April 4, 2024 | Chris Hobson
Just yesterday Dave Kimbell, the CEO of Ulta [full disclosure: one of Rare Beauty Brands’ largest customers] made comments that precipitated a roughly 15% decline in the company’s stock price, the largest single-day decline in several years. Shares in several other prominent beauty companies saw similar declines in the wake of his remarks. Specifically, Mr....
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April 25, 2022 | Chris Hobson
Last week (almost) the entire Rare Beauty Brands (RBB) team traveled to Arizona for our first annual RBB Summit. This was our way to address the WFx blues. As a company we’ve fully embraced the Work From Anywhere (WFx) transition over the past several years. A the same time, we feel that it is super-important...
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January 29, 2022 | Chris Hobson
Staying relevant in the always changing beauty industry took on added meaning in the context of the recent news that one-time darling startup brand Glossier has seen sales declines of ~20% for the past two years in a row, and just laid off a third of its workforce. 🙁 What happened to Glossier? Some of...
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December 4, 2021 | Chris Hobson
My last post took a swing at some of the oft-cited downsides of the new WFx experiment that corporate America is running in real-time. In contrast to what has quickly become popular wisdom, I think most businesses (including us at Rare Beauty Brands) have found that at least in the short term, productivity is up...
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December 1, 2021 | Chris Hobson
Full disclosure: Rare Beauty Brands has completely embraced the WFx (Work From Anywhere) shift that COVID-19 thrust upon many of us. Before the pandemic most of our team commuted daily to our offices just outside of Boston. Almost 2-years on, we still maintain a smaller version of that office, but it is there for mail...
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November 22, 2021 | Chris Hobson
It seems that everywhere you look these days, people are talking about the supply chain crisis, both in the economy overall, and in the beauty industry more specifically. I won’t rehash those analyses, but you can check out some of my favorite ones here and here and here and here. Personally, my best guess is...
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November 18, 2021 | Chris Hobson
So if we accept the premise of my previous post, namely that today’s brand marketers are like hedge fund managers constantly on the hunt for ‘alpha’, the obvious question is, how do they find it? Why is Alpha so Elusive? First, let’s explore why digital marketing alpha has gotten so difficult to obtain. Just like...
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November 9, 2021 | Chris Hobson
Who wouldn’t want to be a hedge fund manager? Enormous pay packages. Private jets. Ownership of sports teams. Art collections. Houses in the Hamptons and Bahamas. Check out the annual (yes, annual) pay packages at right (yes, those are in millions). Well, the fact is that despite all these perks, hedge fund managers are under...
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