Beauty and med spa / Glendale, CA / Since 2023

Glo LA

We spent three years perfecting the light. What worked was shot on the fly

Glo LA is a beauty salon in Glendale with two owners who wanted to be unique. After a year of polished production, we turned the camera on the people who work there.

Before

5K
views on a typical reel

After

3.6M
views on one reel: 3M
views on a team reel: 1M
views on another: 3 years
on one project

The account

The view counts on the same account, before and after.

See @glo_losangeles

Before

After

Glo LA reels grid where one reel has 3.6M views and another 380K — After: 3.6M views on one reel

Glo LA reels grid where one reel has 3M views — A team reel at 3M views

Glo LA reels grid with reels at 380K, 535K and 1M views — 380K, 535K and 1M on one screen

The brief

Taste comes before words

Glo LA opened in Glendale. Its two owners have impeccable taste, and you can't work in beauty without it, because the job is seeing beauty. They didn't want to just look good in the feed. They wanted to be unique.

They knew what they wanted. The hard part is that taste comes before words, and putting a feeling into words takes time. In projects like this, the style is found along the way, together. This is the most common request we get. We took the project on in 2023 and have worked on it for three years.

Stage one

Year one was about the work

Beauty is one of the most crowded niches, an endless stream of transformations where accounts blur into one. In Glendale, several salons on one street film the same thing.

We started with what we do best, the light around the models. A transformation is all about contrast, and bad light kills the stylist's work before the edit. Then color and frame-by-frame cleanup, because video doesn't forgive what a photo does. Inflamed skin is a one-minute fix in a photo, but on video the model moves and turns, so you can't hide it in every frame.

On set it was one operator, who was also the producer. We worked out ideas as a team before each shoot and polished the result in post. The client never sees those two stages, and they're why the quality held for three years straight.

Content Production
Model Shoots
Post-Production
Content Strategy
Staff Humor Reels

The turn

What we realized next

The year gave the salon a large body of strong work. It proved the salon knew its craft. It gave nobody a reason to pick it, because in Glendale everyone knows the craft. We had made the best version of what everyone else makes.

Good work alone doesn't bring people into a salon. People look for their people. You spend two hours in that chair, so you want to feel comfortable there, and a perfectly shot transformation can't show that.

We brought this to the owners ourselves and proposed changing the strategy. They didn't go looking for another agency. They made the turn with us, and that's what three years on one project looks like.

Stage two

We stopped looking outside the salon

We went through the footage and noted what was real about the team: young, very funny, each with her own sense of humor. Then we built an idea around one person and took it into the next shoot.

3.6M
top reel: 3M
team reel: 1M
another

Tap to preview

Team humor

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Sample content

Built on the first stage

Without the lighting we had built, a fun team on camera would look like phone footage.

The results

What happened

Views grew, especially after the entertaining content. Before, a reel on the account got about 5,000 views. After, a reel about booking hair and makeup at the same time reached 3.6M, and one with the whole team reached 3M.

More telling was that other people started studying us. Marketers in Los Angeles began featuring the salon's account on their own pages and discussing why it works. We didn't pay for that or ask for it.

5K
views on a typical reel before: 3.6M
views on the top reel after: 3M
views on a team reel

Why it matters

Production quality is the price of entry. It doesn't tell anyone why they should choose you. That answer is usually already inside your business, in the people who work there. You don't have to invent it. You have to notice it and film it.

If you're in a niche where everyone looks the same, the question isn't whether you have something to show. It's who will notice it and film it so it keeps working for years.