Enrico Frezza

When Peace Out Skincare launched four years ago with its hero sku, Acne Healing Dot, founder Enrico Frezza had one goal: to offer a fuss-free way to shrink breakouts while creating a positive community to address the mental health struggles with acne. Today, the trailblazing brand sells one acne dot every four seconds. The line has since expanded to encompass an assortment of targeted skin care items designed to treat a range of issues from wrinkles to puffy eyes. Year-to-date the indie brand’s sales are up 131 percent and its namesake website has doubled sales and traffic within the last year. This year, Peace Out, which has been exclusive to Sephora brick and mortar stores in the U.S., rolled out in the U.K. with Cult Beauty and Boots and will be expanding into Sephora Asia online in Q4 and in store Q1 of 2022. Here, CEW Beauty News spoke with Enrico about Peace Out’s ecommerce business, expansion plans and marketing strategies, as the brand lays the groundwork to raise capital in Q2 of 2022.

Beauty News: Talk about your DTC growth and the strategies that led to your e-commerce success.
Enrico Frezza: DTC was not something we focused on in the beginning; we put our all into launching with Sephora brick-and-mortar stores and peaceoutskincare.com was strictly educational. Looking back, our tactic was the best approach as we grew tremendously with Sephora and established a name for ourselves that then drove people to our e-commerce faster than we expected. When the pandemic shuttered Sephora stores, we had the opportunity to shift and double down on our e-commerce efforts and it yielded us 610 percent growth for peaceoutskincare.com in 2020. The momentum has continued into 2021 as ecommerce efforts have increased with our overall growth the first quarter of 2021 up 246 percent and we are on track to yet again double our ecommerce year over year since launch.

BN: Can you talk about the brand’s social media strategy, and how you use the various platforms to reach different demographics?
EF: We began seeding our products to the new era of Gen Z influencers to test it out, which led to our biggest success and brand driver of the pandemic. An incredible organic moment happened when skinfluencer, Hyram Yarbro, dueted another influencer’s video featuring our Peace Out Pores product, and overnight it went viral reaching over 2.8 million likes, 75k shares and 8.4k comments and generated over 16K sales – about 6 months worth of inventory in one day. Since then, we have strategically approached each demographic differently meeting our consumers where they are socially, as our products range in ages from 16-55. Our younger Gen Z consumers utilize platforms like TikTok heavily leaning into community building and on-trend social presence. Our millennial and up consumers are primarily on Instagram and Facebook and prefer value messaging around ingredients, effectiveness and results.

BN: What has been your most successful campaign?
EF: This year, we launched Acne Champs 2.0, which was paired with an acne fighting product set.  This was the follow up to our first successful Acne Champs digital campaign which we shot entirely on Zoom, becoming the first Acne or Skincare brand to shoot an entire digital and marketing campaign completely on Zoom. Acne Champs is a digital first marketing campaign that speaks directly to our brands ethos of skinpositivity, inclusivity and acne mental health awareness. We have also focused on our email outreach and have built a robust SMS network, which continues to grow and has yielded a ROI of 1022 percent.

BN: How is the brand performing internationally?
EF: For new regions, we recently launched in Sephora Middle East and in the U.K. with multiple retail partners. We also recently upgraded our Sephora Australia and New Zealand digital presence and improved our in-store experience. Our digital focus in this market has really helped us win while the country is still experiencing a lot of store closures due to COVID. We are confident with our elevated in-store fixtures that we are ready for when these stores open again.

Sephora Europe has seen triple digit growth for Peace Out Skincare for 2021. They have been great partners in elevating our in-store assortment while being very smart and strategic about key moments of animation and brand focus. We have tested some more “advanced” skincare SKUs within their Mini Skincare Market doors and the results have surpassed our targets. Lastly, our business in Sephora Canada has been tremendous.  We just launched one year ago and we recently moved to a brand fixture in all stores and the results are incredibly strong. Since this move, we are seeing our brand rank grow more than planned.

BN: What’s next for the Peace Out?
EF: We will end the year with another major first-to-market product launch in Q4 that will continue the build out of our anti-aging category and routine. We are looking forward to 2022 as we will bring even more product innovation and launches into new markets.