Using only one lip gloss, it took 5 months to achieve the top ranking in all categories in Vietnam! The beauty world in Southeast Asia has collapsed

It is no longer news that domestic beauty brands are going overseas. From the early days when Perfect Diary and Florasis dominated cross-border platforms, to now when niche brands such as Flower Knows and Focallure are riding the waves abroad, the influence of Chinese beauty brands in overseas markets is growing stronger.

Nowadays, with the rise of overseas livestream e-commerce and the emergence of new platforms such as TikTok, brands have more diversified channels for going global, which has also given rise to several rapidly emerging new brands.

The domestic beauty brandColorkey (珂拉琪)is one of them.

Female consumers should be very familiar with the Colorkey brand. It was just launched in 2018, and in 2019, it achieved an amazing sales record of over 200 million yuan in its first year, ranking among the top 3 domestic beauty brands on Tmall and becoming a phenomenal example in the makeup industry.

Colorkey was able to achieve such results in a short period of time because its domestic strategy was to rely on blockbuster single products, precisely targeting niche markets, and quickly winning the favor of consumers.

Now that the brand has gone abroad, it has adopted the same single blockbuster strategy.In just five months, it broke into the Vietnamese market with its lip glaze, going from zero to Top 1 in all categories on TikTok Shop Vietnam..

How exactly did Colorkey achieve this? What can we learn from its journey overseas?

1. Going to Southeast Asia, TikTok Market Positioning and Layout

Shortly after TikTok Shop announced the opening of the Southeast Asian cross-border market, Colorkey, with its keen market insight, chose Southeast Asia as its first stop for going global and quickly took root in this hot land.

The Southeast Asian market brings together many consumers with skin tones similar to Chinese people, especially in countries such as Vietnam and Malaysia, which also have large overseas Chinese communities. This allows Colorkey to easily find a suitable consumer base, providing a breakthrough for the brand's expansion in the local market.

According to Tuke, Colorkey has a total of 4 official accounts on TikTok, two of which are for Vietnam, and the other two for Indonesia and Malaysia, with the main market focused on Vietnam.

Colorkey account data overview

2. Localization Model, Deep Market Penetration

After entering the Southeast Asian market, Colorkey practiced localization. For example, promotional videos for the Vietnamese market use local hashtags such as #xuhuong, #fyp, #sonxinh, to accurately push videos to the target market audience.

Colorkey's use of hashtags in TikTok promotional videos

In addition, before pushing content, Colorkey invites local consumers to participate in product testing activities, deeply exploring their unique needs for skin feel, color, and texture, and then finely adjusts product formulas based on this localized feedback, in order to more accurately grasp local consumers' purchasing preferences.

Colorkey product review video on TikTok

3. Effective Content Marketing, Strengthening Brand Awareness

To drive user purchases, the key is to do a good job in TikTok content marketing.

Colorkey has not only successfully built an account matrix, but also carefully crafted video content and created unique brand topics. The #colorkey hashtag on TikTok has reached 1 billion views, with a total of 7,500 topic videos. From these data, it is clear that Colorkey's brand building on TikTok has been very successful, achieving huge traffic and brand awareness.

TikTok hashtag #colorkey data Source: Echtik

In terms of content creation, Colorkey's promotional videos tend to be in the style of reviews and plot integration, which attracts a large number of fan users to watch. For example, TikTok influencer @thgiag's review and sales video received 8.9 million views, bringing great results for product promotion.

TikTok influencer @thgiag review and sales video

4. In-depth Collaboration with Influencer Marketing

According to Tuke, Colorkey's main sales channel on TikTok Shop comes from influencer sales. This can be seen from the data of the best-selling store COLORKEY Việt Nam, which is associated with a total of 3,300 TikTok influencers. With a total transaction amount of $11.05 million, sales from these influencers accounted for nearly half of the share, indicating that influencer marketing is very important for brands like Colorkey.

Colorkey TikTok Shop sales data Source: Echtik

Looking at Colorkey's journey overseas with the help of TikTok, through precise market positioning, localized operation strategies, effective content marketing, and deep influencer cooperation, it has not only made a name for itself in Southeast Asia, especially in the Vietnamese market, but also became the number one brand in all categories, boosting the reputation of Chinese beauty brands going global.

It is believed that with the continuous strengthening of globalization, more brands like Colorkey will emerge in the future, leveraging TikTok Shop as a gateway to the global community and opening their own chapter of globalization.