Summer Fridays Enters Phase Two With the Overtime Mask
Summer Fridays is launching a second product aimed at helping a woman’s skin reach “zero inbox glow.”
The digital-first, skin-care brand, founded by beauty influencer Marianna Hewitt and business partner Lauren Gores, went live with its debut product, the Jet Lag Mask, last March. The mask became a bestseller on sephora.com less than two weeks after it launched and Summer Fridays has since entered all Sephora doors in the U.S. and Canada.
Hewitt and Gores are now expanding the Summer Fridays lineup with the launch of a second product: the Overtime Mask, a pumpkin-based exfoliating and brightening treatment meant to be used in tandem with Jet Lag.
“We have been formulating Overtime Mask as long as we were working on Jet Lag,” Hewitt said. “There are a lot of exfoliating face masks and products out there, but we wanted to create something gentle that you could use on your skin daily that doesn’t have harsh abrasives.”
“We called it Overtime because so many of us are working overtime, your skin cells are working overtime, they’re constantly shedding and renewing themselves, so we wanted the name to reflect what the mask did,” Gores said. “We’re saying it’s the zero inbox glow — you know that feeling when you get your inbox down to zero, if that ever happens? The mask is meant to do that for your skin. It sheds whatever you don’t want so you can make room for new things.”
Hewitt and Gores are intentionally spacing out their launches and won’t release a new product until 2019. As influencers, they’ve seen their fair share of product — boxes on boxes on boxes — so with Summer Fridays, they decided to stick to single-product rollouts that would allow them to build trust with their audiences and spend more time on formulations. The model has so far worked for them. Neither Hewitt nor Gores would discuss sales figures, but industry sources estimate that Summer Fridays has so far done $5 million in sales.
The Overtime Mask, $44, will be available on sephora.com and Summerfridays.com as of Sept. 4. It will be in all U.S. and Canada Sephora stores by Oct. 12 and will also launch at Cult Beauty.
As part of the Clean at Sephora initiative, Overtime is formulated without sulfates, parabens, synthetic dyes and fragrances. The ingredients include pumpkin and apricot seed powder for exfoliation, as well as oat kernel protein with calming properties and vitamin E for antiaging and fending off collagen-damaging radicals.
“We spend a lot of time creating each product,” Gores said. “We do several rounds, back and forth with our labs. It’s important for every product to be really effective and we can do that best when we have the time and the space to focus on it and do several rounds of testing.”
Like Jet Lag, Overtime comes in a highly Instagram-able tube, this time in a bronze hue fit for fall.
“Social is always top of mind for us,” Hewitt said. “When you first see a product, you want it to be eye-catching, but we also love that it’s in a tube to be photogenic. It’s also more sanitary than putting your hands in a jar and exposing it to whatever you’ve been touching that day if you didn’t wash your hands. We also love the visual aspect and how great it looks on social. We can even envision it now in everyone’s fall flat lays, with the beautiful bronze-y color that will look great in photos and compliment the blue of Jet Lag Mask.”
Hewitt and Gores haven’t yet spent a dollar on the ever-growing category of influencer marketing — part of the luxury of being an influencer is that you have all the right connections already. But Overtime marks its first major marketing spend. In keeping with the fall theme — think PSLs (pumpkin spice lattes) — Hewitt and Gores are working with Alfred Coffee in Los Angeles on custom coffee sleeves that will be available at the shop throughout the month of September.
“Being a social and online brand, this is the first off-line marketing activation that we’re doing and it’s exciting for us because we see it as a way to do marketing that’s not traditional,” Hewitt said. “Even though it’s only in L.A., if you follow someone who posts their cups that lives in L.A. and you live anywhere else, you’re still seeing it. We love that even though it’s a local coffee shop, it’s seen all over the place online.”
More from WWD.com:
Marianna Hewitt’s Summer Fridays: Skin Care’s New Bestseller
Influence Peddler: Marianna Hewitt, Lauren Gores to Build Social-First Brand
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