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With Memorial Day now just a memory, the race to summer is officially on. This is a time of year when both skincare brands and beachgoers are making a splash, and in the spirit of summer, I thought I might as well talk about one brand that’s synonymous with the sun. And by synonymous, I mean that it’s right there in the name.
Behold—more or less the same graph as always:
Sol De Janeiro EMV, 2018 - 2023
Say olá to our friends from the particularly sunny land of Brazil, Sol De Janeiro! And while you’re at it, say olá to some crazy growth over the past year, because dang, that’s quite a jump.
After seeing slow and steady progress from 2018 to 2020, followed by a slight dip in 2021, Sol De Janeiro responded with a healthy rebound in 2022. That would have been sufficiently impressive, but then Sol De Janeiro decided to keep going. The brand surged from $38.8M EMV in 2022 to $113.4M EMV in 2023, a 192% YoY increase. What’s more, this momentum has continued into 2024: from May 2023 to April 2024—AKA the most recent data we have—the brand pulled in $161.3M EMV, a 190% growth.
Digging a little deeper, I found that on a month-to-month basis, the switch was flipped right at the start of 2023. Sol De Janeiro averaged $3.2M EMV per month in 2022, never cracking $5M EMV. in January 2023, the brand netted $5.5M EMV, and has never dropped below the $5M EMV per month threshold again.
From January to May 2023, Sol De Janeiro averaged $7.2M EMV per month. But it didn’t take long for the brand to cross another threshold: in June, Sol De Janeiro hit $10M EMV ($10.4M EMV, to be precise), and has remained above that mark ever since, apart from October and November 2023.
Oh, and for what it’s worth, Sol De Janeiro just blew past $20M EMV in April, collecting a cool $20.4M EMV. With summer approaching, the brand could be primed to hit some new milestones very soon.
Alright, that’s a lot of words about a lot of numbers. You know what might be helpful? A visualization. So here’s everything I just said, ~ in chart form ~
Sol De Janeiro Monthly EMV, January 2022 - April 2024
Maybe I should have just done that from the start. Oh well.
Alright, so now we know that, much like the sun from which its name is derived, Sol De Janeiro also rises. But why?
A Perfect Balance
I’ve never seen anything like this. It might not mean a lot to you, but it means a lot to me, so indulge me for a moment as I bring you behind the curtain.
Sol De Janeiro Ambassadors for May 2023 - April 2024
This chart is part of what I look at to tell the nice stories about brands that I tell from time to time. Basically, it shows the EMV from a given time period (in this case, May 2023 to April 2024) driven by creators who either did or didn’t mention a brand during the corresponding previous time period (in this case, May 2022 to April 2023). Creators who posted about the brand in both time periods are Retained (thanks for sticking around); those who posted in the earlier time period, but not the most recent, are Lost (RIP); those who posted in the most recent time period, but not the earlier one, are New (welcome).
Okay, so all this preamble is to say that usually, I see a lopsided contribution from Retained or New creators. Either a brand is really good at retaining its creators, and its momentum stems from increased contributions from this consistent cohort, or a bunch of newcomers came in and shook things up. But it’s rarely both.
So you’ll note that $80.4M EMV and $80.8M EMV are almost the same number—meaning that Retained and New creators are equally responsible for Sol De Janeiro’s success.
Retained creators almost doubled their output from the previous year…
Sol De Janeiro Retained Creators
Sol De Janeiro New Creators
But what were all these Sol De Janeiro fans posting about?
Give It All Away
Usually, giveaway posts tend to overindex in terms of engagement. It makes sense: when there’s free product to be had, everybody wants a piece. That’s why content in which creators are encouraging their followers to enter a contest, or announcing winners of that contest, draws a ton of likes, comments, and shares.
Nine of Sol De Janeiro’s top EMV-driving posts from May 2022 to April 2023 were giveaway content. These nine posts alone contributed over $2.5M EMV. In all, giveaway content powered $11.4M EMV, which was more than any individual Sol De Janeiro product managed to generate (more on that in a second).
Perhaps more importantly, the impact and increasing ubiquity of these giveaway posts helped introduce Sol De Janeiro to a wider audience. With more consumers encountering—and raving about—Sol De Janeiro products, creators felt a greater need to cover the brand in their content, creating a positive feedback loop that helped push Sol De Janeiro to ever-greater heights.
And why were creators and their followers clamoring for more Sol De Janeiro products?
A Bunch of Bums
No, I’m not referring to those creators and their followers. They were, however, bum enthusiasts—and if you’ve consumed skincare content on social media over the past year, there’s a good chance that you’re a bum enthusiast, too.
I’m referring, of course, to Sol De Janeiro’s hero product, the Brazilian Bum Bum Cream. A body cream intended to firm up and shimmer all parts of your skin, but particularly your, well, you know, the BBBC was a fixture in that giveaway content I mentioned earlier, underscoring its popularity. In all, the BBBC collected $11.1M EMV as Sol De Janeiro’s No. 1 product from May 2023 to April 2024, helping to keep longtime fans around and bringing in new fans at the same time.
But it wasn’t just hero products that helped Sol De Janeiro rocket up the ranks: the brand effectively mobilized its partner community around new launches like the Delícia Drench Body Butter, which debuted to much fanfare in February 2024. Brand partners hyped up the body butter on TikTok (and, to a lesser degree, Instagram), sharing snapshots from a creator trip to Aspen and Sol De Janeiro pop-ups in various cities.
Thanks to this concerted effort from Sol De Janeiro’s partner community, the Delícia Drench Body Butter netted $5.6M EMV—a crazy haul for just three months on the market. Moreover, #SolDeJaneiroPartner showed out as a hashtag: after averaging $403.5k EMV from May to January, the tag pulled in a monthly average of $1.2M EMV from February to April.
In conclusion, Sol De Janeiro is quite obviously making moves: the brand has risen to No. 3 on our Skincare EMV Leaderboard for May 2023 to April 2024, with its 190% YoY surge proving the highest rise among the Top 50 Skincare brands apart from RHODE Skin (243%) and L’Occitane en Provence (254%). Given that from May 2022 to April 2023, Sol De Janeiro ranked No. 11 in Skincare, this momentum further proves that there’s no telling how much further the brand is set to go.
Not bad for a bunch of bums.
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