Landing International, a B2B marketplace for the beauty products industry, focuses on the unique attributes of beauty products and connects emerging beauty and wellness brands with retailers.

Sarah Chung, CEO, Landing International

“I launched Landing with this idea that we need more transparency in the B2B beauty space where brands and retailers can find out information about their potential partners,” says Sarah Chung, Landing’s CEO. “We chose to build this platform around the idea of trading transparency in the industry and leveling the playing field for emerging brands.”

But Landing is also going beyond featuring products on its marketplace from hundreds of beauty brands for buyers at such retailers as Ulta, Target, Dermstore, Nordstrom and Revolve. One of its newest value-added offerings is a custom-designed online training tool that brands can use to connect with retail sales associates and beauty advisors and train them on effective ways to sell and cross-sell beauty products.

For brands, “getting into retail is only half the battle,” says Adriana Lipsztein, vice president of Landing Agency, Landing’s brand services department that assists brands with marketing and public relations. “Historically, retail training demands brand budgets in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, with full-time employees or high-price contractors visiting individual stores to train sales staff.”

Landing developed its online training tool to let brands and merchants reach and train retail staff digitally—a method that has become more valuable amid the safety precautions for personnel during the pandemic, Chung says. “This tool has been under development for the past two years, but certainly the pandemic and the longtail of safety precautions has made retail training even more challenging,” she says.

A demonstration video of the tool shows how brands can load product descriptions and images from their own product catalogs, including such details as the ingredients in skincare cream and how they benefit users based on their skin types, plus such advice as when to apply the cream.

Sharing customized training tools online

The training tool also lets brands upload how-to videos and additional information on industry trends to further educate retail sales associates. Once a brand has developed a customized tool for one or more of its product lines for a client retailer, it can publish it online and share it through an online link with the retailer’s sales staff.

In developing the digital tool and replacing traditional materials, Landing sought to provide a way for brands of all sizes to more easily train sales professionals and with the latest information on brands. “We spoke to dozens of sales associates and heard their frustrations on getting trained on smaller, unknown brands,” Chung says. “We saw a tremendous amount of inefficiencies in the current solutions and how costly a comprehensive training program can be. Then on top of that, information would get aged so quickly, there was no way to update materials quickly and redistribute it instantly.”

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