From Influencer, to Celebrity, to CEO of a Clean Beauty Brand: Grace Chow Rewrote Her Story
Grace Chow (周扬青). Yes, it’s her again. While 2020 was a tough year for many people, it was a year of transformation for influencer, celebrity, and now CEO Grace Chow who leveraged a major scandal with her celebrity ex-boyfriend Show Lo (罗志祥) last Spring to catapult her from a fashion wanghong to a mainstream celebrity.
After Grace bravely revealed Show’s scandal, she gained a lot of positive attention and her career started to take off including a photo shoot for BAZAAR and becoming the Chinese ambassador for By Far, a niche Bulgarian luxury bag brand that was very popular among It girls last year.
At the end of 2020, she became one of the core cast members of Chinese reality TV show Fourtry, alongside famous stars such as Ouyang Nana and Fan Chengcheng.
She now has 11M followers on her Weibo and the average likes for her posts are around 10k to 12k.
On January 20, Grace launched her clean beauty brand Code Mint (纨素之肤) with lipsticks, blush and highlighter. The average price of her products ranges from $10 – $24, which is very affordable for either university students or people who just graduate and start their careers.
Code Mint is Tapping into Clean Beauty
First, what is clean beauty? To become a clean beauty product, two main criteria must be met: clean ingredients and transparent labels. Clean ingredients mean that products that you are using are not risky to your health. Transparent labels, for example, not including fragrance in beauty products or labelling buzzwords such as “natural” or “eco” while actually the product is not.
In China, the concept of clean beauty is still in its early stages and consumers need to be educated, and Grace believes that this is a trend that Chinese consumers will chase after in the near future.
This seems likely as more and more young Chinese consumers are paying closer attention to their health and wellbeing post-COVID, and this includes what they put on their skin.
How Does Grace Introduce Her Beauty Brand?
Weibo is Grace’s main promotion platform, where she has 11M followers. She started to mention the brand since the end of December 2020. Grace also has another secondary Weibo account, which is called Xiaohao (小号, small account) in Chinese.
Compared with her big account which is more polished, she often posts daily life and her feelings on the small account, which has 896k followers so far. The small account revealed her contribution for the brand and Grace sources the account’s followers for advice on which lipstick shade to launch and tells them what process she’s after.
I have to say she’s very smart. First, the majority of people who follow her small account are her loyal followers who want to see more of the daily life of Grace. Second, she keeps telling followers how her team works on this project. As a follower, it feels like I am growing with the brand together. This helps Code Mint to build closer relationship with its customers even prior to launch.
Back to her big account, Grace officially announced the brand on the last day of 2020 when she posted a saying-goodbye-to-2020 Weibo. In the post she mentioned she used to be heavily committed to her relationship with Show Lo, and didn’t focus much on her own career.
Following this, Grace posted 8 Weibo each day from January 1-8. In those posts, she introduced main members of her team, why she named the brand Code Mint, how she worked with a Swedish designer team, whom she paid 500k RMB for designing the logo and packaging and how she interprets the slogan of Code Mint. Every post is so long but they are easy to understand. From those posts, you spot an extremely hard-working and enthusiastic woman who loves her career and beauty so much. Her genuine love and enthusiasm for the brand and the work she is doing shines through.
After Code Mint was officially launched, Grace promoted her brand by working with beauty KOLs. Not only does she have them post about the product, but when they do, she interacts with them on Weibo, for example, by reposting their posts mentioning the brand and writes 1-2 sentences saying nice thing about the KOL. So she actually drives more attention and traffic to the KOL and helps them grow their following as well. Besides this, Grace uses her products in public all the time, for example on the set of Fourtry 2 (潮流合伙人2) or when filming for magazines. Many followers leave comments asking what lipstick shade she was wearing or whether she was wearing Code Mint’s highlighter on the show.
Comments
While Grace has many loyal fans, she has many haters as well, and most of them are loyal fans of her ex-boyfriend Show Lo, whose career in Mainland China was destroyed because of what Grace revealed.
In general, Code Mint is liked by many girls, but there are also negative voices saying its products are not high quality, and some satire Grace’s spending on hiring the Swedish designer team. They are saying Code Mint’s packaging is plagiarized and it is very similar to a Korean beauty brand 3CE.
It seems like Grace is very committed to the brand and she’s not like other KOLs or celebrities who have a third party to handle everything and the brand only has their names on it. Based on Grace’s attitude, I am quite optimistic about the brand. But the beauty market is getting very saturated, and I am not sure whether Code Mint can break out from fierce competition. The brand only launched a little over 2 months ago so it is too early to tell.
Read more:
Clean beauty in China: Can influencer Grace Chow help drive awareness of category with new brand?
