On the first day of New York Fashion Week in February, the longest queue snaking through Soho wasn’t for a fashion show at all.

Instead, the crowd was waiting to enter MAC’s downtown Manhattan store for an event celebrating the Estée Lauder-owned makeup brand’s new 1990s-themed campaign, centred around its recently revived nude lip products. Inside, there were photo opps, product sampling and shade matching, live demonstrations from makeup artists and goodie bags with free lip pencils in the brand’s sold-out Cool Spice shade for the first hundred attendees. Actor Julia Fox, reality TV star Tiffany Pollard and the one and only Martha Stewart, who all star in the campaign, were all there. For eager fans, they signed posters printed with the slogan “I only wear MAC” and the stars wearing the aforementioned nude lipstick, in various states of undress — from a silk robe on Stewart to Fox wearing nothing at all.

The event drove a 300 percent increase in store traffic compared to the same day the previous year, and online, there were 59 pieces of event-focussed content shared across global social channels, resulting in 7.8 million impressions. 25 media placements generated $3.5 million in media impact value, a measure used to evaluate the impact of media exposure, according to Launchmetrics.

It may have been MAC’s logo splashed all over the walls, but pulling the strings behind the scenes was experiential marketing agency CNC, which has become fashion and beauty’s go-to partner for US-based experience production in recent years.

CNC was founded as Coffee ’n Clothes by Ryan Glick in 2014 as an Instagram account dedicated to sharing — as you might expect — images of outfits alongside cups of coffee. By the next year, Glick was hosting café-inspired pop-ups for brands including Nike and Bottega Veneta, and then opened his own café in 2018, where he continued to bring brand events to life.

Since then, CNC has grown beyond coffee, focussed on creating events that are integrated into brands’ broader marketing strategies. From retail pop-ups to large-scale events and more targeted community moments like dinners and influencer trips, the agency not only hosts the full gamut of brand experiences, but also offers services in creating social content and branded merchandise and facilitating creator partnerships.

Just within the past year, the newly-rebranded CNC has hosted a mobile vending experience for Glossier’s newly launched cherry lip balm including charm customisation, a photo booth and cherry-flavoured treats; an influencer trip to the Hamptons for the launch of two new CeraVe products and a flower shop pop-up to drive sampling for Prada’s Paradoxe fragrance. There was also a college tailgate tour to UCLA and University of Miami featuring gaming experiences for the launch of Ralph Lauren’s Polo 67 fragrance and a wellness-focussed “Club Beyond” pop-up for activewear brand Beyond Yoga to extend the Californian brand’s presence to NYC.

Glick said it’s the agency’s hospitality roots that give it a “competitive edge,” particularly when combined with the agency’s innate understanding of social media — much of which is tied back to Glick’s own chops, honed at social agency Annex88 (now owned by ad giant Havas) before launching CNC.

“We started as a social media community, so that’s built into everything we do,” he said. CNC approaches all of its activations with the question in mind of: “How does an experience that we’re doing in New York feel across global communities, across social platforms?”

Events, however, are just the beginning. Glick’s vision for the agency is to offer “specialised teams across verticals” and evolve to “start creating experiences for celebrities and talent,” he said. Being independently owned amid mass agency consolidation, CNC also has the freedom to “do what we want, when we want, for who we want,” said Glick.

Scrappy Success

In the early days of the company, Glick was trying to simultaneously build a coffee brand and events agency. After having to shut down his café during the pandemic, he decided to pivot away from coffee-centric events to provide a broader experiential offering in 2021.

CNC’s strength comes in its ability to find the right way for a particular brand to activate to reach a certain goal. For example, when Dolce & Gabbana enlisted the agency in 2021 to help it boost performance in the New York market, they were operating amidst post-pandemic restrictions.

The team considered what a luxury customer might be missing during the pandemic, and jumped in with a mobile solution: A travelling D&G-print airstream, which customers could book to come to their houses in the Hamptons — where much of the brand’s target client base was located in the summer — for an at-home shopping experience.

“We’re scrappy, we get things done. We move fast,” said Glick of his team’s ethos. “You can’t teach hungriness and scrappiness and go-getting, so that’s really what we look for,” he said, as well as employees with experience in “non-traditional spaces, not just people that have come from an agency background.”

The team includes hospitality veterans, as well as producers who were formerly in the restaurant industry — all of whom are accustomed to the fast pace of events, as well as the customer service and attention to detail that takes an experience from good to great.

This agility is also what enables CNC’s team of 20 to pull off the complex, large-scale events it manages, like MAC’s.

“It’s a choreography. We have five blocks of people trying to come in,” said Drew Elliott, MAC’s creative director.

Bigger-Picture Events

Having transitioned from “essentially an upscale coffee caterer,” as Glick put it, to a full-service experiential agency, CNC has its sights set on further strategic expansion.

A core goal for the agency is to transform how the fashion and beauty industries consider events as a part of their marketing strategy — much of which will be supported by the development of CNC’s strategic and creative departments, as well as its aim of establishing longer-term partnerships with clients.

Rather than simply hosting one-off activations that risk feeling disjointed, the agency’s aim is to make in-person activations an organic and integral part of clients’ longer-term strategy, connecting the dots between experiences and other advertising channels. “We’re shifting the narrative, so events aren’t seen as an after-thought or an add-on,” said Glick.

Connecting these events to big-picture KPIs — whether directly supporting a campaign like MAC’s or fuelling growth in specific markets like D&G — is key to making them integral to a brand’s broader marketing plans.

CNC’s partnership with Beyond Yoga did just this as the California-based activewear brand worked to grow awareness on the East Coast. Together, they created a seven-day New York City pop-up which included 18 wellness classes hosted by top instructors from studios like SkyTing Yoga and Melissa Wood Health, a hair bar and smoothies, and over 100 product SKUs available for purchase at the pop-up. The event attracted 14,000 attendees and generated 21.3 million out-of-home impressions. In line with its goal to foster longer-term brand relationships, CNC also has another event planned with Beyond Yoga at the end of March at The Grove shopping centre in LA, and is in the process of planning an influencer trip for the brand.

“Our vision is, how do we become more than just a service provider?” said Glick. “I want us to be seen as less of a vendor and more of a creative partner.”