As a company, Maybelline™is known for making innovative and ambitious products for our wide array of clientele. We want to make cosmetics and cosmetic accessories for the everyday woman. This includes Sidney, a young commuting student that we shadowed. Sidney has the daily problem of losing her makeup brushes during the makeup application process before class. Since she is a commuter, she doesn’t have time to be looking for makeup brushes that might have rolled off her table or are in her makeup pouch. The Maybelline™executive team knew that something needed to be done about this problem, for Sidney and other busy New Yorkers like her.
We then turned to our design team. Our group of creative professional designers created a product that is perfect for a client like Sidney: The Brush Buster™. This innovative product is a stylish, trendy hat that dangles your makeup brushes in front of your face and around your head during the makeup process. The design team’s prototype for the product was created with paper mache, gold brads, wire, and makeup brushes. The realization of the Brush Buster™would include a real hat with Maybelline™makeup brushes, sold in the form of a set. The designers and retail teams collaborated to come up with the set price of $19, making our net profit per hat about $9.75. There would be an array of color and design choices for the hat, such as pink, green, and white bucket hats, baseball caps, and wide brimmed hats.
The Maybelline™marketing team had a range of ideas concerning the advertising and marketing of the Brush Buster™. Madeline, one of the team members, came up with two concepts that the company decided to follow through with. The first idea was a series of posters to be plastered throughout Manhattan, but also on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube advertisements. These posters would be in the format and style of old Maybelline™ads, making this product seem like a staple of Maybelline™. They would paint the Brush Buster™as a Maybelline™classic across the minds of buyers, as a more psychological approach to the marketing process.
Madeline’s second idea for the Brush Buster™ campaign was to collaborate with the leading fashion and beauty magazine powerhouse, Vogue, on their YouTube videos. Vogue does makeup videos with well-known and extremely recognizable celebrities like Emily Ratajkowski, Kim Kardashian, and Margot Robbie. The most viewed of these videos is with Rihanna, racking in 19 million views. Madeline proposed the idea of coupling the Brush Buster™ with Vogue beauty routine videos, promoting the product in a subtler yet extremely influential way. Pair the Vogue concept with YouTube sidebar advertisements, creating a marketing gold mine.
As with any product, there are still a number of unanswered questions. Will the Brush Buster™ fit all sized heads? Will the invention of the Brush Buster™ lead to other hat holders, like mascara applicating hats? Whatever happens as a result of creating the Brush Buster™, Maybelline will continue to be on the forefront of cosmetic and cosmetic accessory design and marketing.