More than 4,000 consumers recently rushed to join hair and body care brand Ouai’s community on TYB—a platform that blends the group chat functionality of messaging apps such as Discord and Geneva with elements of a customer loyalty program.

That number likely would have been larger if Ouai didn’t limit the window for new members to join the private group to just a few days each month, Laural Simeon, Ouai’s senior director of direct-to-consumer, told Ad Age. 

Since launching on TYB last February, Ouai has amassed a community of over 13,000 consumers, including the 4,000 who joined in August, Simeon said. The brand has a waitlist of consumers queued up to join its TYB community when it invites a new group fans into the group later this month, she said.

“We’ve only been opening it up for like a week a month, every month,” she said, so the group doesn’t become too big too quickly. “I think if we left the doors open, it would probably [explode].”

Ouai is just one of more than 80 brands currently utilizing TYB to engage with and reward their most loyal consumers. The name, an acronym for “try your best,” was inspired by the mother of Founder and CEO Ty Haney, who often used the phrase during Haney’s childhood, according to TYB Chief Operating Officer Breana Teubner.

After launching in 2022, TYB mostly attracted beauty brands. But over the last several months, brands from fashion, wellness, food and beverage have also joined the platform, Teubner said.

The platform has “hundreds of thousands” of users, according to Teubner, who declined to provide specific data on usage. 

TYB allows brands to run loyalty programs that offer consumers “coins” in exchange for completing challenges posted by the brand. These can range from signing up for the brand’s email list to capturing photo or video content featuring its products. Users can also engage with brand representatives and other consumers through group chats in each community. It is free for brands and consumers to join the platform. 

“The future of brand building is community-generated and it’s measurable,” Haney, who also founded DTC athleisure brand Outdoor Voices, wrote in a TYB blog post ahead of the platform’s launch.

Teubner echoed Haney’s statement, calling the DTC business model of focusing on customer acquisition rather than retention and pumping money into performance marketing or pricey ads on Instagram and Facebook “flawed in a lot of ways.”

“It can be anywhere from five to 20 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than retain a current customer,” Teubner continued. “By formalizing this direct relationship through the communities that they build using TYB and rewarding those fans for helping them grow their brand, it’s directly correlated to retaining them … We consistently ask [consumers] what their favorite perk is for being part of communities on TYB and, resoundingly, they say the connection to the brand.” 

Indeed, brands such as Ouai, skincare brand Topicals and ChapStick—which launched its TYB community just two weeks ago—told Ad Age they’re capitalizing on first-party consumer insights from platform conversations. They’re using these insights to guide product development and marketing campaigns, while also utilizing TYB challenges to reward consumers for creating user-generated content that can be repurposed for social media posts and other marketing materials.

Brand-building engine

Topicals, the first brand to establish a community on TYB, has grown its community over the past two years from around 1,000 brand ambassadors to a blended group of over 22,000 ambassadors, loyal consumers (nicknamed the “Spottie Hotties”) and estheticians and dermatologists, said Natalie Browne Holmes, Topicals’ director of community and social impact. 

Holmes considers TYB to be a core part of “the new version of the customer relationship,” where brands seek out consumer feedback to shape their product development process and prioritize consumers and their experiences with products in their marketing. For instance, Topicals is gearing up to release an under-eye mask product developed largely within its TYB community, also known as the “Spottie Sphere.” The brand’s creative team used consumer feedback and multiple rounds of voting to narrow down the design and other elements of the mask, Holmes said. 

Gen Z consumers, in particular, expect to have their voices heard by brands and “impact our upcoming product launches, get rewarded when they give us feedback or just have an opportunity and a space to be able to have an impact on your most beloved brands,” she added. Brands such as e.l.f. and Converse have recently embraced this phenomenon by looking to Gen Z’s demands in their comments sections to help them determine new products to develop or discontinued products to bring back. (It is unclear how many Gen Zers are on TYB because each community is “reflective of their respective brand communities,” said Teubner. Users must be 18 or older to join TYB on their own; those aged 13 to 18 can have a TYB account with adult supervision, according to TYB's terms of service.

TYB has also become an important element of Topicals’ social media content strategy, Holmes said. Topicals regularly rewards members of its TYB community for completing challenges that involve sharing videos or photos connected to the brand, such as reviewing a specific product, she said. Those challenges are often based on requests from Topicals’ social media team for specific types of user-generated content they can either run as paid media or transform into content for the brand’s own channels, such as product testimonials or their questions about a new product launch, said Grace Sofia Caro, Topicals’ community impact manager. While brands do not need to pay community members to use their content in advertising, per TYB terms and service, Topicals rewards users whose content they use for social content or paid media with “product discounts, early access and exclusive opportunities,” Holmes said.

Topicals also draws from its TYB community members when choosing consumers for events, brand trips (such as a recent journey to the Swiss Alps) and early access to a new product, Caro said.

Departments across Procter & Gamble-owned Ouai, including its customer experience, social media and product development teams, work together to determine which conversations to strike up in brand’s TYB group chats, Simeon said. The brand’s head of customer experience moderates the chat but other employees can answer questions, too. 

“Originally coming in, we thought [TYB] would be a big revenue driver, and that was probably our number one goal,” she said. “But now that we’re in it, yeah, people are converting and using their coins, but I think the value of that connection, that relationship, has just outweighed anything else. And I think the number one thing that we find value in is the [first-party] data that we’re getting back from our customers.”

In the coming weeks, Simeon is planning to launch a channel in Ouai’s TYB community focused on product development—or, more specifically, generating inspiration for new products from consumers’ feedback and suggestions. “A lot of our product development came formerly from social comments,” she said. “But now I think this is giving [consumers] a space where they can have a conversation, and opening up a [product development] funnel. It’s always good to tap into someone who you're actually building this for and say, ‘What do you actually, really want from us?’”

Ouai is also discussing the possibility of bringing the brand to new markets based on responses it has seen from the members of its TYB community, Simeon said. For instance, a handful of over 100 consumers who recently joined a Zoom webinar for members of Ouai’s TYB community were from countries where Ouai isn’t sold, such as Qatar, she said. Some of those consumers who live in markets Ouai isn’t sold in will still complete TYB challenges and collect coins, she added, “and that’s proof, really, that we need to go into those markets.”

ChapStick also launched its TYB community to unite and reward passionate brand fans who, until recently, had been scattered in Facebook groups and other niche enclaves across the internet, said Megha Goel, social media & influencer manager at Chaptstick parent Suave Brands Company. Establishing a TYB community for ChapStick was one of Goel’s priorities after Suave completed its acquisition of the brand from Haleon in June, she said. 

The brand has gathered over 1,000 members in its TYB community in the two weeks since launching on the platform, she added.

While the number may pale in comparison to the brand’s nearly 130,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram, engagement on TYB is beginning to outpace the engagement the brand typically receives on its social channels, Goel said.

“[Our members] have been writing to the TYB community email about how much they love being a part of the platform,” she said. “And we’re seeing people from the Facebook groups coming and joining the platform and talking about how they love it and how it kind of helps them engage directly with the brand.” 

“Because [ChapStick] is a legacy brand, there’s so many fans and so many communities—like, there are Facebook groups that just exchange ChapStick flavors or send pictures of the new releases that they found—but the fanbase has been so under-leveraged,” Goel said. “Just in a few months, I’ve seen so many DMs that we get [from people] that want to be a part of the brand and so many personal, handwritten letters that come to the company. And with this fandom I noticed, there definitely was a need to further engage these fans.”

ChapStick announced its launch on TYB with a slew of nostalgia-fueled social posts tapping into the “obsession” with the brand Goel had seen from consumers, she said. The challenges ChapStick has run in its TYB community focus on the role the brand has played in consumers’ lives, such as describing “the weirdest places you lost your ChapStick” or their “ChapStick origin story”—how they were first introduced to the brand, she said. Those challenges are boosting engagement across ChapStick’s social channels, too, as the brand is repurposing those challenges for social posts that prompt consumers to respond to the same questions, she said. 

At the same time, ChapStick has also begun using TYB as a focus group and asking consumers in the community (who range from roughly 18 to 45, per Goel) about their favorite content creators, social platforms and other preferences that could shape ChapStick’s future marketing, she said. 

“[TYB] has made community so measurable—you can see how many people are [joining] the community, how the community is growing, what they’re thinking, what they like, what they expect the brand to do,” Goel said. “It’s such a living and breathing space of who your brand fans are.”