The Pennock Knockdown: Choosing the Right Service Providers for Your Brand: Expert Tips from Catherine LePetit
Watch or Listen to Episode 3 with Catherine LePetit
Listen on Apple and Spotify. Watch on TikTok or Youtube.
Catherine LePetit has been in the cosmetics industry for 23 years, specifically in the sales department. Within LVMH for 15 of those years work for benefit cosmetics, makeup forever, and sephora. Murad part of Unilever.
She left murad doing the pandemic and started business consulting for consumer brands.
Founded Sun Drunk in 2023 - it is a beach essential brand. As a solo presenter she’s creating her own marketing strategies
Brands Mentioned
Transcript
Nikki Lindgren
Welcome to another episode of The Pennock Knockdown, a podcast where we unpack key strategies and tactics for digital marketing leaders.
I'm joined today by Catherine LePetit. She has been in the cosmetics industry for 23 years in the sales department. Fifteen of those years were spent at LVMH, where she worked for Benefit Cosmetics, Make Up Forever, and Sephora. Later, she moved to Murad at Unilever and left that role during the pandemic, at which point she started doing business consulting and coaching for consumer brands.
And during this timeframe, if that wasn't enough, she also founded her own business, Sundrunk, in 2023. It's a beach essentials brand. And as a solopreneur, she has been creating all parts of the business on her own, including all of her marketing strategies. So Catherine, really excited to have you today and get into some of the topics about marketing that you've been tackling.
Catherine LePetit
Thank you, Nikki. I'm super excited to be here. It's my first podcast.
Nikki Lindgren
Super excited to have you. Well, the first question we like to start with is really around what is your favorite skincare product at the moment? So anything you just recently started using or trying or the next thing in your cart to purchase.
Catherine LePetit
My 18-year-old—so I have three boys and teenagers—and my 18-year-old was very alpha male. And every time I ask him, "Use my thing, use my Sundrunk products, they're amazing, they're clean"—like, go for it—he's like, "I don't need that, I'm a man."
And this time, he texted me one day out of the blue and he's like, "Mom, buy me this!" And I was like, "What is this?" So I bought it and I just took it from his bathroom. It's this beautiful thing. Actually, I really like it. I love the marketing too. I think it's pretty cool. You have Marilyn Monroe on one side and, I think, one of those beautiful actors from back in the day.
It's only pure, clean ingredients, and the texture is super delicious. I was impressed, and I was like, "What happened? How did you get to know that thing?"
It was one of the moms—we were on weekends—she was using it and I loved it. So, I don't know. Sometimes marketing.
Nikki Lindgren
It's incredible. I love that you had it handy to show me. I can't tell from the container—what type of product is it?
Catherine LePetit
It's a whipped tallow honey balm, but it's not greasy and it's super moisturizing. I'm actually very impressed by the texture and the feel.
Nikki Lindgren
Okay. I love it. I love it. Anything the teenage boy likes is a huge value prop, right? A huge selling point.
Catherine LePetit
It's approved by my teenager.
Nikki Lindgren
We want to get into a little bit around playbooks you used within the marketing lane at Sundrunk or other places to understand what you found successful and maybe what you found really unsuccessful. So I'd love to kind of kick it over to you to walk through a strategy that you've recently launched that either soared or flopped.
Catherine LePetit
Personally, I tried EDDM and it completely flopped. I have an intuition why it flopped but—EDDM, it's a direct mail. Yeah. And it's a big postcard, which I hate actually. I think it's not sustainable, but they put it in every single mailbox. And even though my mailbox says, "Please do not give me anything other than just my mail," they will put it in if they have to for some reason.
Nikki Lindgren
Mailed postcard.
Catherine LePetit
And so I was like, okay, so maybe it's a good way for me to get my brand out, especially because I'm seasonal. Sundrunk is a beach lifestyle brand.
Nikki Lindgren
Mm-hmm.
Catherine LePetit
All my area goes to the beach almost every weekend. So it's like, I'm going to target my clients. It's going to be great. You can target from the neighborhood. You have their yearly revenue. So you target the people you think are more susceptible to buy your brand. Like, it's really well done on the backend. And then I hired a designer to do the whole thing, and I did a special promo code just for that thing. So I did everything by the book that is supposed to—
Nikki Lindgren
Mm-hmm.
Catherine LePetit
And I had one person buying from it out of 5,000.
Nikki Lindgren
So it sounds like it was a good platform for making sure you were going after the geography you wanted—really close to home, it sounds like—and also the targeting, primarily higher household incomes. And I'm assuming the design was good if you worked with someone who was a professional designer for it. And you said you think you know why it flopped. So what do you think it was?
Catherine LePetit
I think there's multiple things as usual. First of all, I did it in July, which is the low season here. Believe it or not, snowbirds are coming in October, November. So for us in Florida, the high season is November to April.
Nikki Lindgren
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Catherine LePetit
And I did it in July because I thought I would target the people like me who live here all year long. I wanted to target them. But most of those mailboxes were probably empty because it's so packed with snowbirds. So maybe that will have an effect now. I don’t know. Who knows? I actually opened the promo code until December 31st. I will let you know if I get more orders.
I think that’s one. Two, I targeted very high-end people, and if they are like me, they don't read their mail. Every time I receive those postcards, I just put everything in the garbage—barely look at it. So maybe they do the same thing.
Nikki Lindgren
Mm-hmm.
Catherine LePetit
I actually have another hypothesis—a third one. That one client who ordered actually came to me during a live event with a postcard and said, "I received your postcard in my mail, but I don't want to buy until I touch and I see." And I thought that was a point. Could be one of the reasons.
Nikki Lindgren
Mm-hmm. Well, and maybe that's how the customer came to the live event, right? It was because not only did they learn about it digitally, but they also had the postcards. So will you be testing it again during high season?
Catherine LePetit
It's a lot of money, and I think for that amount of money, I will probably put that money in Meta ads.
Nikki Lindgren
Yeah, Meta ads are still pretty effective. So hopefully you find similar success when you run or increase spend in those campaigns. So we heard about a flop. Thank you for being so transparent about that. Anything that has been working particularly well with yourself or any of the businesses you're doing coaching with?
Catherine LePetit
I hope so.
"Buy with Prime." Add it to the DTC website. It is actually helpful, especially for...
Nikki Lindgren
Mm-hmm.
Catherine LePetit
...close to Christmas, actually, because people want their day very fast, and going on DTC can take up to seven to 10 days to receive your product. So having Buy With Prime on your own website, DTC website, really helps the sales. That was just implemented in one of my big brands, and I was like, wow, I had no idea that it would be performing that well.
Nikki Lindgren
Yeah, that's an awesome tip.
Catherine LePetit
What I learned also—it goes to your DTC business, not to Amazon business. So the margin is actually really good.
Nikki Lindgren
That is great. So I guess a call-out to any small business owner: if they can put Buy With Prime on their website, wherever they're running their storefront, they should go ahead and do that.
Catherine LePetit
I actually asked Amazon for Sun Drunk. I was like, so is it only for big brands, because the brand I'm working for is huge? And they're like, no, no, actually, we could implement it on any brand. So yes, it's a good tip for anybody who's listening to this podcast.
Nikki Lindgren
We've got the direct mail situation. We've got Buy With Prime. Any other nuggets of success or lack thereof that come to mind?
Catherine LePetit
Yes, I'm thinking about another one that everybody's talking about right now: TikTok Lives. The brand I'm consulting for—it was all the rage. Everybody, all the marketing agencies, were like, you have to do TikTok, you have to do TikTok. So we pushed organic content, we pushed ads on TikTok.
We saw it like slowly, slowly ramp up. And then they were like, you have to do Live, TikTok Live. And that is not working. I think the learning there is who you hire to do the Live.
It's a science. You cannot just pretend you know and just do a Live. The agency they paid was, I personally think, terrible. I would not recommend that. But for a flat fee, they will take care of everything. So sometimes it's easier for a brand to say, yeah, big check, go for it. But then the ROI was just close to zero. It was just terrible, terrible. They hired a random girl who has no experience in products.
It was terrible.
Nikki Lindgren
And the Live was basically selling? It was like the infomercial, the QVC version of selling the product? Okay, so interesting to hear. Basically hired an agency that was turnkey, did all of it, and then they brought in their own talent too, who might have created the friction.
Catherine LePetit
Click.
And when I say "own talent," they sent us a few profiles to pick from. And none of them made sense, like none of them. And I gave that feedback. I was like, this is not relevant to our brand, like at all. None of them fit our brand, our brand DNA, our brand expression. They have no knowledge of products. Like, where are we going with this? And they're like, yeah, well, we'll do it. We do that for so many brands and, you know...
Nikki Lindgren
Okay.
Catherine LePetit
They have that spiel, but it clearly... after, I think, eight Lives—which are two-hour Lives. It's like super long and super boring. I looked at some of them, and I was like, who's looking at... who's watching that? We probably, by the end of the eighth one, with all the feedback, little by little, one by one, we were doing a thousand dollars. Like, it's—I mean, for that type of run, it's nothing. It's like...
Nikki Lindgren
Are ads on TikTok in general for that brand doing? Because it sounds like you said there was some ramping period until the Lives happened. So are there parts of TikTok that the brand is still very committed to?
Catherine LePetit
So yes, after it basically was a solid two- to three-month ramping period for those ads to be profitable. I mean, break even.
But I would say the downside was that it deteriorated the brand image big time because those ads are really ads. They're not pretty. They're not on brand. They're AI-generated from TikTok. TikTok generates them super fast, and they just push them, push them, push them.
Catherine LePetit
And so they go into the organic content, and it was blasting. It was terrible for the organic image of the brand. But it's a choice. It's a choice you have to make. And that's why I decided to continue with ads.
Nikki Lindgren
Okay. Right. So the short-term success over a long-term image is something brands kind of need to be mindful of, especially when working with agency vendors who maybe don't understand their brand ethos super well, and also considering AI and like image creation, asset creation that may or may not look like the brand, that can be really tarnishing too.
Catherine LePetit
Yeah.
Nikki Lindgren
We can move into a lane that is interesting for me to dissect more as an agency owner and trying to strengthen the connection with clients and prospective clients. And I think you're in a really unique role to answer this question because you are both doing your own business consulting and probably help make decisions over vendors to utilize for those businesses. Plus, at Sundrunk, you will be hiring agencies and service providers as well. And the question is really, what do you think has become top of mind for buyers at the in-house brand team when trying to figure out who is the right service provider for them? So if they're hiring an SEO agency or an email agency, is there something new that they're kind of looking for in terms of who is the right vendor?
Catherine LePetit
So I will talk about my personal experience and what I'm looking for. I don't know what other people are doing. And actually, I'm going to listen to your podcast so I can learn more about that. Maybe I'm completely off, but I will tell you how I pick my vendors. First of all, I don't know if you know, but as a founder and CEO, I'm inundated. My inbox is insane with people just randomly emailing me saying they can 10x my Shopify sales, they can increase my SEO organic, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They give me like a little paragraph that is completely not adapted to SunDrunk, first of all. So that drives me nuts and I just delete or I say stop emailing me please because they keep emailing. So first of all, if it's out of the blue, that needs to be super targeted to me, to my brand. They need to talk my language, they need to talk to me. So that's number one. And it happened that sometimes they do, and I take a call because I'm like, okay, you're talking to me, why not? Exploring the idea. And then I would say the person I have in front of me needs to be solid. That sounds so obvious. But if it's all fluff and there is no presentation that explains exactly what they're doing, what is their case studies, how much revenue they can drive. I am not in and I usually finish the meeting by saying, okay, so show me case studies. And I go, yeah, I will send them to you. And I never, they never follow up. So they're not solid and I spend half hour wasted. And some of them have case studies, but they have a hard time to put their offering clear. I just wanted clear offering. What are you giving me for that price? Some agency gave me like, yeah, $5,000 a month and we'll do all your meta ads and we'll do all your content and...
Nikki Lindgren
Yep.
Catherine LePetit
Yeah, that sounds a little too beautiful to be real. So show me how you're going to do that. Like, what do I need from me? How the partnership is going to work? It's especially because I'm from sales. That pitch needs to be nailed. Like, it's a big problem I feel in this industry right now. It's so fluffy. It's crazy.
Nikki Lindgren
Right. Yeah.
I like a few things you said in there because, you know, obviously the cold email trend is too much, right? Like it's gone too far. I don't think any business that's a service-based business looking for clients is probably not seeing success with that anymore. So I think there has got to be a shifting and a tilting and, you know, hopefully that's an early like Q1, Q2 2025 thing where you get fewer cold inquiries out there.
Catherine LePetit
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Nikki Lindgren
And then I think the other thing that's really meaningful from what you said is just kind of like the cut through of the noise of making sure not only do they understand you and your business, have like solid foundation of case studies similar to your business or, you know, kind of like that clarity of workflow and way of working. You also mentioned in there like a little bit about what is required of your time. And I think that's a really hard thing to understand when you're trying to buy a service of like, you just going to talk to me every once in a while to give me status updates? Do you actually need me to do stuff, et cetera? And I can't tell you even on my side of the fence, I've involved myself in contracts where I did not understand how much time of mine it would require. I thought I was paying someone else to take care of the opportunity for me. And it ended up...
Catherine LePetit
Mm-hmm.
Nikki Lindgren
Being a lot more of my time. And in the end, it was like, well, what value did they add for us? So I appreciate that.
Catherine LePetit
Exactly. Super important. That's the question I ask all the time. I don't want to end up doing the whole work and then I'm like, wait, what did I pay you for? So that's the person you recommended me, we just talked about before. That's what I liked about her pitch. She was super clear. And then I said, so what's the partnership look like? Like, how often are we going to meet? What do I need from me? She was super clear too in her answer, which was really comforting for me. Was like, okay, she knows what she's talking about.
Nikki Lindgren
Yes.
Catherine LePetit
And on the ROI, which is a huge piece for all the brands out there, big or small, they want an ROI. How long will it take to get there? Like she was clear, it's not gonna happen overnight. She was super clear, which I was expecting that. I like that, then someone was going to say like, don't worry, X20 in like two weeks. No, this is not even realistic, I get it. So she was clear on the ROI and... And she even did her homework. Like she followed up with me with, this is your computer. This is what I pulled. This is what they're doing. I think we can do X amount of this. She was like talking to me again. And I love that.
Nikki Lindgren
Seems like a really solid way to land a new client. And it sounds like the relationship's going really well too. Yeah.
Catherine LePetit
Really well because she's consistent with what she said and sold me. So that's perfect.
Nikki Lindgren
Yeah, awesome. Well, those are some good nuggets. Thank you so much for that. We're about to close 2024. And so a lot of us are thinking about what is going to be different within the marketing ecosystem in the future. And so as you kind of described some of the issues and successes you've had in marketing, in finding service providers, etc., are you thinking about the marketing mix or like the stack of services within the marketing ecosystem you'll utilize differently in 2025?
Catherine LePetit
Because I'm a baby brand, I have so much to do, like I'm not even doing the basics yet, so I need to really ramp up that. I would say for the big brands, there's a lot of talk about really accelerating TikTok and YouTube. And YouTube, the last three months, I keep hearing YouTube, YouTube, YouTube, YouTube. And looking at my 11-year-old, I totally understand why YouTube is going to be the next big thing because he doesn't care about TikTok anymore. It's just on YouTube, which sounds insane to me because I have an 18-year-old, a 15 and an 11, and I can see the shift.
Nikki Lindgren
Hmm.
Catherine LePetit
One is already out of social media. The other one is on Snapchat, doesn't care about the rest. And the other one is on YouTube. There is not even... Yeah, it's moving so fast. So I would say those are to be considered very seriously.
Nikki Lindgren
Yeah.
Yes, similar. We're doing more ad buying on TikTok and YouTube than ever before. And I do consider that something that will continue in 2025. I think like Meta is a good stable source for revenue for brands. But I do think the shift is going to happen where fewer of the overall marketing mixed dollars are going to Meta and it's reallocated to more emerging technologies or platforms. And in some cases, like you and I might have talked about it before, but like there are some brands that just do really well on Pinterest. And so can we continue to give more of their paid media mix, for example, to a platform that might be a little bit of a corner case for most other brands and something they would just like activate seasonally?
Catherine LePetit
Totally. Actually, that's a very good point. I mean, any marketing strategy should be really catered to that brand. And my brand in particular, I would love a marketer to help me out there, but my brand is special. I cannot just run the playbook that I did for all my skincare and hair brands because I'm different. I'm seasonal.
Nikki Lindgren
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Catherine LePetit
There's apparel and towels, it's very different. Actually, also another thing that I just discovered is those platforms like Palm Street. I don't know if you've ever heard about that. I tried to...
Nikki Lindgren
Do you put it on your website or do you, is it like hosted onto your website or is it the platform is Pond Street and you watch it over there?
Catherine LePetit
It's an app, Street, it was targeting only plant people, people who buy Very targeted. And then they started to open to beauty. So they reached out to me and I was like, I don't know if I have time, blah, blah, But the deal was so good that I was like, okay, let me try. And I did two lives and I was like amazed how successful it was. I can pull it off on TikTok. But Palm Street, because the community is so strong and it's really well done, the backend and all that, it's super easy to use that I was like, okay, maybe that's the future too. Like those live shopping platforms. My ROI of one hour was insane. Like I was like, okay, to think about.
Nikki Lindgren
More. Yeah.
There you go. That explains why you're not excited about doing direct mail again. You can just go into Ponson Piler. Right. Well, I love the diversity that you're thinking through for 2025 to probably get. I'm assuming most of your paid dollars right now do or getting allocated to Meta. That...
Catherine LePetit
Right? Exactly.
Actually, no, because I was restricted until a month ago. I finally decided to let go of my account and restart a new one because I explored all opportunities. I was restricted. There was nothing Meta could do about it. So I'm starting over. So no, I haven't tried Meta yet. That's what I'm saying. I need to do the basic before I move up to the next level. But yeah, Meta is my big challenge for the next.
I would like to start in January because I think Christmas is crazy. Yeah, I would like to start in January.
Nikki Lindgren
All right, our final question as we're wrapping up is really kind of the reflection point. So what advice would you give your younger self if you were starting all over again in this business?
Catherine LePetit
I really enjoyed my whole career growth and I think I'm really proud of myself when I think about it. I will tell my younger self enjoy the director level. This is the best level ever. You're not too into politics and you're not too in execution. It's just the perfect level. Enjoy that moment as long as you can. That would be my biggest advice to my little one. If I were to give advice to my kids, which I do all the time, it's like, do something you're passionate about. And that's, I was always passionate about beauty and anything beautiful and I don't know. So it was perfect for me. And then I evolved to, I don't care about beauty anymore. I just care about the beach. I just want to enjoy the beach. So I created Sundrunk to fit what I'm passionate about. And I think the more you're passionate about something,
Nikki Lindgren
Yeah.
Catherine LePetit
The more successful you will become naturally because you're passionate about it. So that was my biggest advice. Be passionate about what you do. Life is too short.
Nikki Lindgren
Yeah. And then I do have to say with you on the director level front of that just being a really good position to have. So appreciate the idea of maybe enjoying spending time there for.
Catherine LePetit
Yeah, it's funny how we run after that, the next promotion, the next promotion, I want to be a VP, I want to be a VP without really knowing how much it is. A VP level, it's just super sensitive. In all the sensitivity that under it, it's like terrible.
Nikki Lindgren
Yeah.
Catherine LePetit
Always kind of being on call for anything that comes up at work.
Nikki Lindgren
Yeah, it's a very different step.
Nikki Lindgren
Catherine, this has been so much fun. Final question is really how can people get in touch with you who want to learn more about Sundrunk and maybe buy some of your products?
Catherine LePetit
Please. Yeah, sure. So it's @SunDrunkWorld, so sundrunkworld.com and all the social media from TikTok to Instagram to YouTube, you know, all of them. It's sundrunkworld as well. And I will be super happy to see you. And I swear to God, you guys are gonna be my witness. I'm gonna start doing content more often, more consistently. That's my biggest challenge for 2025. I'm excited.
Nikki Lindgren
Great. Well, I'm excited to watch the content come forward and follow you on your socials and really appreciate your time today, Catherine.
Catherine LePetit
Thank you so much, Nikki, for inviting me. I really enjoyed it.
Nikki Lindgren
Thank you.
