder brands. You know, Amazon's made strides into the Les Coteaux portfolio. Some of the L'Oreal Lux portfolio, but there's still major holdouts. That if you think about from a market cap perspective, like not having Clinique or Mac, those are not gaps you can fill no matter how many great like buzzy up and coming brands you sign.
That said, especially in the US, I think the concept of beauty on Amazon and premium beauty within the beauty industry has like totally jumped the shark. So I think that brands now, most of them outside of these massive conglomerate holdouts where the decision will be made between Paris and Seattle.
Most brands understand that Amazon's going to be a part of their journey, and we actually see them bringing that forward. And coming to Amazon sooner just because from an end customer perspective, especially in the U. S., Amazon is so prevalent as Obviously, as a product search engine, as a research vehicle, and as a massive commercial opportunity, I think there's also rightly the fear that if you do not come and put your stake on your real estate on Amazon, absolutely, someone else will.
And then Maria and I are tasked with going and cleaning it up, which is so much harder than starting fresh. In the UK and Europe, we are not at that level of penetration. Amazon is ubiquitous here but it's not as ubiquitous as it is in the U. S. So I think there’s still more learning. But having worked through the pandemic and brands that wouldn't take your phone call and they’re calling and, and yeah, we're definitely living in a different world that we were just 3 years ago, 5-6 years ago.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, great. Well, let's dive into some of the more practical aspects of beauty. And I want to sort of turn to you, Maria. I think we all know about Amazon product listings and the basics there. But when it comes to premium beauty products, in your mind, what are the components that really make up like an effective and optimized listings?
You know, what are you particularly for agencies that are active in this space? What's your counsel in terms of things to pay attention to and how to think about it?
Maria Dane
I think before answering that question, we got to have to take a step back sometimes and ask ourselves, why are we doing this? What does the optimized product listing look like? But before you even get there, why would we optimized product listings to begin with. So essentially what we need to do when we work on optimization specifically for luxury beauty brands or beauty brands in general, number one, you need to do this to drive discoverability. And there's certain components of the optimized product listings that do that for you. So the titles. that have to be optimized, the product description that optimized, the bullets that contain very specific information.
A lot of the times, you know, we see brands kind of going through the motions and putting in the information, not understanding why necessarily they're doing this. So all of this drives your discoverability, you know, the title being the primary driver, but of course you have your descriptions, you have your bullets, there's so much information that you can put in, then you can pump it up with the keywords. Whenever we see brands that don't take advantage of that, that's a pretty massive miss that could be very well taken care of very, very quickly.
And, you know, at the end of the day, when you talk about discoverability, why is discoverability important? I'm a big fan of data and I'm a big fan of figuring out what are some data points that tell us maybe sometimes, but, it's traditionally well-known that the top 3, 4, 5 listings account for about 64% of all clicks on amazon.com. And about 70% of customers never look that past that first front page and search results. So driving your discoverability and taking care of your product listings, it's an incredibly serious subject and it's an incredibly serious topic.
So ensuring that you, it's not set it and forget it. I'm ensuring that you're looking at your titles, ensure that you look at what is in your title, maybe even on quarterly basis and changing the information based on the keywords based on what the customer is searching for based sometimes even on seasonality is incredibly, incredibly important. So that's just one of the parts of optimized product listings. That's specifically particularly important for especially for beauty brands and luxury beauty brands.
A few things to mention too, when we talk about the product listing itself. The product display pages, the rich product display pages, that the delicious photography that you see the lifestyle images that put you exactly where you need to be as you're looking through them. You know, we shop with our eyes, sometimes we don't really read through some of the content. So the listing is discovered, it's in front of the customer, ensuring that your primary images are there to specs their best in class on Amazon, ensuring that you have your unique selling proposition that is baked into your images and not just your descriptors.
Because a lot of customers again, you're scrolling through your phone. You're probably not going to be looking at every single bullet point, but you will shop with your eyes. You know, and making sure that your features and benefits that are baked into your images showcase the brand that you are versus just putting in some information that can apply to a lot of different brands. That's incredibly important.
So improving that conversion after you drive discoverability, all of that goes to optimize product listing. When we work with brands, we tend to plug ourselves into the marketing. We tend to plug ourselves into the department. You know, the product development.
Sometimes we talk to brand owners and we take the time to truly listen and kind of become an extension of the brand, because we want to learn what makes you a little bit more unique, because that's exactly how the consumer is looking at the information. And that's exactly how they're ingesting the information as well.
So making sure that you understand the whys, the why, why do you optimize lists? It's why do you work on improving conversion? And what are some of the levers that we'll probably discuss today to that accelerate that performance? Once the basics are best in class, I think that's incredibly, incredibly important. So the takeaway here is take your product listings very, very seriously.
Renee Parker
I think to add to Maria on that, something that surprises premium brands is they're used to having like a curation happen for them. So they're used to being sat next to brands on shelf or a digital shelf where the work has already been done. But on Amazon's digital shelf, If you're USP, you're trying to sell retinol or vitamin C, you can be sure there's going to be a lot of other cheaper options sitting right next to you.
So yeah, it goes back into the why you have to not just tell people why you're better and why you can command a higher price. But like Maria said, you have to show them who you are and who your brand is, and why you're, you're premium. So I think brands need to look even more premium on Amazon and be even richer and more delicious in their imagery to really stand out and command the prices.
Paul Sonneveld
I think that's a great segment into sort of the next thing I was going to ask Maria which is around brand stores and A-Plus pages. How do they play into this whole conversation as specific from a beauty angle point of view?
Maria Dane
I'll come up with some fun facts again. So A-Plus, when we talk to her, a lot of our brands, the question is what does A-Plus do for me, what is the information going to contain? So think of it as your increased sales. You put up A-Plus pages, your sales go up by 3 to 10%, which is great. And the reason why you put up A-Plus pages is you are educating the consumer and the customer about your product and your brand. You have that opportunity. Whereas in the luxury retailer, you know, you have the representatives of the brand, there's the sales associates that come through, they give you the samples and they walk you through the product line that is exactly what A-Plus. Really great executed A-Plus will do for you.
So essentially when we talk about this, when we talk about the customers, I think another really great point was and this was on Amazon through gives us a study 25% of shoppers currently feel that there is not enough information to make a decision on buying an “expensive” but a luxury or premium brand on Amazon.
So educating them and making sure that you are putting in that content, that's an incredibly simple way of adding this information via the A-Plus modules. And again, when we talk about the modules, we actually have our proprietary way of putting together the modules, but we'll talk about this here. We always talk with our, you know, we speak with our brand owners and we talk about the brand story. So that goes back to our initial conversations with the brand owners because we want to get excited.
There's a reason why the brand is alive. So the customer and the consumer needs to know that as well, you know, make sure that your modules includes the brand story, make sure that you double down on key product benefits and please use lifestyle photos. Use lifestyle photos that put me exactly where you want me to be. That, you know, into literally into the middle of your brand or into the middle of the flower field, that this is where you want me to be because that's what you're trying to portray.
Make sure they talk about the features because that sets you apart from the rest of the competition. And as Renee said, if you are charging premium for your products, this is exactly where you talk about why the price is a premium price. Make it educational. We often think that consumer knows exactly how to use certain products. You know what? They probably don't. Or if they think that they do, they're probably using it incorrectly.
So making sure that you are very softly guiding them along the sort of like the steps of what to do and how to do without being too preachy or without being too sort of full of hot air, but making sure that you basically give them that information is incredibly important through A-Plus modules.
And, you know, the last module on A-Plus to what about cross selling? What about the entire ranges of products that you have? Make sure that you showcase this information and make sure that basically the brand puts their foot forward when they talk about the product and makes it easier for the consumer to make that decision and to jump on the product.
And at the end of the day, with A-Plus and the brand store, the brand store is your leverage. You know, it's the legitimacy factor on Amazon. Sometimes you think that the consumer may know a lot about you, but maybe they don't, you know, maybe they want to know that this is the brand that's selling the merchandise and it's not somebody coming in that's a reseller or this is the product that's not sold. You know, is it authorized? Should it be sold on Amazon?
So the brand store guarantees that they will see that yes, this is a legitimate brand and look at all of the variety of products are there, but it's also a storefront within Amazon that essentially allows you to not just to have legitimacy, but add a little bit of that branding and a little bit more of that personalized information. So it's incredibly, incredibly important.
Paul Sonneveld
Thanks, Maria. And I can imagine these conversations with beauty companies are probably kind of easier because they live in that world of marketing and branding and doing all of that. But I want to talk about, I guess maybe a more controversial, aspect, which is around maybe Advertising and promotions, maybe I'm sure advertising less controversial, but certainly when it comes to promotions, deals, pricing, the premium brands are very sensitive to price, price perception, brand, all of that. Renee, maybe one for you. Like how do you talk to your clients about this, you know, and how should premium beauty brands think about both advertising and promotions and pricing implicitly.
Renee Parker
Sure. I think it again comes back to starting a conversation with a brand and the decision makers at that brand, which is why are we doing this? Why are we doing Amazon? I think with premium beauty brands, more than other types of brands, you within kind of a spectrum of very offensive, acquisition focused reasons and strategy to be on Amazon versus a more defensive kind of like channel cleanup reason and everything in between, you'll see that beauty brands, unlike other categories, brands will really sit sometimes closer to the defensive side.
If that's the case, we're still going to want to think about brand and market share protection, share voice protection. So, Beauty brands definitely need to expect to invest on Amazon, but potentially that's a lower level from a percentage perspective of reinvestment. We're focusing more on maintaining share of voice on branded keywords. In that case, maybe they are participating only in tier one events. So, you know, black Friday, Cyber Monday and prime day.
But as we move up, to where most brands sit, which is kind of in the middle or of more offensive or acquisition focused. Yeah, then we're thinking about market share again but taking market share from competitors, as well as protecting our own, definitely participating and tier one events on Amazon on the marketing calendar, but then also layering in participation and tier two events as it makes sense for the brand for Mother's Day, Father's Day, Valentine's Day.
I think it is important though, sometimes with premium beauty brands to keep them a bit honest, because if we just look at the statistics, there's I mean, there's a lot of promotion that goes on in the category outside of Amazon, a lot more than I think sometimes the category wants to admit.
So I think kind of like Maria is so good at is like having very kindly but having your facts and figures there. When it comes to how many phone calls did I get when I was working at Amazon? I was like, you're discounting me, you're discounting me. And I was like, well. You know, I'm not allowed to get into the art of proprietary pricing at Amazon, but we are not funding a promotion on you. We're matching like widely reputable retailers. So your time would be best spent picking up the phone and talking to others.
So I think that brands, get excited too, because when Amazon, when you don't know anything about Amazon, it seems like this black box and it still is to all of us to some degree. But it's also with the tools that are out there today, one of the places where you really couldn't measure the outputs and get tons of data on the back of the inputs. And so I think as brands start to see success. We've worked with brands that have started to be like, we just want to clean this up. We just want to take it easy. And then guess what? They start to make money. And then it's shocking how very much the tune changes and they think, all right, this is interesting. Like, how can we make a goal for this? And advertising is obviously a huge, a huge part of that as our promotion.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Yeah. I want to ask just a very practical question. I mean, in my previous life, I spent many years in health and beauty, in mass retail, not in e-commerce, but when it comes to sort of big promotional events like we have Prime Day coming up, I think early or early to mid-October. Like, how do you position that event in the mind of a beauty brand? Because I imagine there's a, you can get some pushback around reluctance to discount heavily and not kind of drive down that sort of price perception of the brand. How do you tackle those topics with your, with your clients? Maria or Renee, feel free to jump in.
Maria Dane
I can jump into it.
Renee Parker
Sure.
Maria Dane
Especially when it comes to big events, right, or funding for big events, we do have conversations, honest conversations about what does that actually do for you? What are we looking for? A lot of the time, these big events are customer acquisition tools. So how much does a brand's spend? How much does the company spend on acquiring a customer? Right? How much do they spend on acquiring a return customer?
So ensuring that you have these conversations and ensuring that appropriate budgets are allocated, but also giving our brands, giving our clients information that they need to take to their finance departments or to sort of talk a little bit more about the idea of if we are going to double down on Prime Day.
We're going to acquire a lot of customers that truly wouldn't come to our brand to begin with, but we'll utilize different resources given to us by Amazon by marketing toward those individuals that made a purchase by maybe, making sure that they know that we have a subscribe and basically future purchases that they might have, or they might make post that initial prime day. So it's not just about making the big sales numbers, but why do you make the jump and why have those big sales numbers and what is behind it and what is truly the goal of the brand at the time? That's also, that's very important.
Paul Sonneveld
That absolutely makes sense. I mean, certainly, positioning as an opportunity is definitely critical. So, looking at the clock, we're past half an hour, so we should sort of get into wrap-up mode here. Maybe the last question I want to finish up with today is really around the bigger picture perspective. You know, clearly in Luxury Beauty, like anything, there are brands that really succeed, they win, and there are brands that fail. Not everyone can be a winner, right? In your experience, I mean, you've been in the space operating both on the Amazon side and now on the outside for a long time. You know, are there specific attributes, strategies, or actions that you see that the winning brands take? What sets them apart from those that maybe don't fare as well?
Renee Parker
From my perspective, I think I'm the first person. Even when I was at Amazon to some degree, if you get a brand that feels, it feels too early, it feels like the stakeholders aren't fully bought into what Amazon is. I am a big proponent of waiting. I think that Amazon is not a game to take lightly, it is all in.
We as, you know, people living in the Amazon ecosystem know how painful it is to operate with Amazon. It's not cheap. It's not easy. So I tell brands, it's like, it's either both feet in or it's just wait, it doesn't work well when it's one foot in one foot out. I think it's also brands just trying to remove premium brands, trying to remove emotion, and preconception. I mean, there's a lot of fear. So trying to stay level-headed and make decisions, make great business decisions while really also taking actions that maintain the integrity of the brand. You know, we've run up against founders who said, I don't want to do A-Plus content, or I don't like what you've done here because it's starting to look better than my own website. And that makes me uncomfortable.
So sometimes it's almost excellent drives fear of cannibalization or fear of like, where is this all headed? Is Amazon going to take it over? So I think it's kind of talking through that and getting stakeholders on side and then just really understanding and setting the right expectations that it's going to take time. It's going to take money from an Ad's perspective and investment in content is not going to happen overnight. So I've seen the best success with brands who coming from the brands themselves that are coming from. So I don't come from a retail background. I was a banker for a long time before I went to Amazon. So I don't know what premium beauty is supposed to look like. I don't know.
But I think almost premium brands need to, in some ways, almost forget like how they think things should be or how they are elsewhere. And just take Amazon for face value. So I'm right. This is what, this is the game. This is what we're up against. This is the opportunity. Are we in? Okay, now let's really understand what the levers are and let's give it our best shot and let's go.
So I think it's almost a kind of an understanding and a commitment level and saying, let's do this. So brands that kind of go on and say, let's do this and you've got to have great product. I mean, at the end of the day, traffic drivers bring people to the page. Content does what it can, but the beauty, why investors love beauty is because it's so sticky, right? Tie, repeat, purchase, just refill and that comes to the product. So great brands will do well. And some of that comes from the brand itself. There's nothing we could do on that front. We just give brands the best chance on Amazon.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Thanks, Renee. Maria, any final words, or things you'd add to that in terms of what makes brands the winning brands really stand out? What makes them successful?
Maria Dane
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. To echo Renee, the brands that do really well understand that Amazon is not a lifeline. It's a long-term strategy and it's a long time strategy. So knowing and giving the resources to ensure that that success is going to essentially happen. You know, it's demand planning. It's finance who is involved. It's not your, you know, it's not the lowest sales manager down on the totem pole that's handling the Amazon account.
It's truly somebody who has a background in e-commerce and strategy DTC, or maybe Amazon strategy from another brand or another place. but it's making sure that again, as Renee had said, and as I've mentioned this already, it's not, it's definitely not a lifeline. It is a long-term strategy. Those brands that understand it, they double down and they dig in their heels and that's when we go to work.
Paul Sonneveld
Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Maria and Renee for appearing on the show today. You've been very generous with your knowledge and expertise. And in some senses, I feel like we've only just covered some of the surface here. I think there's some really big, for example, I'd love to get into how do you maximize subscribe and save in this whole category and optimize for customer lifetime value? I think a very interesting topic, but maybe we should talk about doing a follow-up session in a couple of months time.
For those viewers who operate in the beauty space and either looking to partner with you or looking to tap into your advice, what is the best way to get in touch?
Renee Parker
Probably on LinkedIn. So I'd probably message either one of us on LinkedIn. That would probably be the best place to do so. And yeah, we do have a history of kind of partnering with, partner agencies who are maybe based in the US but don't have international operations. Because, while we're global now, we started out in the UK and Europe. So I have a lot of expertise in that area.
Paul Sonneveld
Excellent. Well, thank you, Marie and Renee. It was great to have you on the show today. Thanks very much.
Renee Parker
Thank you.
Maria Dane
Thank you for having us.
Paul Sonneveld
Thank you all for tuning in to today's enlightening episode on premium beauty on Amazon. If you're hungry for more, don't forget to visit our website for our video-on-demand library and access a treasure trove of Amazon insights.
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