Breaking Embargoes, Beauty Blacklists & Mikayla Nogueira’s Sephora Bet

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

G-L-A-M, Gloss Angeles.

Kirbie Johnson (0:14)

All right, so there was a question that popped up in the Slack channel that I thought would be a fun kickoff for this particular episode. If you're in our Slack channel, you know that we have testings going on at any given time. And if you're new here, we have this program called Gloss Angeles Confidential.

I can't imagine you haven't heard about it. Well, if it is your first time ever tuning in. The reason why I'm bringing this up is because we have this Slack channel, and there are people in this particular testing that we have going on, because we have testings going on at any given point. And this person, Heather, asked us, based off of something that happened in one of the testings, to talk about this on the podcast. Okay, so there's a testing where we have an embargo. And we are not allowed to talk about this product before it launches, okay? That means not us, not anybody in this group. You're basically under an NDA.

And embargo is something that you and I know very well. It's essentially confidentiality, that you're not going to go scream from the rooftops that a launch is happening when you get all of this information ahead of time. So there's about, how many people are in this group? I can't remember this particular one.

Maybe 200 or maybe 100 people in this particular group. It's a lot of people. And we started getting comments this past week that were like, hey, we're seeing content creators posting about this launch. Are we allowed to talk about it? Or does the embargo still stand? And Heather Whistley said, this would make an interesting pod episode of what happens when one breaks their embargo. Does the brand just not work with them moving forward and that's it? Or is there a do not work with blacklist that brands share and their name goes on it? So I figured it might be fun to like kind of describe what happens in this case, especially from our side of things. There was actually a situation with Gloria where she allegedly broke a house labs embargo and she took down the post. But then she ended up putting it back up and was essentially saying like, I didn't get any notification that this was under embargo.

And I have to wonder if my review was positive, would you have wanted me to take it down?

SPEAKER_1 (2:26)

This was my first ever negative review of a house labs product. My team was told that the video needed to come down due to embargo concerns. The house labs team also told my team that they had told me in the PR package that this product was under embargo. However, they didn't. This was the note. I've been an influencer for years. So if I see something that's under embargo in a PR package, I'm going to be inclined not to post it because legal is legal. And the product had already been leaked publicly via Trend Mood, which is one of the biggest beauty bloggers on Instagram. It was leaked two days earlier by Trend Mood and stayed up. If the concern was truly visibility, the product was already visible and not by my hands. So naturally, the question becomes, well, what was different? The difference was the conversation surrounding the product. The difference was that the post wasn't just simply showing the bronzers. It was evaluating them.

Kirbie Johnson (3:13)

Because she was pretty critical of this particular house labs launch. And I think that's an interesting topic of conversation in regards to embargoes. But I was like, Sara and I have been through this, where we get told there is an embargo date. We have to abide by it. And then we see that somebody has posted about it early, weeks early. And we're like, well, it's fair game. It's out in the open now. And the brand hasn't done anything to get it taken down. We, of course, try to reach out to the brand to be like, hey, we saw this, this is fair game now. Like if everybody else is posting, you know, why aren't we? There was a situation this past week with Mikayla Nogueira, which we'll talk about a little bit later in the podcast, but POV is going to Sephora.

And we got an email from her PR team weeks ago that said, what, like under embargo until August 5th at this time. But then she went to the Sephora Managers Conference and it's like a big to do.

Sara Tan (4:15)

She's talking about it on the panel there.

Kirbie Johnson (4:17)

There's a business of fashion article that goes out. And so it's like, yeah, I feel we are by abiding by embargo when this information is already out in the open.