A Night For Green Beauty, the brand-focused discovery and shopping event for people creating and buying green beauty, is back, founder Victoria Fantauzzi tells Beauty Independent in an exclusive interview.
After a three-year hiatus, ANFGB is being resuscitated virtually on Thursday, Aug. 2 from 7 to 9 p.m. EST. This online reincarnation returns the event to its roots, which started on Twitter in 2012 before morphing into physical events in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, where the final one was held in 2015.
Fans of ANFGB have been continually begging Fantauzzi, who’s co-founder of clean skincare line La Bella Figura as well, to revive the occasion. She resisted until a recent fan request convinced her to pull the trigger.
“When [she] explained how much it meant to her to connect with the people behind her favorite brands, I considered bringing it back,” says Fantauzzi. “It made me nostalgic for the camaraderie and community platform we built over the years.”
The live events had been successful, but executing them while managing La Bella Figura proved untenable for Fantauzzi. “It was extremely time consuming,” she recalls. “It got really big. It became like a second business. I never wanted the event to feel less special and thought, ‘If I couldn’t run it better and better each year, then why bother?’”
The digital version of ANFGB will be easier for Fantauzzi to manage. She doesn’t have to pin down a chic city location and provide music, drinks, decoration and more. Much has changed since the physical ANFGB events faded to improve a virtual soiree. Today, ANFGB can tap into social media advancements to make the online event highly interactive.
The brands participating in the two-hour event will all go live at the same time for ANFGB. They’ll offer exclusives and special promotions to customers through social media platforms, websites and in-store events. The brands will also promote ANFGB and their fellow brands involved through other events and media using the hashtag #ANFGB18.
“Do they want to highlight a special product? Do they want to highlight a promotion? This is the night to do it, and to do live events and parties in their work environments,” says Fantauzzi. “They can speak to their customer directly through these channels that we didn’t have back in 2012. There was no Instagram Stories or Facebook Live.” Fantauzzi and La Bella Figura will host and broadcaste a party in Chicago to mark ANFGB 2018. The brand will launch a new product and unveil a special promotion. Many brands that did ANFGB in the past are set for the 2018 edition. The roster features an illustrious list of veteran clean beauty brands, including One Love Organics, Zoe Organics, May Lindstrom, Josh Rosebrook, S.W. Basics, Florescent, Osmia Organics and Meow Meow Tweet. Fantauzzi hopes recently launched clean beauty brands will join the stalwart crew. Interested brands must fill out a form to ensure their formulations are green and clean, and say yes to doing cross-promotions. “They agree to do this as a community event,” emphasizes Fantauzzi.
As ANFGB reappears, One Love Organics founder Suzanne LeRoux, who will return for the 2018 edition, reflects on how far the green beauty segment has come since its earlier events. “At the New York A Night For Green Beauty, we were all just scared that we were crazy or that this would never catch on,” she says, adding,”It was just what I needed, to meet these other women who had this same conviction. Adina Grigore was there, May Lindstrom had literally just put temporary labels on her bottles. Illia was there. That was the first time I had ever seen any of their lipsticks.”
LeRoux continues, “It was just so brand new, and it really was all the courage that I needed to keep going, that there was a community of other people around the country who believed there was just no other way to go back to conventional skincare. We [became] a group to share advice and see where this whole thing is headed. I just considered it vital. I always made it a point every year to go to ANFGB because I needed that support and that group.”
Heather Hamilton, founder and ceo of Zoe Organics, is also looking forward to returning to the community created by ANFGB. “There really isn’t anything like it,” she enthuses. “It was special because the industry was still young, yet here we were, promoting a cause we really believed in. We may have been struggling to make an impact alone, but we found that together we were a force. We believed that natural and organic beauty and wellness products would become the new norm and were relentless in our mission. With such explosive growth in the industry, it’s refreshing to be alongside honest, customer focused brands working to keep it real and make it even better.
