OBJECTIVE:
George the salon, a prominent celebrity salon in the heart of Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood, decided to add a new professional hair care line to their retail shelves and for use by stylists in the summer of 2013. George Gonzalez, owner of George the salon, tasked Janice McCafferty PR to take advantage of the situation to help garner media attention and boost appointment bookings. Unfortunately, salons across the country had been bringing Davines and Kerastase products into their portfolios with regularity, making such a change quite mundane.
STRATEGY:
In order to get editors and writers excited about the change, we decided that we needed to examine what trends were starting to get hot in other markets. We wanted to help George create a unique service, with a catchy name, that utilized the newly added product lines. Ultimately, we settled on tackling a blowout service due to the amount of attention Rachel Zoe’s DreamDry (New York City) and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Babaii Blow Dry Bar (Los Angeles) were receiving. However, we knew that a standard blowout using a line new to the salon still wasn’t newsworthy in and of itself.
We decided that we needed to pull luxurious lifestyle elements into the treatment if we wanted to create a buzz. We examined product names, looking for clever ways to utilize them, but came up empty handed. However, upon turning the bottle over, we struck gold. Davines Texturizer Spray contained cashmere proteins. We had found exactly what we needed to turn a routine hair treatment into a lavish procedure worthy of attention. We then paired the Davines product with a hair oil from Kerastase and The Cashmere Blowout was born.
We scoured the internet and discovered that the phrase “cashmere blowout” had never been used in a salon setting. Because of that, we decided that our communication needed to emphasize that George the salon was offering The World’s First Cashmere Blowout. After all, what woman wouldn’t want her hair to feel as soft as cashmere? The service ignited a media frenzy due to its originality and catchy name, which George cashed in on quite well.
RESULTS:
The press release netted George roughly 30 print and online placements, not to mention a plethora of notable social media mentions. The Huffington Post, Teen Vogue, Total Beauty, Refinery29, Lucky, Racked, Daily Makeover and more ran features on the service, many pegging George as a salon innovator and trendsetter. Cumulatively, Cashmere Blowout press accounted for more than 100 million media impressions worldwide. Demand for the service, and retail products to maintain the look, exploded and continue to remain high. In fact, George the salon is still performing close to 15 Cashmere Blowouts monthly, even though the service debuted last June.