Skingraphica, the world’s first luxury skincare range for tattooed skin, is not just aiming to create a new category, but also wants to break with existing paradigms in the market that are degrading brands.
Founder Mat Baxter, who shared an image of his Eagle tattoo below, unveiled an ambitious go to market approach that will focus solely on brand building and powered by “old school media”.
Speaking to B&T at a steak lunch overlooking the Sydney Opera House, Baxter believes that he hasn’t bitten off more than he can chew. He is confident that a 100 per cent focus on brand building and a media strategy that leans heavily on out of home can help Skingraphica become the premier skincare product for tattooed skin across the world.
“We’re designing for our brand. And so as far as the marketing strategy goes, there’s no lower funnel effort. There’s not going to be in the foreseeable future,” he said.
“Great brand building is about knowing exactly where you need to go and putting in enough effort and enough critical mass to actually get a result. So we’re not doing omnichannel strategy, we’re not getting on the performance bandwagon, and we’re going to build a brand.
“We’re going to invest in those powerhouse channels. This includes out of home and some digital, such as content and influencer marketing.”
Baxter is a staunch advocate for the power of “old school media”. He challenges the industry’s “aversion to using old media because it’s seen as not cool”, arguing that it often works better than digital.
On 1 October, the brand will unveil a national outdoor campaign celebrating Australians with outstanding skin art. The work will be bold, fashion-forward and intentionally disruptive — a “deliberate departure from the soft- focus, trope-laden world of traditional skincare marketing”.
For the first time, B&T can reveal some of the finalised creative assets for Skingraphica (see assets in hero image, and photo shoo below).
“Out of home is a channel that still has massive clout in culture, particularly in markets like Australia, where people are outdoors a lot. It builds brands. It creates prestige. It’s culturally influential. It’s unmissable. You can’t scroll past it out of home unless you’re a hermit and you only live in a house,” he said.
Skingraphica has appointed QMS as its exclusive out-of-home partner, and will leverage the company’s national network. At the same time, SCENTRE Group, through its Westfield retail media assets, will connect Skingraphica directly with millions of beauty-conscious, fashion-forward consumers in the country’s most premium shopping environments, even though the product, for now, can only be bought online.
Avoiding the lower funnel trap
Skingraphica’s initial focus on top of the funnel activity flies in the face of the current marketing convention to pump more money into lower funnel performance activity.
“I think lower funnel, in many cases, is a fallacy,” Baxter said. “There’s this notion that the last place you came from is the place that you should acknowledge as the primer for the conversion. And that’s been shaped by the digital companies controlling their own attribution. Marketers have fallen for it. The industry has fallen for it.
“Google and Facebook and all these guys are out there mining a lot of value from advertisers, and those advertisers are not joining the dots sufficiently enough up the funnel to say, ‘Well, hold on, where does this demand in performance actually come from?’ That’s not to say performance doesn’t have a role, but it’s been way too over represented.”
Baxter said this trend has “degraded brand” to a point where it is considered an “old world concept” that is being usurped by “a relentless focus on performance marketing driving down costs”.
“The sign, now, of a great marketer within an organisation, is one that drives down cost at the expense of brand, and doesn’t really advocate for brand anymore,” he said. “Marketing has become a financial exercise as opposed to a brand-building exercise.”
Baxter observes that this trend has even hampered power brands of the past. He believes several have “withered on the vine and died a little bit”.
Using as analogy of brand as a ‘corporate plant’, if brands are not nourished and cared for as an asset, they eventually die, and when “the tree dies, it’s very hard to hang stuff off the branches like the products or the market propositions.”
It’s not all bad news. One brand he believes that is bucking the trend in Australia is Telstra under Brent Smart, while some blue chip companies in the US, such as Nike, are also swinging the pendulum back to brand.
You get what you pay
Baxter acknowledges that marketers are under pressure to cut costs. At Skingraphica, he is able to make decisions based on effectiveness rather than cost because “we don’t have bankers in the business and we are not running our business through a spreadsheet”.
On that front, Baxter said that Skingraphica will not scrimp on paying for quality media. He believes that a premium brand should pay a premium to achieve its brand-building goals.
“If that means we have to spend over the market CPMs that are benchmarked on a whole bunch of cheap inventory that is low quality. We’ll do it,” he said.
“If you believe in brands, which I do, you spend in the premium and some because you can price differently. You can attract a more prestigious customer, and throughout the life value of the customer you will see more value.
“If you can’t do that, or you don’t want to do that, or finance gets to make the decision about brand, then marketing is an extinct discipline. In a lot of businesses, it already is. It’s essentially been relegated to either a very small voice in the boardroom or no voice at all.”
Creating a community
A big part of Skingraphica’s marketing strategy involves building a community of people that love high end artistic tattoos.
Skingraphica is targeting about 5-10 per cent of the estimated one billion people in the world who have a tattoo– an market worth $6 billion a year with forecasts that it will grow to $9.25 billion by 2034. In Australia, about a quarter of the population have a tough sticker, which rises to around 60 per cent of Gen Z and millennials.
Skingraphica will work with beauty and fashion influencers to bring the brand to market on social media, intentionally avoiding the cosmetics playbook.
“Tattoos are the ultimate expression of self, the modern-day fashion statement you wear 24/7. We wanted to avoid tired skincare tropes and instead position Skingraphica as a style-driven brand at the intersection of fashion and art. Our campaign reflects that spirit with the simple line, Skincare for Skin Art,” he said.
“As a fashion brand, we need to act like a fashion brand. We’re not really a brand that operates in skincare. Skincare is sort of, is our, is our way of engaging in a category that’s a fashion category.We wanted something that was different, that broke those conventions. So no product shots, beautiful photography, of course, but celebrating the art, the art of skin.”
Skingraphica is a direct to consumer product and is currently taking registrations for pre-order. It is also targeting the top 100 tattoo artists in the world top serve as ambassadors through Graphica Membership, which will reward artists with incentives and profit share if they bring new customers to the company.
“We’re a skin art brand. We’re there for the most intricate and best work on the planet. So we focus on work done by the top 100 artists in the world, these artists charging US$10,000 dollars a piece, some as high as $100,000 for really intricate full backs or full chest kind of work,” he said.
“There’s a huge amount of industry engagement at that top level. Two of the world’s top 10 artists are actively involved in the business. Within the next three to four weeks, we’re just putting ink on paper with regards to some ambassadorial sort of work that they’re going to be doing with us.”
Baxter said that he wants to establish Skingraphica’s brand and credentials outside of bricks and mortar initially, but is open to approaches from retailers when the time is right. He said about 60 per cent of Mecca and Sephora customers have tattoos and many spend large sums on skincare products.
Why do this?
Baxter, a famous disruptor and agitator in media and marketing circles, was the former global CEO of IPG Mediabrands Initiative and Huge before returning to Australia to work at Mutinex for a year.
Few would have predicted entering the tattoo skincare sector after leaving Mutinex, but those close to Baxter could see that a move away from agencies and corporate life as on the cards.
After a stressful 10 year stint in the US, which included a serious car accident, Baxter said that he had a mid-life crisis, was homesick and made the decision to reprioritise his life and return Down Under.
Post Mutinex, he wanted to be “less focused on the corporate world, and to get back to family and to come back to a slightly more calm culture than America”; Baxter lived through one Trump presidency and is happy to be on this side of the Pacific.
Well stocked on fast cars, he opted for a “mid-life crisis with a needle” and met world-renowned artist Mikael Rämgård. The pair got on famously, and discussed a gap in the market for premium skincare products for tattooed skin.
Meanwhile, Baxter got his first tattoo.
“I wanted to have something physically on me every day that reminded me that I was in this new chapter. So I chose the eagle because, eagles soar, they see things from above and get a good view of the world. So I got this and thought that was it.
“I never expected to sit in the chair and start, and end up with a business.”
Baxter admits that he has got the tattoo bug and his next bit of skin art will be left entirely in the hands of the artist.
This might sound risky, but Baxter doesn’t shy away from risk or disruption. His newfound knowledge of needle work and skincare in a relatively short space of time is impressive, his passion and drive insatiable and he already has skin in the game.
His goal is to create a new category for skincare for tattooed skin, and establish Skingraphica as the number one brand in the space within a year. Few people who know Baxter would bet against him.
