Trinny London perfects new customer acquisition with Asana

Trinny London’s luxury range of easy, modern, ‘do-it-everywhere’ makeup has permeated cosmetic bags across the world—in just four years the company has scaled to over 170 employees. However, this incredible tragectory led to concerns about how to sustain this level of growth long-term with new customer acquisition.

In consumer industries, social media is crucial for building a community of people who feel an affinity with the brand—and Trinny London is no exception. To create engaging content that attracts new customers, Trinny London needs to run a highly cross-functional operation. Like many startups, it first used basic tools to manage its projects and campaigns. “We had a mammoth spreadsheet where we tried to catalogue all the content and link it up between the teams,” said Shannon O'Hara, Producer. “Spreadsheets gave us an overview, but there was so much manual work to keep it updated.” There had to be a better way.

According to The Anatomy of Work Index individuals can save six hours and five minutes every week through improved processes alone. Trinny London decided to implement a new Kanban-style tool and immediately found it easier to see tasks, track progress and identify functional dependencies. But it created a new problem: over-communication. “People's inboxes were flooded with notifications,” explained Shannon.

Trinny London decided to evaluate more work management tools, realising it needed something with strong automation that had all the functionality it needed out-of-the-box. “We needed a more sophisticated system—something that functioned like a spreadsheet, only with a real-time view and automatic notifications, and without overwhelming people,” said Shannon.

Asana ticked all the boxes

Asana and Trinny London’s teams began the implementation with a single use case: to assist with product launches. Jemima Childs, Video Production Coordinator, said, “Asana made the process so clear. It felt like everyone knew where they were at and what they needed to do.” Shannon continued, “If I'm away from my laptop, I keep up with notifications through the Slack integration. Everything is in one place so it hasn’t taken over my emails when I get back to my keyboard.”

Proving Asana’s capabilities on a small scale made the rollout simpler. But the team’s enjoyment wasn’t just attributed to how Asana improved work management—it extended to all the small details. “I like how you can show colleagues appreciation through emojis. It is very motivating and it makes a big difference,” said Jemima.

The right foundation

“When using our initial spreadsheet and Kanban-style tool, we were forever chasing people for updates. It doubled rather than halved the workload,” said Jemima. However, the clarity provided by Asana to brief in new ads, organise them and record feedback has enabled Trinny London to improve work for its employees—an investment the Anatomy of Work Index shows over a quarter of workers wish their employers would make to support better collaboration. “My favourite feature is the ability to add one task to multiple boards. This way we only need to communicate in one task and it’s visible everywhere. This has been a game changer for us,” said Shannon.

Trinny London uses Asana to improve its ad spend. As Demi Mistry, Paid Social Coordinator, explained, “Before, it was very difficult to know where everything was and to match the right images with the right copy. Asana gives me complete oversight of each ad’s purpose, description, related links and assets, as well as the state of progress and next steps. Asana helps us get things uploaded to Facebook’s ad manager and tested quicker. When we know what's working, we can get more things briefed in and improve the return on sales.”

Flawless execution

Asana also enables Trinny London to align its cross-functional teams that drive new customer acquisition as the business matures.

Centralised, shared boards provide a single view of all tasks, with clear status updates and collaborators looped into a project when needed. “Because we crossover with every team within marketing, Asana is great for managing all tasks. We have four boards solely for photoshoots: one to organise the shoots, one for retouching, one for editorial, and one for additional design,” said Penny Bavister, Design Ops Coordinator. “To keep us on track, I set up a rule so that when a task is marked as complete, it automatically moves to the next board. If something's missing, another rule demotes its status, and passes it back to the previous board for further work.”

Shannon commented, “Asana has helped us to automate the feedback approval process, which has definitely sped things up and made everything clearer.”

Additionally, the Anatomy of Work Index found that most workers are only able to spend 14% of their time on forward-looking strategy, and Trinny London believes Asana presented it with a huge opportunity. “My previous role now functions by itself,” explained Shannon. “'Asana has given me more time to work on higher level planning and look ahead to future launches and projects”

Visible results

A core KPI of the video production team was to increase one-minute watch times on all the website and YouTube video content. This encourages more viewers to ‘like and subscribe’, which ultimately drives revenue. “To capture new video briefs we ask the editorial team to complete an Asana form, which creates a task in the video production board. I then have a visual list of requests, so it’s easier to assess workloads and the state of different assets, before assigning the brief to the design or copy team,” explained Jemima.

Previously, inbound requests were managed in email, and the volume meant actions were often missed or there was miscommunication—one of the top impacts of burnout according to the Anatomy of Work Index. Now, 99% of internal communication goes through Asana. Additionally, people feel ownership over the tasks they’re assigned, can access the information they need, and feel they can influence the outcome of their work, which motivates them to take responsibility. As Jemima commented, “Asana has given us a way to better manage workloads.”

Made up for success

With Asana embedded into the rhythm of the business, Trinny London now has the right platform to scale and diversify so it remains relevant to future customers. “Over the next year the focus is to increase our presence in growth markets, including the US, Germany, and Canada,” said Demi. “Asana will be a big help in organising the new country launches, as well as maintaining business-as-usual.”

Trinny London is now confident in its ability to acquire new customers long-term, because Asana gives the team the platform they need to manage and execute work flawlessly.