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There’s a brand that’s poised to blow up the fragrance industry, and I thought that you might like to know about it.
Launched all the way back in November 2018, Kayali is the fragrance arm of Huda Beauty, a powerhouse cosmetics brand that also spawned Wishful, a skincare company. While these two brands were founded by influencer turned mega-entrepreneur Huda Kattan, Kayali is the brainchild of Mona Kattan. Both sisters are on an absolute tear, with each brand reflecting various aspects of the Kattans’ Iraqi-American heritage.
While Huda Beauty and Wishful have seen less traction in recent years within their respective categories, Kayali has taken off like a rocket. You knew this chart was coming, so here it is—Kayali’s annual EMV totals from 2018 to 2023:
Kayali EMV Performance 2018-2023
That’s what we love to see, folks.
What’s particularly noteworthy about Kayali’s growth is how exponential it’s proved to be from year to year. After pulling in $1.5M EMV in 2018, Kayali more than doubled this total, collecting $4.3M EMV in 2019. Kayali then doubled-up again in 2020, surging to $9.1M EMV. After a slight increase to $10.8M EMV in 2021—people weren’t trying to smell their best during the pandemic—Kayali jumped back on the growth train in 2022, closing the year with $17.1M EMV. Finally, Kayali decided that it liked that whole ‘>100% YoY growth’ thing and enjoyed its best year yet in 2023, surging to $39.0M EMV.
Related: The Keys to Success for 2023's Top Beauty and Fashion Brands
Thanks to all this momentum, Kayali climbed to the No. 4 spot in our U.S. Fragrance rankings for 2023, neck-and-neck with heavy-hitters like Dior and Saint Laurent.
Fragrances Leaderboard 2023, With Kayali's YoY EMV Growth Standing Out
Even with as savvy and starry a brand founder as Huda Kattan, there’s no guarantee for this level of success. So what are the secrets fueling Kayali’s rise to the top?
1. Well-Loved Products
This one isn’t really a secret, but you’d be surprised how few brands get it right.
Upon analyzing creators’ content about Kayali, I was struck by how consistently these brand fans referred to specific Kayali offerings, rather than the brand at large.
This might be because Kayali’s products sound delicious, and tend to align with ice cream flavors. Who doesn’t love ice cream? Who wouldn’t want to smell like the inside of an ice cream parlor?
In 2023, posts mentioning Kayali’s various Vanilla scents garnered $9.1M EMV, nearly 25% of the brand’s total. While my colleague Zach Donnenfield incorrectly insists that vanilla is the greatest ice cream flavor—exciting take, Zach—it seems that at least a few fragrance fans out there agree with him.
Meanwhile, we also saw notable totals for the Pistachio Gelato Parfum (now we’re talking), as well as Kayali’s new Lychee perfume, which netted a respective $5.3M EMV and $2.0M EMV.
Related: I Know My Worth: How Erewhon Market Went From LA Luxury to Top Grocery Retailer
2. A Focus on New Creators
As I mentioned earlier, Kayali pulled in $17.1M EMV in 2022, its highest-ever total up to that point. In 2023, Kayali collected $17.8M EMV from creators who hadn’t mentioned the brand in 2022.
In other words, people who had never mentioned Kayali before 2023 drove more EMV during that year than Kayali had received in any previous year. It’s pretty rare for a brand to pull that off.
Plus, it wasn’t as if consistent Kayali fans stopped posting about the brand: creators who mentioned Kayali in both 2022 and 2023 surged from $15.1M EMV to $21.2M EMV.
One of the brand’s key newcomers in 2023 was its No. 1 overall earner, perfume and lifestyle creator Roxy (@roxslayofficial on Instagram). Roxy inspired $708.5k EMV via 139 posts touting her favorite Kayali offerings (good news, Zach—she’s also a fan of vanilla). Additionally, fellow newcomer Christine Ndolo (@dazzlinfragrances on Instagram) frequently featured Kayali in her signature ‘layered combo’ fragrance mashups, generating $580.7k EMV across 193 posts.
Throughout 2023, Kayali did an excellent job of reaching creators like Roxy and Christine: fragrance fanatics with lower follow counts who post prolifically about their favorite brands. Powered by the perfect fit, these incoming creators helped push Kayali to new heights.
Related: 5 Keys to Building Authentic Creator Connections
3. Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One Before: TikTok
Yes, everyone’s favorite short-form video platform also played a key role in Kayali’s momentum, as it did for countless brands across all sorts of verticals in 2023.
Instagram, a perennially popular platform for fragrance content, remained at the top of the heap for Kayali, as seen by what might be this newsletter’s first-ever pie chart (because ice cream is even better with pie):
Kayali's EMV largely comes from Instagram
So yes, Instagram accounted for roughly three-quarters of Kayali’s total EMV. But a funny thing happens when we look at the YoY EMV growth figures for each of these three major platforms:
TikTik Leads Kayali's YoY EMV Growth
Listen, a 114% YoY growth rate for Instagram EMV is nothing to scoff at. But when TikTok bursts in with a 406% YoY spike, even at a smaller total portion of the brand’s EMV, it’s fair to say that this is the platform where Kayali is seeing the most momentum.
Much of Kayali’s TikTok content was similar to its Instagram content: bite-sized videos of raving endorsements from fragrance fanatics. However, TikTokers were more likely to give a shout-out to Sephora in their content, while also posting about Kayali via paid partnerships, rather than organically.
Takeaway: More Proof of the Growth Formula
If I could boil down 2023’s highest-growth brands to a few consistent traits, they’d look a lot like what Kayali has done so well:
- Create memorable products that people truly love.
- Identify new creators within your broader target demographic, and furnish them with opportunities for content creation.
- TikTok. That’s it, that’s the bullet point.
It might not be as exciting as the Super Bowl (which, again, I’ll have more coverage of soon), but if Kayali keeps this up, it might just win the Super Bowl of fragrance.
After all, if the brand manages to double its EMV yet again in 2024, Kayali will be the No. 1 in U.S. fragrance by a wide margin.
That’s not an official prediction, by the way. But if it does happen, well, you heard it here first.
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