Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato's Rare Beauty reunion passed half a billion views, and it didn’t need a new product to get there. Our founder and editor, Shannon Kate Murray, explains why more female founders should be teaming up, with eight collaboration ideas you can start on straight away.
"YO YO YO… 18 years later, Delena is back," announced Rare Beauty's Instagram on 28 October.
It was women supporting women on a Hollywood scale: a new campaign from Selena Gomez's make-up brand, starring Gomez and Demi Lovato. The campaign, called Still Making Each Other Blush, recreated the YouTube videos the pair filmed together as teenagers and the poster for their 2009 Disney film, Princess Protection Program to promote a limited-edition bundle. The bundle was named Delena, after the nickname fans gave them back then: two of Rare Beauty's existing liquid blushers and a brush, for US$50. There was even a billboard on Sunset Boulevard.
Tyra Booker, Rare Beauty's assistant vice president of integrated marketing, came up with the idea. In a LinkedIn post, she said she pitched it in her first week at the company, inspired by the friendship she grew up watching on the pair's YouTube videos. By her count, the campaign passed 500 million views across every platform.
That's the Delena effect: two women getting further together than either would alone.
Why did the Delena campaign work?
Delena works for two reasons, and you can borrow both.
Each of them brought people the other might not reach. Rare Beauty gets in front of Lovato's fans as well as Gomez's, and Lovato gets in front of Rare Beauty's customers. Your version is smaller, but it works the same way: her customers meet you, and yours meet her.
The pairing made sense. Gomez is the face of her own brand, and the public knows her through her past, so the most natural partner was someone from it that fans already loved. Customers saw two women they felt they knew rather than two logos, and people buy from people. For you, a natural partner is someone whose work sits easily next to yours, so customers instantly see why you're together: a nutritionist and a personal trainer makes sense in a way a nutritionist and a dog groomer doesn't.
It also works even though their friendship hasn't always been easy. In 2020, Lovato told Harper's Bazaar, "I'm not friends with her." When the campaign launched, she told Elle that friends go through phases of being close and phases of not being in touch, and that it was great to be in "a place today where we can collaborate on things". Even the commentator Hugo Henderson, who is sceptical about how close they are now, thinks they've worked out something useful in a video about the pair: whatever the state of their friendship, anything they promote together does far better than it would alone.
This campaign proved them right. So why don't more of us do the same?
Why don’t more founders team up?
Two things often get in the way, but neither should stop you.
Seeing each other as competition. It's easy to see another woman in your industry as a rival, when her customers could be yours and yours could be hers.
Worrying about imposing. Asking for something can feel like taking more than you're giving. And women ask less: in a 2023 survey of 500 UK founders, commissioned by Fiverr and Virgin StartUp, women were much less likely than men to ask for business help.
But a fair ask isn't taking. A collaboration is out in the open: you both know what you're putting in and what you're hoping to get back. That's very different from using someone, which is keeping her close for what she can do for you and drifting off once she's no longer useful.
You're also less of an imposition than you think. In a 2022 study in Psychological Science, people who needed help consistently underestimated how willing others were to give it, and how good helping would make them feel.
Who should you team up with?
Look for someone whose customers overlap with yours but who doesn't sell what you sell.
You don't need to be best friends first. Plenty of good partnerships are purely business, and friendship often grows out of working together. In my experience, clients turn into friends, and so do the founders you meet along the way.
Once you've found her, get in touch. If you know someone who can introduce you, even better. If not, don't be afraid to message a founder you admire directly.
Don't overthink the message, and please don't get AI to write it. Founders get templated pitches all the time, and they all sound the same. Write it the way you'd message a friend: say hello and who you are, then share your idea and what's in it for her.
What can you do together?
Delena didn't need a new product. It was two blushers Rare Beauty already sold, plus a brush. Your collaboration doesn't need one either. A few ideas that work well:
Share what you know with her audience. Write a guest post for her blog, or appear on her podcast.
Run a joint workshop or webinar, and create a free guide together to give attendees.
Swap a spot in each other’s newsletters. Never share the email lists themselves.
Put together a limited-edition bundle from what you both already sell, like a candle maker and a chocolatier.
Create a package for clients, or pitch for bigger work together. A brand photographer and a web designer could offer a full rebrand, and go after projects neither could take on alone.
Stock each other’s products. A salon could sell a local candle maker’s candles at the till.
Run a joint giveaway. You both promote it, and the prize shows off both businesses. Write clear terms and conditions, which UK advertising rules require.
Refer clients to each other. When a client needs something you don’t offer, send them her way, and agree up front whether there’s a referral fee.
How do you make it work?
A collaboration runs smoothly when you sort the practical side out early.
Agree the basics. Agree who's putting in what and by when, and how you'll split any costs and money. If you're selling something together, agree who handles orders and customer questions; if you're creating something, like a guide, agree that you can both use it. Put it all in an email, including what happens if one of you wants to step back, and for anything bigger than a one-off, get a proper agreement drawn up.
Agree on the effort, not the results. You can't promise her sales, and she can't promise you any either, so agree on things like how often you'll each promote it. Make sure you're both putting something in, rather than one of you just lending a name.
Show up in it yourselves. People buy from people, so put both your faces and voices in it, not just a shared graphic.
Track it, then talk about it. Give each of you your own discount code or link, so you can both see what the collaboration brought in. Once it's done, have a quick chat about what worked and whether you'd do it again.
Get more out of it. If you made something, use it again. A webinar recording can become blog posts and social clips for both of you, long after the day itself.
What if you're not the right fit?
Stay in touch anyway. Businesses change, and someone who isn’t the right fit today might be in a year’s time, once she’s launched something new or you’ve grown in a different direction.
Until then, cheer on her launches, and recommend her when there’s nothing in it for you. I’m a serial referrer: if someone’s brilliant at what they do, I’ll send clients their way without a second thought. That kind of no-strings support is what makes people trust you when you do team up.
And she might turn out to be your next friend.
Your own Delena effect
You don't have a Disney past or the budget to put a billboard on Sunset Boulevard, and you don't need either. Selena and Demi showed what two women can do when they come together. The founder version is smaller and closer to home, and it starts with one message to a woman whose work you admire.
So send it.