A critique of Rare Beauty's Substack strategy

And what other brands need to know before launching their own

Email is intimate, algorithms are broken, and suddenly everyone’s rediscovering the value of having a direct line to their audience on Substack. Even legacy media is starting to experiment, with Allure launching The Beauty Chat back in March, The Telegraph starting a Substack that exclusively reports on the royal family, and then there’s The Spotlight showbiz round-up that’s ‘powered by the Daily Mail’.

Social media forced brands into becoming content publishers, and now Substack offers them something they’ve been chasing ever since – a platform where they don’t have to fight for attention and can talk to their audience on their own terms. Fashion brands were swift to catch on and beauty brands are following, hoping to build an audience that might actually, you know, want to hear from them.

“If your brand enters Substack now while it’s still shaping its identity beyond journalism and solo creators, you can define your category before it becomes saturated,” Laura Toma, email strategy lead at Semrush, told Vogue Business. “Much like the early days of Instagram, when fashion and beauty brands were able to build massive followings before the algorithm shifted and competition intensified.”

Among the biggest beauty brands to test the waters is Rare Beauty, founded by Selena Gomez and purveyor of a very viral liquid blush (the shade Encourage is top tier, in case you were wondering). The brand’s Substack Rare Beauty Secrets landed in April, billed as “a (semi-authorised) look behind the scenes at a bestselling beauty brand” and written by ‘Your Rare Insider’ – an anonymous staffer who promises to “share what I know and ask for forgiveness later.”

According the launch post, Your Rare Insider is known to “talk shop over Sunday brunch and midweek happy hour, oversharing whenever possible”. I have to admit that the brand’s rendition of an employee gone rogue is a little odd, as spilling “practical tips” from Rare Beauty’s resident makeup artist hardly counts as a scandalous internal leak – particularly given subsequent posts have ranged from a merciless exposé on how Rare Beauty’s brow gel was made, to a round-up of 80s blush inspiration.

Now to be clear, I’m not being snarky; I write about lipsticks for a living and obviously believe there’s value in this kind of content. It’s just not exactly the rebellious premise we were initially sold (wouldn’t that be fun? Anyway). In the Vogue Business article, the brand’s marketing leads discuss the strategy behind Rare Beauty Secrets. According to the outlet, the goal of the newsletter is to offer a “semi-permeable membrane between the Rare Beauty team and its customers,” with a focus on storytelling rather than selling.

A Note from an Insider

The brand views Substack as a platform that supports long-form content, nuance and a more direct relationship with its community – particularly around Rare Beauty’s mental health mission. Katie Welch, Rare Beauty’s Chief Marketing Officer, says that Rare Beauty Secrets is deliberately ambiguous and strategically unofficial, styled as an off-duty dispatch from someone with access to the company Slack. “It felt like a natural extension of the brand,” she says.

Curiously, Rare Beauty wouldn’t disclose how many people actually subscribe to the Substack. Vogue Business reports that while “the majority of early subscribers came from Rare Beauty’s social media following” there’s been “about 17 per cent of subscribers” arriving via Substack’s discovery channels. The brand claims the newsletter has “high” open rates and sees between 20,000 and 25,000 visits a month.