From doctor to the stars to household name: Vicki Belo’s road to making the Philippines beautiful

VICTORIA “Vicki” Belo, the doctor behind the Belo Group skin clinics, keeps herself in step with the times, and her business follows suit.

At the Shangri-La Plaza’s 2024 Thanksgiving Night on Feb. 5, her daughter and Belo Group Managing Director Cristalle Belo-Pitt discussed how the business keeps itself young. The clinic first opened in 1990, and now have 15 branches all over the Philippines, with one in Cebu and another in Davao. The name has also been solidified via its billboards, its casual namedrops in movies, in its Belo Essentials skincare line, and her mother’s own celebrity status.

“My mom is a psychology graduate. Even though she didn’t take marketing, she knew marketing well, because she understood people,” said Ms. Belo-Pitt. For example, the Belo group’s first clinic in Makati only measured 144 sqm., with only two facial rooms and a doctor’s room, so even with just two people, the clinic would always appear full. “Since the very beginning, she knew what marketing was all about.”

“The secret sauce to staying relevant is quite simple: always go back to your ‘why,’” she said. For the senior Belo, “It was about making the Philippines the most beautiful country in the world, one person at a time.”

In January, Ms. Belo won the Gold Award from Compare Retreats as the Medical Aesthetic Clinic of the Year at the Luxury Wellness Travel Awards 2024. “We did this by bringing the best technology from around the world into the Philippines,” she said. Ms. Belo-Pitt said that aesthetic machines made in the US and in the EU have a difficult time penetrating each other’s markets due to stiff competition and industry regulations, but, “The Philippines has no ego. So we get the best from Europe and the US, and we bring it here to the Philippines.”

Ms. Belo-Pitt recalls that her mother had been the first to bring laser skin treatments to the Philippines in 1990, and doctors had gone on the news to discredit their use. “Thirty-four years later, every dermatologist has a laser in their clinic,” she said. “You can’t evolve without changing your core values and principles. Your brand’s narrative creates a differentiation in a crowded marketplace.”

Another one of their known tactics is using celebrity endorsements. Ms. Belo-Pitt, for instance, showed their new commercial with actor Piolo Pascual as the endorser of Emface, a treatment that exercises the muscles on the face for more definition, connecting that with Mr. Pascual’s well-known physique. “That’s just an example of how we’re able to get technology, create a story around it, use our celebrities wisely, and plaster it all over the mall, our clinics, on social media, and advertising,” she said. “We don’t really pay for advertising actually on TV. It’s a lot of digital and a lot of PR.”

She also said that “We always incorporate fun.” This taps into her mother’s own reputation, which started with her becoming a “doctor to the stars,” but she has since become a celebrity in her own right. Ms. Belo-Pitt showed a video from one of her mother’s social media channels (the senior Belo’s Instagram account has 3.4 million followers) where her mother runs over a breast implant with her Rolls-Royce to prove its durability. “It gets the eyeballs; it gets the name out there,” she said.

But the true coup for the Belo Medical Group was attaching their name to a line of skincare products, Belo Essentials, which solidified their reputation from doctor to the stars to a household name. Ms. Belo said that she co-founded the brand in 2007 with her mother after people like waiters and cashiers would tell them that they wanted to get treatments from the Belo clinics but couldn’t afford them. “We realized that if our goal is to make the Philippines the most beautiful country in the world one person at a time, how will we do it if we only have 15 clinics, right?”

Since the launch of the skincare line, the Belo name is now visible, according to Ms. Belo-Pitt, in 8,000 stores all over the Philippines, and in 26 countries where the products are exported.

She told a story about how a friend had been at the immigration counter in Chile, and after noticing their Philippine passport, the officer there asked about the Belo clinics. “Some of you might notice, ‘Belo’ has become a verb. ‘Magpa-Belo ka.’ It’s not, ‘magpa-beauty ka.’” — Joseph L. Garcia