Smashbox Enlists Pamela Anderson in Comeback Bid

Pamela Anderson is having a little bit of a comeback of late. The Smashbox Cosmetics workforce hopes she will be able to do the identical for his or her struggling model.

On Thursday, Anderson was revealed because the face of the model’s new “OG” marketing campaign selling its Photograph End Primer hero product. Whereas she has been photographed for journal cowl and editorial shoots by the model’s founder Davis Issue previously, the marketing campaign marks her first time showing in a Smashbox advert.

“Now is an efficient time for us to have a face,” stated Issue. “I assumed she was excellent for the OG marketing campaign as a result of I created the primer again within the late Nineties, and he or she’s such an iconic determine.”

Following a fictionalised Hulu present, a Netflix documentary and a normal obsession with Y2K fashion, Anderson has returned to the cultural zeitgeist with celebrities and influencers like Kim Kardashian paying homage to her fashion. Smashbox is the most recent model to journey the Pam resurgence wave after Proenza Schouler earned buzz final month with its marketing campaign that includes her modelling its seems makeup-free. In late January, she acquired skincare model Sonsie.

Smashbox, in the meantime, has seen a unique trajectory lately.

“The pandemic simply slammed us — actually obliterated us. We’re fortunate to nonetheless be in enterprise due to that,” stated Issue. Estée Lauder Corporations reported in its fiscal 2024 second-quarter earnings report on Feb. 5 that it had revised its inside forecasts for Smashbox attributable to lower-than-expected outcomes. In December 2023, the model shut down its Canada DTC web site after present process layoffs in June 2023 and exiting the UK and Eire in 2022.

“We actually unfold skinny everywhere in the globe. Whenever you transfer away from a distributor mannequin, and extra into an affiliate mannequin in all of the Lauder workplaces, and so they have anyone that’s hooked up to your model, it’s a little bit bit harder,” stated Issue. Outdoors the U.S. market, he stated that India and Italy are nonetheless main areas of focus.

With Anderson, Issue is hoping to faucet into nostalgia for the model’s Nineties and 2000s heyday, when Smashbox rose to prominence as he used its primer and different merchandise on numerous movie star photograph topics at Smashbox Studios. His preliminary foray into make-up had been impressed by the legacy of his great-grandfather Max Issue, who’s credited with coining the time period “make-up.”

Smashbox is certainly one of quite a few ELC portfolio manufacturers which have struggled to regain the relevance that they held within the 2000s. The corporate shut down Becca Cosmetics in 2021, leaving manufacturing of two of its hero merchandise to Smashbox. As ELC goals to steer its manufacturers to a turnaround, nostalgia has supplied traditional manufacturers with potential for a gross sales increase following the recognition of Clinique’s Black Honey lipstick on TikTok.

“We have now a singular place. We’re the one photograph studio on the earth that has a cosmetics model that was run by the individuals who invented commercialised make-up,” stated Issue.

Study extra:

Pamela Anderson Purchases Stake in Sonsie Skin

The actress and activist has joined the premium skincare firm as a co-founder and co-owner.