ByErim

At a glance

Sector: beauty and personal care. A creator-led brand selling direct to consumers.

Client: ByErim, the luxury hair and beard oil brand founded by Erim Kaur. The oil is 100% natural, unisex and cruelty-free, it was awarded “Winner of the best hair oil” in 2022, and the brand had over 75,000 customers worldwide before it had an app.

Platforms: iOS and Android.

What we did: designed and built the official ByErim app for both platforms in four weeks, with the shopping experience built around the brand’s product photography, Apple Pay and Google Pay at checkout, and push notifications as an owned marketing channel.

The challenge

Creator-led commerce is not ordinary retail with a famous face attached. It has its own distinct problems, and ByErim had all of them.

A social following is rented, not owned. Reach on Instagram and TikTok is decided by an algorithm and can drop without warning. A brand built on that reach needs a channel it controls outright. Email is the usual answer, and email is read roughly 15% of the time; push notifications are read around 80% of the time.

The founder’s voice carries the brand. People buy ByErim because they trust Erim Kaur on hair care, not because they were shopping for hair oil. A generic storefront would throw that away, so the tone, imagery and product guidance had to sound like her rather than like a retailer.

Content and shopping have to live together. A follower who arrives after watching a routine wants to see the routine and buy the products in the same place. Split the two and you lose people at the join.

Launch day is a spike, not a curve. A creator can point a very large audience at a new app in one story, so everything from the store listing to the checkout has to hold up on day one.

The audience has no patience for friction. Someone tapping through from a story is mid-scroll. A registration wall or a manual card form loses them before the basket.

The brief was to get marketing messages out to more users, increase the engagement rate and build higher brand loyalty.

What we designed

A shop that leads with photography. Browse and product screens are laid out around full-bleed imagery rather than a dense grid of thumbnails, with the whole range reachable in a couple of taps.

Product pages in the founder’s voice. Ingredients, what the oil is for and how to use it are written as guidance rather than specification, keeping the voice that built the brand in the place where the purchase decision happens.

One-tap checkout. Apple Pay and Google Pay are the primary payment methods, not an afterthought below a card form. A customer goes from product page to confirmed order in about four seconds and a single tap, removing the biggest drop-off point for traffic arriving from social.

Push notifications as the marketing channel. The team can send messages themselves, without a developer in the loop, for launches, restocks and campaign moments. This is what turns installs into an audience the brand can reach at the right time.

A four-week build across both stores. Design, build and release to the App Store and Google Play took four weeks, so the launch could be timed to a campaign moment rather than the other way round.

Results

On launch, ByErim reached the top 100 of all apps in the App Store charts. That is the overall all-apps chart rather than a category listing, which for a single-product beauty brand meant placing above established retail names including Missguided, Co-Op and Ikea.

The app collected thousands of downloads in its first 24 hours and its user base has continued to grow since, with push notifications giving the team a direct line to customers they own rather than rent.

Frequently asked

Is an app worth it if I already sell through social media?

It is worth it once your following is large enough that losing reach is expensive. Social gets you discovered; an app is where you keep the people who already bought. The honest test is whether you have enough repeat customers to justify it. If you do, the reach arithmetic is compelling: push is read around 80% of the time against roughly 15% for email.

How do you convert social followers into app users?

By giving the app something the feed cannot: faster checkout, first access to launches and restocks, and order history in one place. The launch matters too. A creator pointing their audience at the app in one coordinated push is what produced ByErim’s first 24 hours and its chart placing, rather than a slow trickle of installs.

How do you design an app around a personal brand?

Start from the founder’s voice and let the interface get out of its way. The photography and copy come first and the layout serves them, and product guidance is written the way the founder would say it. The test is simple: if a follower could not tell the app was made by the person they follow, the design has failed.

Related services

ByErim was built for an audience that already followed the brand, which is a common starting point for creator-led launches. If you are scoping something similar, how much app design costs in the UK is the place to begin, and a free UX audit will show you how much of your current mobile checkout is costing you. There is more on what it is like working with an app design agency in London, or get started and tell us about your brand.