Welcome to the very first edition of entered the chat, a new monthly series where I sit down with a team or marketer I'm a little bit obsessed with and get them to share what's working, what they've learned, and the thinking behind the work the rest of us admire from the outside. 

 

I couldn't have picked a better person to kick it off. The first to enter the chat is MacKenzie Kassab, Director of Creative Strategy at Rare Beauty, and the one person behind one of the most loved brand newsletters on Substack, writing it weekly as a team of one.

 

I went in with a lot of questions, because the Rare Beauty Substack does something most brand newsletters don't. It doesn't sell you anything. We broke it down, had a great chat and lucky for you I recorded it so I can give ya the best bits. Enjoy! 

I'm MacKenzie Kassab and I work at Rare Beauty as our Director of Creative Strategy. Day to day that means looking at what we want to communicate with our consumers and our community, from a brand level and a product level, and translating that into campaigns. So campaign messaging and taglines all the way down to the words you see when you walk into a store, go on our website, or scroll our social media.

Everything we do is guided by our brand pillars: our people and community, our purpose and mental health, and our products. When we set up the Substack we looked at content the same way. It had to fit into one of those buckets. Beyond that, the idea was to give people access to the brand that they wouldn't get anywhere else.

 

Substack happened really organically. There's so much going on at this brand between the mental health initiatives, the products, the interesting people in our orbit, and I'd sit in meetings thinking, this is so interesting, it's a shame people don't know about it. But it didn't work for a TikTok or a conversion-driven email, so we always had these interesting things to share and nowhere to share them.

 

Around the same time, a lot of us in the office got onto Substack and found our own niches. The fashion girls, the finance girls, and I'm a history nerd so I was deep in the history ones. Then it was a lightbulb moment of, wait, this is almost a blogging platform, and we have all these stories. With my editorial background I could take it on alongside my day to day, and I was passionate about it, so I volunteered. The best brand decisions are usually the obvious ones.

I came into it very professionally, thinking I'd have a strict editorial calendar with three months mapped out from day one. I did what I'd traditionally seen work, so tutorials and get ready with me's. But the landscape has changed. People can get tutorials anywhere now, from influencers they already feel connected to, so us jumping in as the new expert just didn't land.

 

I was lucky to have the support to scrap the whole thing and go week to week to see what resonated. We treated it as an experiment, there weren't a ton of eyeballs on us, so we could afford to be experimental. What we found was that our mental health content, which isn't our most popular content on other platforms, performs really well on Substack. It was about challenging our assumptions about what people actually want. Ten or fifteen years ago a lot of beauty brands did the branded blog thing, and very few did it well, because they treated it like a marketing play, and nobody wants to feel marketed to when they're investing time in reading something. The biggest learning for us was to listen and respond, and to keep the flexibility to do that.

I don't want to be dramatic, but a lot of the time it is chaos. Right now I'm working on a piece about how one of our mascaras came to be, because there's a story behind the claims testing. We did an abnormal amount of clinical testing on it, and it turned out that was because it works on every single lash type, and to say that, you have to test it on every lash type. So I'm chasing our product development team for the early prototype images, because I think our community would love to see them.

 

There's a lot of following up and chasing bits and pieces. We publish on Tuesday mornings, and there are times it's scheduled and ready by Friday, and times where at 9:59 I'm still writing. The polish people see is real, but behind it there's a lot of last minute and a lot of flexibility. The upside of that is being so close to our community that we can respond in real time.

This is embarrassing, but while some people wake up and scroll TikTok, I get up and scroll Reddit. When I come into the office, one of the first things I do is read Sephora reviews. There's something different about how people talk there. On a brand's own platform, there's an expectation that the brand is listening. On Reddit or a Sephora review, people are talking to each other, with no expectation that the brand cares what they're saying. I want to hear what people say when they don't think we're listening, the honest opinions and the honest curiosities.

 

A good example: we have a powder blush that's incredibly fragile, and we saw reviews about how delicate it is. So we did a "how this blush was made" post. The reality is that to get that texture and finish, it has to be very finely milled, which by nature isn't a stiff formula, so if you drop it, it can break. We went back and forth with the manufacturer, and changing the packaging would have made it far more expensive, while changing the formula would have lost the finish. So we decided the fragility was worth it for the experience. Rather than treat it as a flaw, we explained the conscious choice behind it. We listen using reviews and Reddit, and then we use Substack to respond.

If you have pressure to convert, it's not going to work, because that just isn't what Substack is for in my experience. You're asking a lot of someone to either come to the platform and dedicate time to your newsletter, or to open one that lands in their inbox. If it feels like they're being sold to, there's no reason to open it. There are a million other places they're being sold to all day.

 

The reason it works for us is that our leadership recognises the value is in community building. Our team is also used to seeing engagement metrics with a lot of zeros on the end from other platforms, and this is not that. There aren't millions of people on Substack. We look at how many people open the newsletter and the quality of the responses, plus the feedback we get from people at real life events. If your leadership is expecting conversion from this, I'd honestly reconsider whether it's the right move. I haven't seen a brand really killing it at selling through Substack.

And there you have it! A huge thank you to MacKenzie for being so generous with what's working for her, and for sharing the honest behind the scenes that we don't get to see nearly often enough.

 

If you want more, we pulled our favourite bits from the conversation into a carousel over on Instagram. And whilst you're here, let us know who you'd love us to poke next month, we're always taking names. And if you or your team are up to something interesting, please don't be shy, pitch me. Just hit reply to this email and tell me what you're working on!