What a lipstick launch taught us about week one
Most launches are decided in seven days. A short field guide to the week that matters most.
Amara DialloHead of socialThe first seven days of a launch decide what the shelf, the algorithm and the press think of you. After that you are paying to change their minds.
So we run launch week like a war room: one dashboard, one call every morning, and budget that moves the same day the numbers do.
The shade nobody planned for
We launched a range of eight lipsticks for a beauty client last spring. The plan put most of the media behind the two shades the client expected to sell. By Tuesday afternoon a different shade, a deep brick red, was getting three times the saves of anything else on social. By Wednesday it had sold out online.
In a normal plan, that signal reaches the brand in a monthly report. We moved creator content and paid budget onto the brick red within four hours, asked the factory to bring the next batch forward, and changed the retail window copy before the weekend.
How the week runs
One dashboard. Sales, saves, search, stock and sentiment on one screen, updated hourly. If the client’s e-commerce team and our media team are looking at different numbers, nobody acts.
One call at 9:00. Twenty minutes, every day, with someone from the client who can make decisions. We bring three options, not a status update.
Budget held back. We plan only 70% of launch-week media in advance. The rest waits for what the first 48 hours tell us.
Creators on standby. Six creators with open briefs, ready to film the shade, the moment or the conversation that takes off. A good reaction filmed on Wednesday is worth more than a perfect one on Friday.
A launch plan is a guess. Launch week is where you find out which part of the guess was right.
What it changed
The brick red became the range’s best seller and the hero of the next campaign. More useful, the client now plans every launch with held-back budget and a week-one call, and so do we.
If you are launching soon, ask one question before you sign off the plan: what would we do differently if the numbers on day two surprised us, and who can say yes to it by lunchtime?
