THE CLIENT
Kylie Jenner is one of the biggest celebrities in the world, with over 70 million followers on social media, and a rapidly growing personal brand made famous by her role on the hit E! reality show, Keeping Up with the Kardashians. The youngest of the Kardashian/Jenner families, Kylie is one of the most sought-after young celebrities internationally.
THE BRAND
Kylie Cosmetics is a collection of over 20 shades of matte, gloss and metal liquid lip sticks and lip liners. Young girls all over the world are looking for the best way to replicate the now famous ‘Kylie Lip’, and the the Kylie Lip Kit by Kylie Cosmetics does just that. The first product to be branded by Kylie exclusively under the Kylie Jenner name, the Kylie Cosmetics brand was designed to appeal to young women and teenagers everywhere, and is sold in 100 countries worldwide.
THE GOAL
The goal of our project with Kylie was twofold. First, we wanted to build a beautiful digital campaign (inclusive of an eCommerce website platform, as well as marketing collateral like logo design, social media imagery and product branding) that would closely follow Kylie’s own personal style, as well as the style of her global fan base. Second, Ultrabrand needed to implement a website that could handle an immense traffic load of up to 20 million users in the website’s first day online, combined with a launch set for the net’s busiest day, Cyber Monday. Keeping the site online and running smoothly during a massive global rollout was essential to ensuring no loss in revenue, media attention or customer satisfaction.
THE TECHNOLOGY
The Kylie Lip Kit website was originally built on a custom WordPress platform using WooCommerce, one of the world’s most robust eCommerce platforms. Ultrabrand worked directly with the Office of the CEO at GoDaddy, the largest web host in the world, who connected our team to MediaTemple, a subsidiary owned by GoDaddy experienced in massive web launches for celebrities like Beyonce and Donald Trump. The website was built on a custom-built solution with Amazon AWS as our back-end server provider. The solution was custom designed for ultra high availability, to counter millions and millions of fans hitting the site at once. The site also needed to be elastic, with an architecture that would support an initial surge of traffic, followed by peaks and valleys where server requirements could be scaled up and down accordingly. Ultrabrand, in combination with MediaTemple, ensured a set of contingencies to counter any fault intolerances by building several scenario and traffic load-specific copies of the website, that the servers would automatically shift between depending on traffic loads. This kept the site online, and promptly notified users when the product had sold out. Eventually, Ultrabrand made the decision to move the eCommerce aspect of the site to a more robust solution, and in February 2016, the entire site was moved to the Shopify platform. Ultrabrand continued to manage the branding of the site, as well as store/inventory management for each flash sale.
THE RESULT
The Kylie Cosmetics website and social media campaign went live to Kylie Jenner’s 50 million+ followers at 9AM PST on Cyber Monday (November 29th, 2015) with a team of cloud architechts on hand to monitor the launch, ensuring the website and its servers maintained a high fidelity throughout the launch, as timezones shifted and various other countries ‘came online’. Ultrabrand’s CEO Ryan Ward-Williams was at Kris Jenner’s home in Hidden Hills, Calabasas with Kylie Jenner, Kris Jenner, Kim Kardahsian, North West, Scott Disick and Cici Bussey on the day of the launch to celebrate. Today, Kylie Cosmetics has grown into one of the fastest growing global cosmetic brands in the world. The Jenner/Kardashian families retained Ultrabrand under a full-time brand strategy consulting engagement that helped Kylie Cosmetics and other family-owned brands grow significantly throughout 2016.
