When the Face the Future scholarship opened, Bubble’s community filled the application queue overnight. Here’s how a brand built on its community designed a program that kept its community at the center.
Program: Face the Future Scholarship Segment: Consumer brand / Corporate scholarship program
At a Glance
- 5,317 scholarship applications were received against a planned 200
- 74% open rate on the announcement to 380,598 community members
- 5,296 non-winners invited into the Bubble ambassador community
- 5 national press features picked up the story
A Community-First Brand from Day Zero
Most brands talk about community. Bubble built it before they built the brand.
When Bubble’s CEO and founder, Shai Eisenman, started developing the company, the work began with focus groups. People who use skincare. People who didn’t. People who couldn’t find what they wanted in the prestige category and couldn’t afford it either. From those conversations, a community took shape. It had brand ambassadors eight months before the brand had products. The first community chat platform launched in spring 2020. The brand launched in November.
“Community has been part of Bubble since before the brand’s inception. The brand was built through a series of focus groups our CEO conducted while developing the company. From those early conversations, a community naturally formed, with people helping shape the brand before products even existed.” – Marianne Robinson, Sr. Director, Community & Influencer Marketing, Bubble Skincare
Five years in, that community runs deep. Ambassadors weigh in on products, packaging, social trends, and brand decisions. They show up in store, on social, in conversation. By 2025, Bubble saw an opportunity to make the relationship reciprocal in a more substantial way.
Face the Future
The scholarship was created to give back to the ambassador community that has helped shape Bubble over the years. After seeing ambassadors consistently contribute through insights, content, and advocacy, Bubble wanted to invest in their futures beyond skincare.
“Our ambassadors have played a role in nearly every major decision Bubble has made. Face the Future was my way of creating something that genuinely gave back to the community, not something based on social following, academic performance, or traditional accolades.” – Marianne Robinson
The Scholarship was named “Face the Future,” a play on Bubble’s tagline, Face the Day. The brand exists to help people feel confident in their skin, regardless of what skin they have. The scholarship would do something similar for the next chapter of their lives.
The framing was also commercial in the truest sense. Bubble’s whole product thesis is about making the prestige tier accessible. Quality skincare developed with dermatologists should not be reserved for people who can afford luxury pricing. Bubble extended that thesis into education. School supplies. An extra graphic design class. Aesthetician school. Design tools. For first-generation college students or for students stretching to afford tuition, those things are luxuries too.
“We wanted the program to feel deeply rooted in Bubble’s DNA. From the language to the positioning, everything reflected who we are as a brand and why we were creating this scholarship in the first place.” – Marianne Robinson
The Vision Was Clear, the Execution Was Not
At this point, the Bubble team knew what they wanted but not how to build it in a way that wasn’t manual or operationally overwhelming.
This is the point at which most consumer brands stop. Mission programs are designed by people who care about the outcome and managed by people who were not hired to manage them. The result is well-intentioned work that costs a lot, doesn’t scale, and quietly winds down after a year or two.
After researching scholarship programs run by other companies. Bubble looked at what formats existed, what infrastructure other brands used, and what the operational reality looked like. That research led them to Kaleidoscope.
Bubble didn’t want a generic platform that looked like a banking interface. Their brand standards are exacting. The visual identity is bold, youthful, deliberate. The voice is warm and direct. A scholarship application that looked or felt off-brand would have read as inauthentic to the community Bubble was trying to honor.
A Partnership Built on What Bubble Didn’t Have to Figure Out
The build was a partnership in the literal sense. Bubble brought the brand, the vision, the imagery, the copy, and the why. Kaleidoscope brought the operational expertise of having designed and run scholarship programs at every scale for over a decade.
“The Kaleidoscope team really acted as experts and partners throughout the process. We brought the vision, the brand, and the purpose behind the program, and they guided us through best practices and the operational side of making it happen.” – Marianne Robinson
Two surprises emerged from the partnership.
The first challenge was scope. What appeared to be a relatively simple project quickly expanded as the team uncovered the many considerations involved in building a fair, compliant, and effective scholarship application process.
“I initially thought we would need to build every question and process from scratch. What surprised me most was how many important considerations the platform surfaced that we simply would not have thought through on our own.” – Marianne Robinson
The second surprise was about integrity. Bubble’s scholarship had a wrinkle most consumer-brand scholarships don’t have: a top-tier reward reserved for active ambassadors. That tier created a real conflict of interest if the brand’s own community team had to evaluate ambassador submissions. The third-party review structure, which had felt like an operational necessity at the start, turned out to be the thing that made the program credible.
“Because we reserved a top scholarship tier for active ambassadors, it was important that the review process felt completely fair and unbiased. Having a third-party evaluation process gave the program a level of integrity that was really important to us.” – Marianne Robinson
There was also an unexpected benefit. Non-winning applicants could be invited into Bubble’s ambassador community. People who came to the brand for a scholarship became part of the brand’s ongoing community.
“One unexpected benefit was realizing we could bring applicants into the broader Bubble community experience. People who initially discovered the brand through the scholarship became part of the community long after the application process ended.” – Marianne Robinson
The Numbers and the People Behind Them
Bubble contracted for a 200-application pilot. The application window opened, and the team immediately knew they had to scale up.
Program Performance
- 5,317 total applications
- 4,447 drafts started
- 739 submitted for review
- 21 winners
- ~$65,000 awarded
- 200 applications in the original contract
“We originally planned for around 200 applications and realized almost immediately that we were going to receive thousands.” – Marianne Robinson
The team expanded the contract mid-cycle to handle the volume. The drop-off between applications started (4,447) and applications submitted (739) gave Bubble a clear data signal for where the form needed work. The bottleneck was the recommender step: applicants needed someone else to submit a reference on their behalf, and many applications stalled there. The team kept the integrity check in place for cycle one and is revisiting the design for cycle two.
That volume did not come from paid acquisition. It came from the audience Bubble had spent five years building.
Brand Reach
When the program opened, Bubble announced it to its community first, and the community answered.
- 380,598 community members received the announcement email
- 74% opened it
- 179,282 views on the winners’ announcement post
- 97,637 views on the program introduction post
- 7,776 sessions on the scholarship landing page
- 5 national press features picked up the story
The story behind the numbers was more interesting than the numbers themselves.
“These students were some of the most impressive people I’ve ever read about. We had incredible artists submitting portfolios, aspiring aestheticians, future engineers, and even students who wanted to become astronauts.” – Marianne Robinson
The applicant pool reached well beyond Bubble’s typical audience. Aspiring engineers, painters, future aestheticians, NASA-curious students. People who weren’t on TikTok and didn’t follow skincare trends still found the scholarship and applied.
“Bubble is often seen as a fun, playful, TikTok-driven skincare brand, but this scholarship allowed us to reach people far beyond that audience. Many applicants may not have followed skincare or social media closely, but they still connected with what the program represented.” – Marianne Robinson
When awards went out, the top tier (a $10,000 scholarship) was reserved for active ambassadors who had been in the program for at least 90 days. That gating wasn’t a marketing choice. It was a value choice.
“We didn’t want people joining the ambassador program solely to access the scholarship opportunity. Putting our community first is not always the easiest or most efficient approach, but it is what allows Bubble to remain genuinely community-led.” – Marianne Robinson
What Changes for Cycle Two
The program ran. It worked. Now the Brand is ready to take it to the next level
International is the biggest cycle-two change. The original program was US-only. Demand from outside the US, especially from existing ambassadors, was loud enough that cycle two will open to one winner each from Canada and the UK alongside US winners. Bubble is in over 18,000 stores globally; the scholarship now reflects that footprint.
For Brands Considering the Same Move
For any brand thinking about following Bubble’s lead, Marianne has one question. Bubble makes it clear that the intention is what matters.
“A lot of brands use ‘community’ as a buzzword right now. My biggest question would be, why are you creating a scholarship program in the first place? If the goal is truly to support people rather than simply appear charitable, that intention has to guide every decision.” – Marianne Robinson
“We view this as a brand marketing initiative because it is deeply connected to who Bubble is as a brand. Community is not separate from the business. It is foundational to everything we do.”
Marianne Robinson
For Bubble, the scholarship is not philanthropy bolted onto a brand. It is the brand, expressing itself through a program designed for the community that built it. Mission and marketing are not in different buckets at Bubble because community is not in a different bucket from anything else they do.
That, more than any single number, is the case study.
(Editor’s Note: At the time of the 2025 Scholarship Program and through June 2026, Marianne
Robinson served as Sr. Director, Community & Influencer Marketing, Bubble)
FAQs for Brands
Bubble Skincare’s Face the Future program demonstrates how a scholarship can function as both philanthropy and brand marketing. The announcement reached 380,598 community members at a 74% open rate, drew 5,317 applications against a planned 200, and was picked up by five national press outlets. Marianne Robinson, Bubble’s Sr. Director of Community and Influencer Marketing, frames the program as a brand marketing initiative because it is deeply connected to the brand’s community-first identity.
For most consumer brands, the gap between wanting to launch a scholarship and being able to operate one is significant. Bubble Skincare partnered with Kaleidoscope to handle program design, applicant experience, compliance, and third-party review. Bubble brought the brand, vision, copy, and imagery. No new internal hires were required.
Bubble Skincare tracked reach across owned and earned channels in addition to program performance. Key metrics included email open rate (74% on 380,598 recipients), social views (276,919 across announcement posts), landing page sessions (7,776), and press features (5 national outlets). Community conversion was also measured: 5,296 non-winning applicants were invited into Bubble’s ambassador program.
Bubble’s brand standards required a platform that matched its visual identity and voice. Marianne Robinson researched scholarship programs run by other companies and selected Kaleidoscope because the platform handled operational complexity (form design, compliance, third-party review) without forcing Bubble onto a generic template. Kaleidoscope acted as an expert partner across program design and best practices.
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