A fast-growing China domestic cosmetics brand

Merely five years since its debut in 2016, Perfect Diary has made its reputation as one of the top cosmetics brands domestically and internationally. The 9.9 Tmall Shopping Festival in 2018 could be regarded as an important milestone for Perfect Diary, where the brand came first in sales volume in the beauty and makeup category for the first time, surpassing foreign brands such as Maybelline and L’Oréal.

For Tmall’s 11.11 Single Day Shopping Festival in 2019, Perfect Diary took only 28 minutes to exceed the total Single Day sales of 2018, and was the first cosmetics brand on the platform to achieve a turnover of more than 100 million RMB (€12.98 million). There is no doubt that Perfect Diary is now one of the dark horses among Chinese cosmetics brands.

Social Marketing is the essence of Perfect Diary’s digital strategy

The key to Perfect Diary’s success is actually worth learning by whatever brands hoping to gain a share of China’s e-commerce market. Perfect Diary is spending considerable amount on its social marketing.

Perfect Diary targeted Little Red Book (Xiaohongshu), a community-based platform with more than 85 million monthly active users. Here, more than 90% of users are young women, which is directly in line with the Perfect Diary’s targeting clientele, and they are generating more than 3 billion posts a day.

Among them, celebrities and KOLs are what Perfect Diary has been cooperating with since the beginning. Using three-point strategy, meaning combining “celebrities with products”, “beauty makeup bloggers with products” and “ordinary people with products”, Perfect Diary covers the whole spectrum of customers. On the other hand, the official brand account of Perfect Diary on Little Red Book has a large group of followers as well. By May 2020, it has gathered more than 1.97 million followers and 3.16 million likes, the number of which far exceeds other well-known domestic and foreign cosmetics brands.

Having such a prominent position in social marketing is in no case a coincidence – just check the job posting of Perfect Diary – it is something unimaginable for foreign cosmetics brands. From product end, marketing end to digital retail end, Perfect Diary establishes a whole structure using over 400 job positions and it is all in-house, meaning it can have full control over every product line.

Enriching the brand image

Besides extending its potential user base, Perfect Diary also is working on a better image of brand, building up personalities and storytelling of brands in collaboration with different IPs. For example, Perfect Diary jointly launched lipstick collection with the National Palace Museum and eyeshadow palette with the British Museum, all of which are enhancing the brand’s cultural dimension.

In February 2020, Perfect Diary teamed up with Discovery channel to launch the Explorer 12-color eye shadow palette, using animal-inspired colors. The special highlight of this collection is the launched of a palette endorsed by dog Never, the pet of China’s top livestreaming host Austin Li.

Austin Li has more than 42.71 million followers on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. On the midnight of February 25th, Austin started a pre-sale of the Never palette in livestreaming, and 150,000 sets of eye shadows were sold out in no time.

It is reported that In April this year, Perfect Diary completed a new round financing of 100 million USD, and the post-investment valuation has reached 2 billion dollars. Perfect Diary is now a leading brand in cosmetics market both in market share and user experience. We can see how it stared at the beginning and indeed it did a wonderful job in the past five years. To observe where China domestic brands are heading in the future, Perfect Diary can serve as a very good example to follow.