CSA Exclusive: Beauty brand succeeds with Facebook livestream

For Alleyoop, the Facebook “Live Shopping Fridays” livestream promotion is proving to be a slam dunk for sales and engagement.

Based in Los Angeles, Alleyoop is a beauty/body care brand that obtains about 70% of its sales volume via direct-to-consumer channels, and also sells through third-party retail partners. Leila Kashani, CEO and founder of Alleyoop, recently spoke with Chain Store Age about how her company became a pioneering participant in Facebook’s summer livestream series and reaped early adopter benefits.

“Alleyoop meets a pain point in that there are too many beauty and body care products and tools,” explained Kashani. “Beauty becomes a 14-step routine. We consolidate the process with our products.”

Launched in late 2019, Alleyoop maintains an active customer community on Facebook which tests products and provides feedback before official launch.

“Our Facebook community helps us see what matters to our customers,” said Kashani. “We also actively advertise on Facebook, and it is our primary ad channel. Thirty percent of our revenue comes from Facebook. Videos of our products that we place on Facebook provide more information than we can selling them on home shopping retailers, with someone else talking about them for five to 20 minutes.”

Given its active participation in and positive response from Facebook advertising, Alleyoop seized the opportunity to be one of the first featured retailers in the social giant’s Live Shopping Fridays promotion. Launched in May 2021 and running through July 16, “Live Shopping Fridays” features shoppable live videos from beauty and fashion brands. Facebook introduced Live Shopping, a function designed to make it easier for consumers to directly shop from videos in real time, in August 2020. 

According to Kashani, the back-end procedures involved in running a Live Shopping Fridays livestream shopping session are straightforward.

“You log into the portal, similar to when you post Facebook ads,” said Kashani. “You select products from your library and click them to go live. Anyone who follows your Facebook page gets an alert. As you speak, you click on your phone to add products.”

Customers can shop directly from the livestream and click desired items to add them to their shopping cart. On the retailer end, no special equipment or studio setup is required – the entire livestream session can be controlled directly from a mobile phone. To ensure a quality setting with proper lighting, Alleyoop has hosted the two Live Shopping Fridays sessions it has been involved with so far from the Los Angeles office of its media agency Coded.

Kashani said Alleyoop has experienced a “huge lift in traffic” within the first three hours of its Facebook livestream shopping sessions, and then a 5 to 10% percent increase upon each additional airing. In addition, livestreaming enables the company to engage its customers much more directly.

“There is always a middleman when you are selling on the Internet or TV,” said Kashani. “We can answer questions directly during the livestream. Customers ask questions like, ‘Is this brush refillable.’ We get answers to them in real time. There is a comment feature. If I’m talking about a product and a customer joins live and gives a shoutout, we can highlight it. It closes the gap.”

Alleyoop plans to continue participating in Facebook Live Shopping, and also intends to explore other livestream shopping opportunities.

“There are other livestream platforms we’ll build out,” said Kashani. “We’ll see how it works.”