When just a few products built a multi-million brand with really-really good quality, no BS science and brilliant marketing.

I've been seeing news that Nicolas Travis, founder of Allies of Skin, just announced he's leaving the brand, which he started in 2016 packing orders himself on Shopify, and grew into a global cult label. A planned, graceful exit, February 2027. I felt an urge to break down this brand's brilliant marketing, because to me it's one of those role model brands of really good marketing of performance-driven cosmetics. Not the only one, but one of them 🙂

But for the start I have to very respectfully disagree with the founder himself. Because I preach to my beauty biz community that a proper signature product can lift your entire brand up, that you need the heroes to do the heavy lifting as one of the easiest ways to grow.

Travis has said Allies "doesn't really have a hero product, because everything sells well." And I understand why he feels that way, from the inside, every SKU is your baby, equally loved. But from my own experience, and from deep-diving into successful and not successful brands, that's almost never how a brand grows. Something has to earn the first yes, that "omg, the brand does what it promises," before the customer commits to the rest of the SKUs.

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And Allies did have a hero that lifted the entire brand and gave it perceived competence. When it launched in 2016, the press literally called the 1A All-Day Mask (claimed by the brand as the world's first day mask) the hero of the range. One product, one idea: a mask-strength treatment that absorbs like a moisturiser, multi-tasking, the anti-10-step. That single SKU said "this is what we do, and we do it better." Then every SKU after it, the serums, the peptide treatment, the cleanser, was built on the same principle.

But the first thing I should have mentioned: the efficacy. The quality paved the way for the brand's success.

And notice this: Allies went against the premium rule of writing very little on the packaging, and instead put the actives right on the bottle, to amplify "you're paying for supercharged, transparent efficacy." They could do that because they're so clear on their persona.

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The premium price is justified, by the formulas, the visuals, and even the newsletters, which stay premium enough to communicate a sale value-first, with the discount almost an afterthought.

Some sources state 85% retention. To me, that's the result of a very well built routine for their target audience, and the education in their communications on how to adopt it. Each SKU has a role: the one that brings the customer in and makes the impression, and the heroes that do the retention heavy lifting. You cannot retain a customer whose first product didn't convince her.

And the concept has soul. At first glance you read "harsh science," but underneath there's a story: the founder started Allies after a tragic accident that caused devastating facial injuries and infections, and he speaks openly about healing and forgiveness. Real science, with real values beneath it.

The brand doesn't have many SKUs, and that's all fine. You don't need 2,000. You need proper positioning, constant evolution, and the discipline to squeeze the maximum from the SKUs you already have.

I could talk about this for hours, it's genuinely what I do on a daily basis with beauty brands. If your brand is at that "good products, but how do we grow" stage, let's talk 🩵

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A lot will hate me for this, but I'll say it anyway. We marketers know exactly how this works. We take another brand as "inspo," and I don't judge anyone for it. I'm all for it: learn from the best, master it, and then set your own trends.

So here are a few brands the whole industry has been "inspired" by:

Aesop: That high-end apothecary feel, the naturally-derived concept, the artisanal look. I still laugh when I hear certain founders say that when they launched, there was nothing natural on the shelf. Then I look at their amber bottles and I just see Aesop, reinterpreted. Aesop existed long before most of these brands, and that whole apothecary aesthetic launched a thousand imitators.

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The Ordinary: Ingredient-led, radically transparent, the percentage of actives right there on the front. Skincare and haircare got completely flooded with that model.

@Rhode: "Glazed" everything. It was funny watching retail fill up in 2025 with glazed this and glazed that, the tube lip gloss, the socials aesthetic. And when Rhode made a phone case with a lip gloss holder, suddenly the entire world was making bag charms, key holders, phone accessories built around products.

Summer Fridays:  That soft, sun-washed, mood-first aesthetic, the lifestyle-before-product feel. Their WOW-effect launch pop-ups. Look how many brands now sell you a vibe and a moodboard first, and the product almost as an afterthought.

Rare Beauty blush. Still, right now, from mass market to prestige, blush in every form and shade, everywhere you look.

Charlotte Tilbury. Pillow Talk, duped since the day it launched and still being duped today.

My full of love message to beauty brands: Learn from the best, 100%, always. But don't stop there. The point was never to copy the trend. It was to become the brand everyone else copies next;)

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Be different! Be relevant! Set the trend, don't just chase it 🩵 With love, your global beauty marketer.

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The golden beauty marketing move in 2026 / 2027: new customer acquisition & better retention, organically, for free, with elevated communications pillars. No extra ad budget.

Sounds like a pitch, I know 🫣 . But this is exactly what proper content pillars do. Get it right, and this pulls new customers in and keeps the ones you already have.

The one thing nobody can ever copy is HOW you talk to your customer.

Content can literally form a devoted brand tribe. People who feel your brand is their world, who look forward to your next post and your next drop, and who do your word-of-mouth for you.

1. It's not WHAT you sell, it's HOW you frame it.
Flamingo Estate sells a candle by telling you the whole strange history of the mandrake plant, witches, medicine women, the root that got women accused of flying. You can't stop reading. I re-read it twice, I swear!!! Now remember the last "why you need hyaluronic acid" email ;) Be honest: which one you close in a second and which one you send to a friend?

(content source: Flamingo Estate Newsletter)

2. Selling a world first, a shared interest, the product last.
May Interest-Based Marketing be blessed! Summer Fridays do mention their products, but they sell a mood, the inspo, a fashionista life, a girl you half want to become first. And notice how co-founder Marianna Hewitt built a community of fashion lovers first and only then the beauty brand, so the product dropped into a world that already loved her.

(Image Source: Summer Fridays Instagram)

And give the brand a bigger conversation than your SKUs. E.L.F. BEAUTY built a social media channel, "Zero Distance with e.l.f. Beauty", around women, sports and culture, not "here's our new product." That's what a proper content pillar does: it lets you talk about something people actually care about, and the brand rises with it.

3. Put a human face on it. People bond with people.
Chloe Walsh (I love how she's crushing it on LinkedIn) grew her brand mostly by showing up as her authentic self, just a founder being visible until people trusted her enough to buy. But a warning: copying what Chloé does won't work for you. It has to be genuinely you, yet strategic enough to fit your brand and your goal.

4. Value-based content. So underused in beauty marketing, and OMG, such a game changer 💘
Your content has to give something. If not educating, then sparking curiosity or an emotion that leaves her feeling richer. Because every time you give real value, you become the authority in her mind.

Update your communications concept, define at least 4 or 5 content pillars and your signature series, each with a real funnel behind it, so you know what every piece of content is doing and which SKU it leads to.

Leading a beauty brand, or using your personal brand to grow one?
I'm opening a limited number of September and October places for ELEVATED Content Pillar Strategy projects.

DM me the words CONTENT PILLARS or send to my email: marinaonyshchuk@gmail.com, and I'll send you 3 focused questions to see whether the project fits your brand.

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Beauty founders and brand leaders love to talk about the consumer in broad, elegant terms: she is 40+, lives in the city, interested in authentic self-care, earns X, modern, wellness-minded, short on time, ingredient-aware. All of that is correct. It is just not enough.

If you really want to understand how she buys beauty, you need to understand something more basic: what else is already taking her money every month. Because she has a certain wallet volume, and she decides how much of it your beauty products get access to, and how often.

Your beauty product is obviously not only competing with the other beauty product, but it competes as well with rent, groceries, transport, healthcare, fitness, dining out, subscriptions, and the simple pressure of keeping life running. For a mid-income woman in Europe or the US, those fixed costs, and the cultural and economic mood around her, decide whether your product feels like an easy yes, a justified mini-luxury reward, or a screenshot she saves with “maybe someday” (note to the last point: I’m not joking, we, Millenials, do that a lot :))

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The budget behind the beauty consumer

I tried to find a single official number for “a mid-class woman,” but statistical agencies track households, income bands and regional averages rather than one tidy figure. Still, if you zoom in on a mid-income woman with a mid-level job (I didn’t want the extremes of “she always flies first class” 😉), the monthly picture usually falls into these ranges:

In the US, roughly $3,500–$6,000+ per month, depending heavily on housing, insurance and city cost of living.

In Europe, roughly €900–€2,500+ per month, with wide variation between Western Europe and the lower-cost markets of Central and Eastern Europe.

What I find interesting is the structure of the spend. The big categories are predictable: housing, food, transport, healthcare. And then the nice-to-have layer: beauty, fitness, apparel, subscriptions, leisure.

Here is roughly what that monthly spend looks like (illustrative ranges, not official statistics):

• Housing: €400–€1,200 in the EU, $1,200–$2,500 in the US

• Food and groceries: €200–€500 in the EU, $400–$800 in the US

• Eating out and delivery: €80–€250 in the EU, $100–$350 in the US

• Transport: €30–€150 in the EU, $250–$800 in the US

• Utilities, phone and internet: €100–€250 in the EU, $150–$350 in the US

• Healthcare and insurance: €0–€150 in the EU, $200–$600 in the US

• Beauty and personal care: €30–€150 in the EU, $50–$250 in the US

• Fitness and wellness: €30–€150 in the EU, $50–$250 in the US

• Apparel: €50–€200 in the EU, $75–$250 in the US

• Entertainment and subscriptions: €50–€150 in the EU, $75–$250 in the US

Look at transport and healthcare, where the US ranges dwarf the European ones. That single gap is often why the exact same beauty product, at the exact same price, feels like an easy yes in one market and a “postpone” in another. Your customer’s wallet is shaped by her country first before it is shaped by your offer.

I won’t reveal a secret if I tell you that beauty sits inside the emotional part of the budget. Unless the consumer has a skin condition that needs medical treatment, but then we are not in beauty anymore, even though beauty is trying hard, as of 2025 and more aggressively toward 2027, to bridge into “medical.” Which only proves the point: beauty has to work harder to justify itself.

A beauty product is not only fighting for wallet share. It is fighting for permission.

If she is choosing between a serum and a dinner out, a body oil and a Pilates class, a fragrance and a transport-heavy week with a flight to Mallorca, then your product has to feel like more than nice-to-have. It should be a meaningful answer to a specific emotional or functional need.

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This is why, on top of “glow,” “fewer dark spots” or “zero pores,” your brand also has to sell something underneath: a sense of control over your health and your looks, and sometimes belonging to a certain group.

• A small luxury, because she can’t afford the LV bag, but she can afford the Chanel foundation that directly says status

• Or the Vichy serum that makes her a woman who “trusts science only.”

• A ritual with an emotional reward, or a reset.

• Proof, when she sees and feels the result.

• A moment of identity, whether she belongs to the minimalist, Instagrammable Rhode club, or she is the Aesop connoisseur of architecture and elegance.

That is what makes beauty resilient even when spending gets cautious. A premium German beauty retailer once told me they thrived during Covid, not only because of their online model, but because the premium segment offered an emotional reward that the uncertain times had created a hunger for.

Which made me rethink everything again (that we all of course know): it is not only about a special offer or an affordable price in beauty. It is deeply emotional. Consumers have become more selective, but they have not stopped spending on beauty.

So before you read how I would fix this from brand and product management perspective, just spend some time with these four questions:

What category of spend is my product replacing? Is my customer buying this as a necessity, a ritual, or an indulgence? Does my pricing match the emotional weight of the purchase? Is my product easy to justify inside a constrained monthly budget?

You will notice then … if your SKU is priced like luxury but communicates like a commodity, you now know what to fix. If you position as everyday routine when the product is really an emotional splurge, same.

And if you forget that your consumer is not choosing between products but between priorities, a new dress or your cream, you will keep losing a competition you didn’t even know you were in.

People will always make room for something that feels like it improves the quality of their life. I didn’t say “longevity” on purpose 😉, but you know what I mean.

That is why beauty and wellness can still win in a cost-conscious market, because when it is positioned correctly, it becomes the thing that makes the rest of the month feel more livable.

And that is a far more powerful selling point than “just another product.”

So how do you actually turn all of this into growth? Below is the method I use with beauty brands in the masstige and premium segments, the ones who come to me with good products and stubbornly not satisfactory numbers. I deliberately call it brand and product work, not marketing only. Brand, product, communications, presentation and commercial offer are all part of marketing, yes, but the two words that decide everything are brand and product. Get those wrong, and no campaign budget will save you. Sorry for being dramatic, as always ;)

So here are five phases that will drastically impact your beauty brand’s growth.

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A brilliant example of how one signature beauty product becomes the brand's credibility engine, turnover booster, and lifts the entire brand.

(Image Credit: Rare Beauty)
As some of you know, I keep preaching this idea: when one signature product (it may be a category, a collection, a technology) is built properly and the entire brand strategy revolves around it, it becomes the symbol of the brand's expertise and creates a ripple effect across the other products and categories, accelerating brand awareness and turnover.

just one of the brilliant examples. I saw the news they appointed their first brand ambassador after 6 years without one, and the appointment was not really about the brand at all. Ella Bright, 19, the breakout star of Off Campus, now fronts a campaign called "Made You Blush," built entirely around one signature product, the Soft Pinch Liquid Blush, with a premise that is charming precisely because it is so simple: men keep trying to make her blush, none of them can, only the blush does.

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What I find worth studying for beauty brands founders and brand leaders (and their marketing teams) is not the ambassador or the campaign, but the order in which all of this happened.
1. They built one product so well and made the basics excellent, on product concept level, quality, performance, design, organic and paid media, PR, that it became the reason people discovered the brand in the first place.
2. The demand grew, the brand extended the offer around it: bigger portion size, other SKUs that are a having a bridge with the signature blush collection etc.
3. And only now, six years in, they bring in a face whose job is not to explain who Rare Beauty is, but simply to stand next to the product everyone already knows.

Because a signature product is not always your highest-revenue SKU. Sometimes the bestseller and the signature are the same thing, sometimes the signature is the one that lifts everything around it, lends its credibility to the rest of the portfolio and, when done right, makes your brand the answer to a category question. Say blush, and quite a lot of people now say Rare. That is the halo effect working exactly as it should.

And it is crazy to see how many beauty brands never reach that point.
Either:
- They have no proper signature product and no category management structure that lets one SKU lift the whole brand.
- Or they do have a signature, but it is not doing the job.
- Or it used to work and stopped, because the bridge between that product and the rest of the portfolio was never properly built.
And so they launch forty products hoping one becomes iconic, instead of building one properly and letting it carry the others.

But having a signature product is one thing. Knowing what to do with it, for six years, is the key work.

Which SKU carries your brand? And if you can name it, are you really squeezing the maximum out of it?

If you'd like to know how this applies to your brand, my DMs are open.

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My dear beauty founders, brand leaders and investors,

Last week I saw headlines that Estée Lauder gave up selling Dr. Jart+, Too Faced and Smashbox. Last year REN closed after 25 years. And I hear all the time from beauty founders and brand leaders: “Our products are amazing, the feedback is incredible, but we can’t grow.”

After 10+ years in global beauty marketing, leading 250+ global product launches across B2B and DTC beauty, I shared the most common reasons on LinkedIn this week, and judging by my inbox, several of them hurt.

The short version, if you missed it:

• Your positioning has no Fleisch am Knochen (as we say in German marketing), which literally means “no meat on the bone,” and “science-driven” differentiates you from nobody.

• The consumer cannot understand in 3 seconds why she needs your product. Either your complex is too complicated in communications or it is not clear beyond “glow” what your product exactly does and why the consumer really needs it.

• Some of your products exist because you or your marketing team like them, tested by the assistant and 5 colleagues or even clients who said “omg, amazing.” But when the product is launched, the target audience doesn’t find it that “omg, amazing” for the price.

• You don’t know your customer’s desires, triggers and values, and the sequence of those. The wrong or a weak beauty product message often comes from not properly knowing your customer. If you do not know your customer, you can’t speak to them in a way that makes them feel you talk to them.

• You went global before owning your home market. You over-claim, promising “10 years back” from one cream in the same decade we retired anti-ageing.

• You’re panicking from your paid performance marketing, where acquisition costs look scary and sometimes more expensive than the first order value… without ever calculating customer lifetime value.

• Your content is me, me, me. Your 130 €/$ SKU has not answered whether it beats La Roche-Posay at 25 €/$.

• Your aesthetics scream “no budget for design.”

• You celebrate sell-in while nobody checks sell-through. And when revenue is stagnating or declining, you launch new SKUs instead of building the proper product category structure with the Signature Product and the hero SKUs you already have.

Naming the mistakes is the easy part :) Any decent publication can do that, and now this one has.

The harder question is the one beauty brands pay for: in which order do you check these, how do you know which one is your problem, and what does the fix look like?

When a brand hires an executive marketing audit, this diagnostic sequence is roughly what they receive, at a starting price of €4,000–10,000+, often much more. Below the line, I’m giving you the version you can run yourself in one Friday afternoon. It will not replace outside eyes entirely, but it will either save you the audit or make the audit 10 times more productive, because you’ll arrive knowing where it hurts, you can fix it and improve your turnover.

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(Image Credit: Glowery / from Pinterest)

Two of the biggest consumer trends right now are personalization and emotional comfort, driven by the fact that trends evolve far faster than they used to and consumers are feeling the fatigue. In skincare, I’ve already seen a few newly founded brands offering AI-powered, tailor-made formulations, where you answer a few questions and receive your own personalized product. In fragrance, scent layering has become the same answer to the same restlessness.

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And if you’re a beauty founder or a brand leader starting to think the future demands a separate SKU for every living human being, with more serums and fragrance formats, let me offer you a different decoding of the “personalization” trend, from a global beauty and wellness marketing perspective.

I personally don’t think personalization means more products. I think it just means the end of “for all skin types, for a Generation X, Y, Z, a gourmand vanilla mist for Gen A, B, C,” which was always still too generic anyway. It was always, to me, more ingredient- and claim-centric than consumer-centric.

What consumers are feeling underneath “personalization” is fatigue. One brand starts a trend, the next copies it, and it shifts again before anyone catches up, and people are exhausted, stepping back to look for what genuinely fits them rather than what the internet told them to want this month. Personalization is simply the name the trend reports have given to that retreat. That’s how I see it.

So the answer I see isn’t a machine blending a personalized bottle for every customer. Let’s take a woman of 40, perimenopausal, with combination skin and perhaps a little eczema or even acne. The old thinking hands her 5 serums, each built around a different hero ingredient. And the fragrance industry offers her 5 perfumes and 10 mists, so she can match her mood throughout the day by layering that whole scent wardrobe. She doesn’t need 5 or 10 products. She needs one product built honestly around her real concerns, maybe shaped by her age, maybe by her lifestyle and other cultural factors.

That is personalization done properly, and it means fewer, sharper products, not more.

Which is why I’d say the future of personalization isn’t found in AI questionnaires or 20 stacked mists. It’s found in the least glamorous work there is: looking honestly at your portfolio and defining whether you built it for one real woman, a niche group you can actually picture, or for an entire imagined generation you named “Gen Y,” living in the city, drinking a cappuccino after work, wanting to look stylish and cool, and hoping she’ll recognize herself.

I do believe AI tools will help, of course. They’ll guide a consumer to the right routine, the right fit. But if your brand can understand one woman so precisely that she feels personally seen without a single questionnaire, then you’ve perfectly answered the personalization trend.

Which brings me, as it always does, back to the one thing underneath everything: know exactly who your customer is. And be just as clear about who she is not.

That, to me, is the future of personalization. Not more, just sharper, more targeted, more precisely consumer-centered.

Developing, launching and marketing products that speak to one precise consumer, not everyone, is exactly the work I do with beauty founders and brand leaders as a global brand and product marketing expert. Let’s speak in DM.

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My Dear Beauty Founders and Brand Leaders,

Who decided that if your beauty brand is built on serious science, it has to look boring and sterile?

Somewhere, in beauty, the brands agreed that credibility must look cold white, a clever font, a woman touching her own face as if her cheekbones are in pain :) As if a smart molecule loses authority the moment it's surrounded by emotion, by beauty, by design that makes you feel something. I never believed it, as a native beauty and wellness marketer, because both my professional worlds taught the same lesson: the science earns the trust, but emotional storytelling and considered design earn the desire, and you need both.

And there's a commercial reason to that, from my expert perspective. Your formula is eventually copyable: actives commoditize, and every brand chases the same hero ingredient. But your brand world cannot be copied, and I mean a properly built one, made for a specific customer persona with its own DNA, its attributes, its facets. That intangible feeling, that universe someone wants to live inside, is the only asset that compounds. Beautiful, fun and captivating were never the opposite of serious science. They're what make the serious science chosen.

Let me show you what I mean.

(Image Credit: Skinrocks by Caroline Hirons)

Look at Skin Rocks, Caroline Hirons’ brand. I religiously believe in everything Caroline does :), and her formulas are as serious and efficacious as the most clinical names in the category, arguably more so. But look at how that science shows up. The Strong Acid, the Gentle Acid, the Control Acid, dressed in taxi-cab yellow, a “Hello Operator” phone box, a millennial PR team gently roasting the Gen Z social team in the captions, real women of different age-stages using the products. The efficacy never drops for a second, it just refuses to be cold, mediocre and boring, and the content speaks to the customer’s life and her skin. That is what, to me, customer-centered beauty marketing science looks like when a brand decides beautiful and serious science can share the room.

(Image Credit: DUA™ by Augustinus Bader Science)

Or take Victoria Beckham Beauty and Dua Lipa’s DUA, both built on Augustinus Bader’s science. I watched AB grow up close, and for years it was the definition of stylish-but-intimidating, that premium, clinical, high-end presence that quietly made ninety-nine percent of the world feel they weren’t invited. And then VB Beauty and DUA happened, and the collaborations taught Augustinus Bader, and frankly the whole industry, that the most serious skincare and skincare-first makeup on earth can also be magnetic, playful, alluring, the kind of thing that creates desire in the first three online seconds before a single ingredient is ever explained. Same science. Completely different feeling. That feeling is the whole game.

(Image Credit: Victoria Beckham Beauty)

Now, I know the question that may be forming in your head: what about the serious-science brands that keep growing and keep attracting serious investment, the Obagi Medical, Medik8 and those harsh science brands of the world? First, some of them are expert-recommended, which carries enormous weight. But look closely and you’ll see they also do the brand-world job properly, the aesthetics, the design, the expression, all far more considered than some may assume. They reflect their brand world at its best.

(Image Credit: OBAGI MEDICAL)

A pre-history first:) I was raised, professionally as a beauty and wellness marketer, in two opposite beauty worlds. The first was lifestyle beauty for the global markets, made in Germany, where you barely say the word “science” and instead build whole emotional universes with fragrance stories, imaginary worlds, a mood so vivid the customers could smell the body lotion without ever testing it. I built those worlds market by market, a different soul for Asia, for DACH, for the UK and US, for the Nordics. Emotional storytelling as craft and the focus.

Then I crossed into the exact opposite: serious, performance-driven professional skincare, made for facialists in cosmetic studios and for the end consumer, where you live or die by whether you can explain what the peptide carrier actually does:) What mattered was just proof, and a customer who’d see through anything less.

Two extremes, the dreamy and the harsh science. And then, a third vantage point: working with premium premium beauty and wellness brands across the world as an independent beauty marketer, and analyzing the global beauty markets daily, because one market never moves alone, and consumer trends now shift at the speed of light.

So I’ve seen this from all three sides, the emotional, the “serious science”, and the bird’s-eye, and the lesson is the same from every angle. Because of that I was forever either loved or resented for by the design teams :), because I would not let the design, the aesthetics slide in either world: serious science and irresistible beauty were never enemies to me, and happy to see many other successfull brands prove the same. Somebody just decided at some point they were.

So if your brand feels invisible to your target customers or you don’t get performance what you believe your brand deserves, I’d advice three places to look before you “blame” the formula.

First: know your customer and know as well who is not your customer. And I am not talking about either just a demographic, or Millenial, Gen X, Z criteria, nor “she is high income woman travelling 1st class 30+ ;)”.

Second: Your brand aesthetics isn’t just “nice marketing”, their primary role is to whisper “made for you” to one target persona and “keep scrolling” to everyone else.

Third: your content. If every pillar is “our innovative peptide,” that’s just one of the brand-centered product education pillar and it’s not a winning strategy. Talk about her life, her 11pm, her small daily wars, and let the science walk in as the answer to her concerns and/or desires.

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I really believe, nobody falls in love with an ingredient. They fall in love with being understood, with the feeling of belonging, with the consequence of the results they get from your products, with that inspiration or aspiration that your brand world communicates.

If you are happy with your brand’s performance, wonderful, carry on exactly as you are.

But if the honest answer is “not quite,” then I’d lovingly invite you to retire “we don’t have the budget for design, for aesthetics, for market-specific communications.” Because I believe that work is not the “nice-to-have when the budget allows”. It is as essential as your product efficacy, as non-negotiable as buying good packaging. It’s the price you pay to be effective and be chosen.

Yes, you need to explain your science, because it earns trust. But your brand world buys desire. And you’re allowed to make the serious thing beautiful.

Have a beautiful week!

Your Global Beauty & Wellness Brand And Product Management Expert, A New Generation Marketer

Maryna Onyshchuk

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I write perspectives like this every week inside Beauty Market Intelligence, my Private Beauty Briefings, where the deeper frameworks I use to build these brand worlds with my clients (masstige and premium beauty and wellness brands) live for my subscribers. And if this is the knot you’re trying to untie in your own brand, that’s the work I do directly, from concept and positioning to market-specific brand and product strategy, including execution (hands-on). My DMs are open.

(Image Credit: Haus Labs)

This morning I saw Haus Labs doing what crazy amount of beauty brands out there should be doing, and I felt I needed to get that to you, because it may definitely improve your turnover.

Haus Labs sells a Triclone Foundation Discovery Set online (side note: it can be fragrance, skincare, body care, hair care, wellness products): you choose a shade family, wear 5 mini shades on your own skin for up to 21 days, and when you buy the full size, the set is on them. While much of their range lives in physical retail, the discovery set lives online, and that placement and the framing is the whole point. Look closely at what it is: not a sachet thrown into a bag at checkout. Not “here’s a freebie, try it sometime.” It’s a framed, personalized invitation to find your match, with the purchase woven into the ritual itself.

That distinction is everything, and it’s the part that so many brands still skip or just do it for the sake of doing it.

Here’s where my mind went. Years ago I was leading the development of a skincare line for a German brand, and we were analyzing the top performers in the portfolio ahead of a possible relaunch of another line. One of the most surprising top performers was a humble 2ml - a typical sample size. But it was never thrown loose into a bag as a free piece. It was given after the customer had tried another product from the range, presented as if it were the original, just in a smaller size, specifically to deepen and complete the effect of the product she’d just experienced.

That framing CAN PERFECTLY turn a product from the range into a hero with the right sample presentation.

I have to disagree that “discovery sizes are nice to have.” In D2C, discovery and portion sizes are essential. But having them is not enough, and calling them “samples” the way physical retail taught us is actively working against you. In a store, a sample is a generous afterthought handed over with a smile. Online, you have to manufacture that entire sensory, emotional moment deliberately, because the customer isn’t standing in front of a person who can say “this would suit you.” Online has to engage all the parts of the brain that physical retail engages for free (the emotional, the intellectual, the physical) and the only way it does that is through presentation and framing. The smaller size is the easy part. The framing is the hard part, and it’s the part that actually works.

This is why I push back when beauty founders or brand leaders tell me, “We developed a beautifully presented discovery set, gorgeous box, lovely leaflet, and it didn’t really work.” I never accept that the format failed. I go straight back to the same question: how did you frame it? Because there is a world of difference between “here’s our new SKU, enjoy” and making the customer feel that this is a personalized suggestion, the piece that completes the result she’s actually after, whether that result is a fragrance, a complexion, healthier hair, calmer skin. What will work when you frame it as it’s a recommendation she didn’t know she was waiting for.

And here’s the way I want you to hold all of this, because it reframes the cost. Performance marketing: the money you spend acquiring a customer or lifting a sale is one side of a coin. It’s a real and necessary cost of growing wallet share.

But the other side of that exact same coin is brand building, and preparing the presentation of a product, whether it’s a smaller size or the original, is precisely that. With a beautifully framed portion size you have invited a consumer into your brand world. You have, quite literally, entered her bathroom and depending on who she is, you’ve either become the new threat to the competitor’s bottle sitting on her shelf, or, if she’s already your customer, you’ve invaded a little more of her vanity and earned more of her routine.

All I wanted to say is that the portion size was never the point. The framing was and in beauty business with such a saturated market, framing is everything: it’s the whole experience you’re selling.

If you’re a beauty founder or a brand leader and figuring out how this applies to your brand, that’s exactly what I help with. Concept development, NPD strategy, positioning, market specific brand business development and growth, global launch. We should talk in DM.

And if takes like this are useful to you, this is the kind of thing I dig into every week inside my paid subscription in Beauty Market Intelligence, my Private Beauty Briefings.

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Maryna Onyshchuk Global Beauty & Wellness Brand & Product Management

Located in Munich | Available Worldwide

Why the brand everyone’s celebrating this week isn’t the one I’d actually study.

I spent this morning reading every Marc Jacobs Beauty relaunch headline, saying the same thing: Marc Jacobs Beauty is back, the comeback of the year, the most anticipated prestige relaunch of 2026, and somewhere between the twentieth “iconic return” and the headline calling it a maximalist manifesto against the clean-girl aesthetic, I caught myself as a beauty and wellness marketer questioning whether we’re all celebrating the right thing.

Because from my own experience and market observation, and I want to say it before anyone misreads me as a hater or pessimist, since I genuinely want this brand to win: a relaunch is not a comeback and a one-time launch revenue spike is not really a success momentum. And right now we have a relaunch and we will soon have a spike, and almost everyone is treating those two things as if they were the finish line when they are barely the very starting point.

Let me be precise about what happened, from brand and product management perspective, because the timeline matters.

The collection went live on Marc Jacobs’ own site on the 28th of May, then onto the Sephora app a few days later, then Sephora.com on the 1st of June, and the physical Sephora stores across the US, UK, Canada and Australia don’t open their doors to it until September. Which means the thing we’re watching right now is the most engineered, most supported, most algorithmically favorable moment this brand will ever have (it’s my assumption only), because a Sephora launch engine behind a beloved fashion name that vanished from shelves in 2021 and left fans paying double on eBay is going to produce a sell-out, and that sell-out will be reported as proof, and it will prove almost nothing, as to me.

(Image Credit: Marc Jacobs)

The distinction I wish more founders carried in their heads: A revenue spike is what happens when demand that has been dammed up for four years gets released in a single week through the best retail partner in the business in the respective markets. Momentum is what happens in month four, month seven, month eleven, after the launch novelty is gone and Sephora’s home page has moved on to the next drop, and the customer has to choose your lipstick again at full price with no nostalgia tailwind and no influencer seeding cycle carrying her there and the Wallet Share per customer is beyond single-purchase SKU, yet, a few products from the brand. The first one is a one-off moment. The second one is a brand.

And the clearest way to tell them apart is wallet share: a spike fills baskets with one hero product once, but momentum is the customer coming back for the second SKU, then the third, expanding her spend across the line at full price because she trusts the brand now, not just the launch.

A one-product customer is a trial, while a multi-product customer is a relationship with a brand, a loyalist that defines the momentum.

Watch how quickly the average customer moves from one SKU to several, because that single number tells you whether you built a brand or just staged a one-off launch event.

And the trait of relaunches specifically is that they are arguably the single hardest move in all of beauty, harder than a cold launch, because you are being asked to do two contradictory things at once: retain the loyalists who kept your memory alive and actually feed your brand, while simultaneously acquiring a completely new generation who has no emotional relationship with the 2013 version at all.

And that brings me to the three things I’m actually watching, none of which we can see yet, all of which will decide whether this is a (1) promissing brand growth or just a (2) very good launch week.

The first is product quality, and I mean this in the specific way today’s consumer means it, not the way 2016 meant it. Back then a prestige fashion name on a compact carried a kind of social shorthand, a borrowed competence, a little hit of belonging that justified the price almost on its own. That era is softening fast. The customer who is going to repurchase now treats premium beauty with genuine skepticism and she is asking:

whether the formula wears comfortably for ten hours, whether the color does what the swatch promised, whether there’s any skin benefit woven in, whether the durability and the finish actually justify standing next to the brands she already trusts and pays the same money for. The name and packaging design maybe gets her to try it once. Only the formula gets her to come back.

We will not know the answer to this for months, which is exactly my point.

The second is the refill cadence, by which I mean the rhythm of new launches that premium beauty retail simply demands and that is frankly not optional once you’re on a Sephora shelf. A relaunch collection, however charming its star-and-daisy-and-heart motifs, is a starting position, not a strategy. The market will ask “what’s next” approximately eleven minutes after launch week ends, and whether Coty has built a pipeline or simply staged an event is something only the back half of this year will reveal… again, it is my marketing expert assumption.

And the third, the one I find most telling, is the brand signature, and here I have to be specific about what I mean because most people hear “signature” and think packaging. I don’t mean packaging design.

I mean the thing that is unmistakably, defensibly yours at the level of the formula, the color, the format, the one user-focused attribute nobody else owns, the reason someone describes your product to a friend without using your name. So far, and I say this with an open mind because it is early, I have not seen the signature. I’ve seen a concept, a mood, skincare infused formulas and interesting textures, a very smart “messy girl” Gen-Z-fiendly positioning, and genuinely lovely playful packaging. But that is not the signature, and the brand that goes maximalist in a clean-girl-fatigued market has made a clever bet on the creative (I’ll give them that fully), without yet showing me the one proprietary thing.

Now let me tell you who I’d study instead, and it’s probably not who you’d expect, because when the conversation turns to celebrity and designer-backed beauty everyone immediately reaches for Rhode as the canonical case study, and Rhode is a remarkable business, but the brand I find more instructive is Victoria Beckham Beauty.

(Image Credit: Victoria Beckham Beauty)

Watch what she’s actually done. A reduced, disciplined portfolio at an accessible-luxury price, which is to say she resisted the single greatest temptation in beauty, the urge to flood every category at once. A genuine signature that lives in the formula and not in celebrity name or packaging design, built through two SKUs in make-up and skincare portfolios:

In Make-Up: Satin Kajal Liner, which is widely considered the quintessential Victoria Beckham Beauty experience. It is frequently described as a “legendary” item for the brand, with over 2 million units sold, and is a staple in professional reviews and editor recommendations.

Key attributes of this product that contribute to its “signature” status include: Versatility, Performance and the Range that comes in a wide variety of both wearable neutrals (like Cocoa and Cinnamon) and bold, unexpected shades.

Beyond the Satin Kajal Liner, several other products are consistently highlighted as “House Icons” or bestsellers: Posh Lipstick: Praised as a “multi-tasking marvel” for its hydrating, buildable formula and sleek, precise design.

And in the skincare category the signature is: The Cell Rejuvenating Illuminator (in collaboration with Augustinus Bader enriched with AB TFC8 complex: A hybrid skincare-makeup product that functions as a primer, highlighter, and treatment to promote radiance.

VB Beauty is managing to have a steady cadence of new launches that nonetheless stays limited and intentional, feeding the market. And most subtly, her fashion heritage is genuinely infused into the beauty vs. just borrowed for a campaign: the minimalism, the restraint, the weighted glass, the runway-skin philosophy all carry straight through from the clothes into the compacts, so the brand feels like one continuous point of view.

That is what, to me, built-to-last looks like, and it is so much less loud than a relaunch that the industry barely stops to applaud it.

Which finally lets me square this with something I say constantly, because a sharp reader will have noticed the apparent contradiction: I am forever telling beauty and wellness founders and brand leaders to define a tight customer and a couple of adjacent, neighboring audiences rather than trying to be everything to everyone, and yet here I am admiring heritage brands that bridge generations sitting quite far apart.

Coach did exactly this, resurrecting itself and becoming a genuine Gen Z favorite in the US and UK without abandoning the customer it already had. So which is it? The resolution is that bridging far-apart audiences is a capability. It is something a brand earns over years through product and consistency and trust, the way Coach did, and the way Victoria Beckham is doing one disciplined launch at a time. It is not something you put on for launch week by hiring the maximalist trend and pointing it at Gen Z. Marc Jacobs Beauty may absolutely build that bridge. I hope it does.

But the bridge gets built in the eighteen consequent months after the launch revenue spike, but definitely not in the first loud seven days everyone’s currently writing about.

So no, I’m not calling it, not yet. I think the creative is smart, the timing against clean-girl is smart, and the Sephora partnership will deliver a launch that looks like a triumph. And I am sincerely rooting for it to become one, because the industry is more interesting when a fashion house treats makeup as a real brand to build.

I just think the honest answer to “is Marc Jacobs Beauty back” is the least satisfying one in the room, which is: ask me at Christmas ;)

Because let me repeat it again, a relaunch is not a comeback. A revenue spike is not momentum.

For my Private Beauty Briefings subscribers (Beauty Founders & Brand Leaders), here is my expert Brand Launch, Relaunch & Repositioning Marketing Framework: how to build the successful brand system that turns a launch spike into long-term momentum, measured by customer lifetime value and wallet share, while holding your loyalists as you acquire a new generation.

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My Dear Beauty and Wellness Founders and Brand Leaders,

I’ve prepared for you a few case studies that prove that you can run attractive seasonal promotions that drive revenue while maintaining your premium brand positioning and building long-term customer relationships.

Allies of Skin and Arrae are doing it really well. Both running seasonal campaigns. Both offering attractive pricing but what caught my attention as a global beauty and wellness marketer: neither felt like a discount. Both felt like curated seasonal opportunities.

“Boost The Benefits” (Allies of Skin):positioning product duos as performance enhancement vs. price reduction.

“Summer Savings Sale” (Arrae), framing bundles as seasonal curation: “For Your Hottest Summer Yet”.

Because premium beauty and wellness marketing is way different from the mass-market beauty and wellness discount-driven marketing.

When you lead with “20% OFF EVERYTHING,” you train customers to wait for sales, with a time you may also devalue your brand. Because you compete on price instead of competing on value.

When you lead with curated systems (”Brighten & Lift Duo,” “Your Daily Routine Bundled Together”), you’re selling transformation first, offer second.

Look at how they present it:

Allies of Skin: “Even tone while helping to protect against environmental damage” + Save 20%.

Arrae: “Build lean muscle & burn body fat” + 30% off bundles.

The savings are there but they’re positioned as added value to a thoughtfully curated solution, not the reason to buy.

And the brilliant part: “New Allies Save 15%” with code WELCOME15. Not “First Order Discount”, not “Sign Up & Save.” The brand priorities joining a community, becoming an ally, not just getting cheaper products.

I work with premium beauty and wellness brands where founders or brand leaders worry that any promotion cheapens the brand. And they’re right to worry, IF you present it as desperation pricing.

But if you present it as seasonal curation, limited-time enhancement, exclusive community access, strategic bundling that actually helps customers succeed faster, that elevates brand, increases basket size, builds loyalty.

The Formula: How To Present Promotions Like A Luxury Brand

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(Image Credit: MOWE Beauty)

I stumbled on MOWE Beauty this week, a newly launched startup, and literally got goosebumps, because that feeling I rarely get anymore when I’m scrolling through beauty launches… actual goosebumps from watching a brand that knows exactly who it’s for and exactly who it’s not for, and isn’t apologizing for either.

Not targeting “women with high income, Gen Y, Z, X, living in the cities”. Not speaking to everyone at the same time. Speaking directly to one specific person with such a sharp precision that if you’re her, you feel it immediately, and if you’re not her, you know it’s not yours and that’s okay.

Let me tell you about MOWE because I think every beauty founder and brand leader should study what they’re doing right now before summer slow-down hits.

MOWE was founded by Tatiana Glezer, and the brand positioning is so sharp it could cut: “Between looking good and feeling good. Between movement and my skin. So I created MOWE. A skin-first beauty brand for women who move to feel good.”

Not a beauty brand that happens to work during workouts. A movement company first, beauty brand second, here to turn beauty rituals into motivation to move, because when you feel beautiful, you don’t just show up, you move differently.

The insight that sparked the brand? She loved the ritual of getting ready to move: the outfit, the intention, the shift. But when it came to her skin, nothing felt right. Clean beauty melted off too quickly during workouts. Sweat-proof makeup stayed but never felt gentle. It always felt like a compromise between looking good and feeling good, between movement and protecting her skin.

So she built MOWE on this philosophy: “Engineered for movement. Designed for skin.” The tagline alone tells you everything. The wrong exercise gear hurts your body. The wrong makeup hurts your skin. MOWE was made to move.

Their product philosophy hits every trend that matters right now without chasing trends desperately the way so many brands are: movement-friendly formulas, breathable and sweat-resistant, skin-first with skincare benefits woven in, makeup that moves with you not against you.

They have two core products right now: Endorphin Skin™ Complexion Booster ($42): it’s literally called “motivation in a bottle” and Heat Flush™ Lip & Cheek Blush ($34), a heat-reactive formula that adapts to your skin’s temperature to reveal a personalized flush of color, formulated with fermented botanical oils and antioxidant vitamins that melt comfortably into skin as it warms.

And here’s why I personally believe this brand has everything it needs to succeed, and why I’m telling you to study them carefully before you launch your next product or try to boost what you already have:

First, the niche is specific yet broad enough to scale. They’re speaking to women who are health-driven, who want to work out or move a lot, who see beauty as part of their wellness ritual. It reminds me of what Alo Yoga and Lululemon did for activewear but this is skincare-first makeup. It’s hitting a massive growing trend: the convergence of beauty and wellness and movement, without trying to be everything.

Second, the product concepts are distinctive. Heat-reactive blush that adapts to individual skin temperature? That’s personalized beauty without needing a quiz or a custom lab. It hits the personalization trend in a way that actually works at scale.

Third, the formula storytelling goes way beyond listing hero ingredients. They’re not saying “formulated with vitamin C and hyaluronic acid” because everyone says that and there’s nothing wrong with that. They’re saying “engineered for movement, designed for skin, formulated to perform through sweat and activity while leaving skin fresh and healthy-looking.” That’s a completely different value proposition that actually means something to the customer they’re trying to reach.

Fourth, the brand communications are so sharp they make my marketing brain jealous. “You wouldn’t run in flip-flops. Then why wear everyday makeup to hot Pilates?” “Office makeup was made for meetings. Not the workout.” “Work beauty doesn’t belong on the mat. MOWE does.” These lines are doing exactly what brand messaging should do: making the problem so obvious that the solution feels inevitable.

Fifth, they have very few SKUs and I feel like that’s their competitive advantage right now. They’re not trying to be a full beauty lineup. They’re solving one specific problem exceptionally well for one specific customer. That focus is what’s going to make them win, I believe.

Sixth, and this is the part that made me stop scrolling, they have a value-first approach. They’re not just selling you makeup that works during workouts. They’re motivating you to move. “Between looking good and feeling good” isn’t a tagline, it’s a philosophy that runs through everything they’re doing. The brand breathes lifestyle, it’s emotional, it makes you want to be part of what they’re building.

I’m genuinely wishing this brand success because it has a beautiful story to tell and a real purpose behind the product, and that combination is rare enough that when I see it done this well, I want to point at it and say: this, study this, because this is what differentiation actually looks like in 2026+ (I mean, it always looked like that but with a saturated market, it is getting even more crucial, to differentiate more the beauty brand).

Summer is getting closer and if you’re a beauty or wellness brand founder or leader, I’m advising you right now to study MOWE carefully and just look again at your brand and see if does have a story this distinctive. Do you know who your customer is with this level of precision? More importantly, do you know who your customer is NOT, and are you okay with that?

Because trying to speak to everyone is how you end up speaking to no one… you know that.

Here is My Personal Framework: How I Build Differentiated Brands That Win Market Share, as a Global Brand & Product Marketing Manager.

After 10+ years of building beauty and beauty brands, leading 250+ product developments and launches across global markets, I’ve developed a framework I use with every beauty and wellness brand I work, whether we’re building a new brand from scratch, launching a new product line, or localizing an established brand into a new market.

This is how I make brands differentiated, market-specific, and magnetic to the right customers while improving loyalty and wallet share from existing ones.

I’m sharing this exclusively with you, my premium subscribers, because this is the exact methodology that’s driven double-digit growth for brands I’ve worked with.

(For my Private Community: Premium Beauty Market Intelligence Subscribers Only)

PART 1: THE FOUNDATION: MAPPING & POSITIONING

Step 1: Brand Perception Mapping (Two Maps, Market-Specific)

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I had a client recently, a premium Skincare brand, completely obsessed with benchmarking their luxury cream (200€ + ) against this giant competitor from their home market, ready to blow their entire budget fighting a brand that here in Europe sits in a dusty retail corner that nobody is interested in.

And it took me a while to persuade the brand that they are fighting the wrong battle because they benchmark against the wrong competitor.

Market specificity is the step ZERO when your beauty or wellness brand wants to expand to another markets. Playing the same rules in every country is, to me, is just burning money.

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In Germany and Austria, for example, your €200 jar isn’t competing with other luxury creams, it may be competing with clinical pharmacy brands because consumers care about “Inhaltsstoffe”, ingredients and efficacy, more than the heritage story (depends of course on a category). In the UK, your premium haircare is fighting mass brands that have salon credibility baked in. In the US, your niche fragrance is up against influencer-backed celebrity launches with ten million followers behind them.

Different markets have completely different games.

The same is also with the hero product. A hero facial pro-age oil from Asia may fail in Europe because this product format is too niche for your target consumer who wants a conventional serum in a cream, low viscosity (watery) or gel format. The shampoo you were about to discontinue at home may also become your number one bestseller in London because the local need was completely different. The fragrance nobody cared about in your home market may explode in New York because suddenly the positioning actually landed with the right audience.

What I wanted to say is that if you don’t adjust to what the local consumer actually values and what your local competition is, your international expansion will be expensive and draining your resources.

Having a 10+ know-how in global brand and product management, I would do first things first: first analyze what’s winning on the local shelf and who my customer is (beyond demographics or Gen Y or X etc), because understanding consumers’ perception characteristics in a specific market is knowing the market reality and being aware of that local reality changes completely when you cross borders.

And yes, you would need (very often) play with the sequence of your brand attributes.

If you’re beauty brand founder or a brand leader, and you’re expanding into new markets and need strategy built for local market specifics, we should talk in DM.

And if you want deep dives into actionable beauty and wellness marketing, how to build the right products, launch them well, and grow profitably, subscribe to my Private Beauty Briefings “Beauty Market Intelligence”!

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One brand launches seasonal sets in pouches; suddenly, twenty others follow. One premium group makes a strategic pivot, and the rest of the industry follows on a global scale without ever thinking if it makes sense for their brand at all.

This cycle of imitation is creating a huge amount of sameness:

Going “Age-Agnostic” : To avoid “offending,” the industry has abandoned specific age targeting in favor of “creams for all”. We speak only to vague outcomes like “glow,” ignoring the real, visceral skin struggles a woman or a young girl actually experiences.

The China Gold Rush: One brand pivots toward the Chinese market, and fifty others rush in the following month, often before they’ve even established a solid foundation in their own home market.

Or the desperate rush to copy the Rhode aesthetic or chase Gen Z hype just because a few brands found success there.

In the end, we are left with brands that look, claim, and sound exactly the same. What about a distinct point of view!?

What I wanted to say is that normally we are supposed to “meeting demand”, but I have a feeling, we’re creating phantom demand by replicating offers that replicate other offers. Don’t you feel so as well?!

It looks to me more like supply is chasing supply, but definitely not demand.

Observing the beauty market as a global brand and product management expert, I see a common trait of successful brands: they are doing the basics well and focus more on consumer trends, knowing their core consumer beyond demographics… they are very consumer-centric.

Just a few examples:

• Lancôme launches Longevity MD with clear age targeting (Under 35. 35-55. 55+) while so many brands are terrified to mention age or developing products for certain age group. It is not innovation and it is still not that super ideal individual approach but still, the brand focuses on own trajectory, their customers and not giving away too much energy and budget on copy-catting what the rest of the brands do.

• Rituals is one of those first brands who creates summer advent calendars for a few years in a row when everyone’s doing winter ones.

• Biotherm packs summer sets in branded water bottles tied to ocean protection and a healthy habit development of drinking water, instead of another generic pouch.

Those are just a few examples. And don’t get me wrong, they’re not ignoring trends or competitor analysis. I feel like they are focusing more on what their actual customer needs, that’s it.

Their customer, their real need, built from there.

The beauty industry is incredibly talented at speed-to-market replication.

Imagine if we applied that same time and resources to be original, to make deeper customer insights, understand specific and real consumer desires and concerns that the product should solve instead.

And if your brand needs strategy built for your customer, let’s talk in DM.

I’m looking at the new Absolue Longevity MD from Lancome launch right now, and beyond all the Devil Wears Prada 2 placement hype that everyone’s talking about, I need to give you, beauty founders and brand leaders, a marketing expert perspective why brands like Lancôme’s skincare division are going to survive this economic and cultural crisis while so many premium brands (especially heritage ones) around them stagnate, if not collapse.

Just some pre-history… Five years ago I was sitting at my desk leading NPD and launch for a premium professional skincare line and my marketing peers looked at me like I’d suggested we go back to dinosaur era, when I said we should position our products by age group and market to the certain age groups.

“That’s old-fashioned, Maryna. Nobody does that anymore. Modern consumers don’t want to be told what age their skin is.”

And I remember sitting there feeling so annoyed: biology didn’t get news about what’s modern and what’s old-fashioned. The aging process didn’t suddenly become fluid just because we decided it was more comfortable to pretend it doesn’t exist in predictable stages.

A teenager’s skin has concerns that a thirty-five-year-old woman’s skin doesn’t have. A woman in her fifties has more visible signs of aging than someone in her early thirties. Yes, there are individual factors, DNA, lifestyle, stress, all of that, but in general, aging is real and it’s sequential and pretending otherwise isn’t progressive, it’s just confusing, as to me as a beauty marketer and as end-consumer.

My message to beauty brands: We shouldn’t be following what one or two brands decided was the “modern” way to do things and then watching the entire industry copy them and continue misguiding consumers for years because nobody wants to be the first one to say, this doesn’t make sense.

And now Lancôme launches Longevity MD and they actually did it. They launched a line that is developed for the specific age-groups and market it accordingly, without stating that “for all skin types” or whatever trendy marketing claim that confuses end-consumers even more.

Anticipate Creme for younger skin, before age 35, preventing visible signs of biological skin aging before they appear.

Intercept Creme for middle skin age, 35-55, slowing down visible signs while they’re happening.

Reset Serum for mature skin, 55 and beyond, reversing visible signs that are already there.

Another part, why they’re going to lead that “Longevity” hype, is that they took it seriously and backed it up scientifically. (Side note: I am so fed up as consumer and marketer to see that the majority of beauty brands use the word “Longevity” without backing it up.)

They partnered with Timeline to bring Mitopure™ - the Urolithin-A longevity supplement that dermatologists have been recommending into topical skincare for the first time. They’re backing their claims with real science, eighty-six percent increase in cellular energy, two hundred fifty-seven percent increase in mitochondrial biogenesis, numbers that actually mean something at a biological level.

Look at this claim: 84% of women perceive their skin as younger than their chronological age.

Which tells you everything you need to know about why this approach works and why the industry’s been so terrified to do it.

This is premium science to me! This is what it looks like when a brand respects both biology and their customer’s intelligence… and money.

Another reason why I believe Lancôme will thrive: they don’t do what almost every struggling brand does, which is create one global brand message and one product story and push it to every market like consumers in Shanghai and consumers in Munich and consumers in New York all have the same skin concerns and cultural context and economic situation.

Lancôme adapts. They meet their target clients where they actually are, in the market they’re actually in, with the concerns they actually have.

They’re not stuck in their past success the way so many heritage premium brands are, still running strategies that worked in 2015 like it’s still 2015. They evolve with time and they pivot when the market demands it.

Their in-retail experiences let you feel the premium performance, the advanced science, the luxury that you’re about to pay for. They don’t just tell you it’s premium, they prove it before you spend a single euro.

And most importantly, they categorize their products by actual biological need instead of by whatever marketing trend is popular this quarter.

So well done to Lancôme, genuinely!

Their smart brand and product marketing strategy is just showing that when the products are built for the reality your target customers are living in, and when they are marketed accordingly according to the specific individual target market, your beauty brand will thrive anyways.

I write about new generation beauty and wellness marketing with strategic reality check here inside Beauty Market Intelligence (Private Beauty Briefings Publication) on how to build for the market you’re in.

If you’re tired of copying strategies that don’t work for your situation, that’s where to start.

Beauty Marketing Intelligence is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

And if you want to build this level of strategy and hands-on execution for your own brand, the kind that makes you untouchable even when the market’s experiencing economic slowdown or crisis, let’s talk how I can help you as a global beauty brand and product management expert.

Your “Overnight Success” Strategy May be Leading You Off a Cliff

Dear beauty and wellness founders and brand leaders,

I wasn’t going to talk about this, but it’s getting impossible to keep silent about it.

Every week I see another expert beauty marketing post breaking down the “secret” to Rhode’s success, Rare Beauty’s organic growth, how Summer Fridays or Glossier or Phlur “cracked the code” to sell millions overnight.

And I want to support those beauty and wellness founders and brand leaders who feel upset when trying to copy-paste those frameworks and their expectations are not met.

I just want to direct about what’s driving me a little bit crazy here, as a global beauty marketer.

First: Community then product is completely different from product then community.

As some sources state, Hailey Bieber had 51 million followers before Rhode launched. Selena Gomez had 430 million. These founders brought existing communities to their products. Massive, devoted, trust-already-built communities.

If you’re starting with a warehouse full of SKUs and searching for customers who don’t know you and don’t trust you yet, following their launch strategy is not just ineffective. It’s sometimes dangerous for your cash flow and your brand positioning.

Second: The market those brands launched into doesn’t exist anymore.

The economic conditions were different. The competition was different. The cultural moment was different. The launch country and the strategic key market was different. What worked for Glossier in 2014 or Rhode in 2022 is not what works now in 2026 and in your particular market with your resources and starting point.

You can’t just follow someone’s overnight success framework without also considering your current market reality, your consumer’s cultural specifics, your actual competition, your positioning, your budget, your business model, your resources.

Context is everything!!

Third: Stop obsessing over Gen Z just because everyone else is.

I know the entire industry is fixating on Gen Z and Gen Alpha right now. Every trend report, every strategy deck, every panel discussion… oh and those social media content pieces and product packaging etc.

But there are other generations with significantly higher spending power who actually need your product more than Gen Z does.

What about Millennials, Gen X, Baby Boomers…?

These are people who have disposable income, who understand the value of premium or masstige beauty, who are actively looking for solutions to real concerns, who will pay for quality without needing to be convinced through fifty TikToks first.

And if you’re positioning as masstige or premium, you need to rethink your core customer very carefully before you chase the generation Z that can’t afford that easily your 100+ €/$ etc product (depends on a category).

Because it is really upsetting my marketing heart to see the beauty brands deciding their customer is Millennial or Gen X, then acting like they’re for Gen Z. Using Gen Z language, targeting Gen Z platforms, avoiding anything that feels “pro-age” because they think it’s unmarketable, not en vogue.

And then being disappointed at the “unknown reason” why their true target customer (the one with the money and the need) walks right past them.

Cultural context of your specific market matters. Generational positioning matters. You can’t be for everyone, and trying to speak to Gen Z while selling to Millennials is how you end up with messaging that speaks literally to no one.

What works if you’re not launching with a built-in community of millions:

For the beginning, just stop copying overnight success stories from the brands that have had different conditions than you have now. Focus on building for the market you’re in at this moment, with the right customer group, with the correct product positioning, with a proper signature product strategy, and with the resources you have or can afford.

Figure out who genuinely needs what you’re making, and (please!!!) not who’s trending on socials.

Build trust before or while you ask for the sale!

Understand that sustainable growth almost never looks like overnight success from the outside, even when it feels slow and frustrating from the inside. It is incremental, very multifaceted and very strategic.

And, sorry for repeating myself, first define correct target consumer - the generation that’s ready to buy from you!

I write about new generation beauty and wellness marketing with strategic reality check inside Beauty Market Intelligence (Private Beauty Briefings Publication) on how to build for the market you’re in.

If you’re tired of copying playbooks that don’t work for your situation, that’s where to start.

I stumbled upon Pinterest’s 2026 Trend Prediction and Spring 2026 Trend Report with key data on consumer behavior and preferences outside of beauty, and the beauty-related “Scent Stacking” trend caught my attention because as a global beauty marketer, I see something much deeper than just “fragrance layering.”

And I think what’s underneath this trend is very important for your business success, in particular your category structure and product messaging. Because I don’t want your beauty brand launching the wrong response to the layering trend. And it concerns not only directly fragrance brands but I am talking about hair care, body care, skincare, make-up, fragrance categories in general.

As Pinterest says in Fragrance Stacking prediction, the consumers are blending oils and perfumes to craft their very own fragrance formulas:

• Perfume layering combinations up 125%.

• Niche perfume collections up 500%.

I do not see it as “launch layering systems” as the next step, even though it does make sense at some point, depending on the category you are in.

I see it as a transition of the core consumer’s need to be changing moods multiple times per day. People want to feel good about their lives in 2026, not upend them. People are building at-home sanctuaries, they want ways to feel better in the life they already have.

Garden inspiration searches up 940%. Balcony makeovers up 165%. Sunday reset rituals, tiny outdoor sanctuaries, micro escapes that fit into real life. And I see beauty with all of that fragrance layering isn’t separate from this shift, it’s a part of it.

What consumers are actually saying, according to me objective expert marketing interpretation: “I want more control over how I feel. I want sensorial experiences that let me adjust my mood throughout the day. I want beauty products that give me micro reset moments, tiny sanctuaries, emotional and nervous system reset with the fragrances, textures, the during-and-after-feel right here in my routine at home”.

That’s why fragrance stacking is an emotional need showing up as a product behavior.

I enjoy seeing many brands respond:

Dove launched Serum + Soothing Oil Body Wash with almond oil and sandalwood, positioning scent as part of the soothing experience.

Gisou’s Tropical Honey Infused Lip Oils bring signature honey scent into layerable format.

Phlur expanded into body and hair mists for “affordable” scent experimentation.

Sol de Janeiro built entire universe around scented body care and mist, fragrance formats that all together allow experimentation.

Premium: Ouai, K18, Olaplex, Oribe blur treatment and fragrance in haircare.

Molton Brown brings a body care and fragrance collection inspired by the quiet routine of tea, Tea Ceremony transforms a simple moment into something more intentional.

I see those few examples are good strategic responses to what consumers want.

Whatever your category is that scent, that wellness aspect, that sensorial experience matters more than we’ve been paying attention to.

I know many default to fragrance-free for safety. There’s a place for that. But I’m projecting we’re entering a moment where intentional scent profiles, hybrid SKUs where fragrance is core to therapeutic experience will help brands get into the hearts (and the wallets) of the target consumers.

Skincare hasn’t done this yet and somehow never really highlight in communications or product messaging the scent, even though it is decisive in a product purchasing or repurchasing decision. Body care and fragrance have. But if your customer wants micro escapes, mood regulation, calm in a ten-minute routine, then scent in your serum isn’t just formulation detail, it’s ritual completion, nervous system reset, why she comes back.

The fragrance layering trend isn’t telling you to launch a kit. It’s telling you consumers expect beauty products to work together emotionally and suggest a smart category that suggests sensorial experiences that adjust to the consumer’s rhythm and lifestyle, give control, E.g. scented body milk with super skincare benefits and as a layer to the fragrance, then a mist to be used on the go and so on.

This means it’s time to rethink your entire product category. Not to think in single launches but rather build collections designed as systems where every product enhances the others, where your customer changes how she feels simply by choosing which layers to use that day.

If you want to know how it can be applied to your brand with new generation beauty marketing that sells, let’s talk in DM.

My dear beauty founders, brand leaders and experts,

While we all obsess about the idea that a successful beauty brand growth in 2026+ requires nailing the latest trend, finding the perfect influencer partnership, or discovering some hero ingredient nobody’s using yet, I wanted to add another or , let’s say, additional important perspective, taking into account what’s currently happening in our beauty and wellness industry.

It all starts at the root, at something almost nobody talks about, but it’s the single most important structural decision you could make to compete in what we are calling the longevity era of beauty.

It’s your organizational structure in marketing.

Let me walk you through why I believe in this, and why your beautiful products with gorgeous packaging and thoughtful formulations have more chances to be performing the way you expect them to perform.

First, just a short overview of where we’re standing right now as a beauty and wellness industry.

Consumers are exhausted. They’re fatigued from pandemic after-effect, from economic instability, political chaos, from being told to optimize and transform and upgrade themselves constantly for years. They’re thinking twice, sometimes three times, before spending money on cosmetics (and not only), and when they do finally pull out their wallet, it’s only for products that justify the price (mass market and masstige are the first choice) with proven quality, visible results, credible brand positioning, formulas that actually do what they promise without destroying anything in the process.

And layered on top of that fatigue, we have this massive wave of longevity consciousness sweeping through beauty, where consumers are shifting to wanting repair, prevention, to soft-yet-potent formulas that deliver results while respecting their barrier, their nervous system, their long-term health.

The trends across every category reflect this shift:

In skincare and body care, consumers want at-home solutions with as few steps as possible, ideally hybrid formats that do multiple jobs at once, with super potent formulas that don’t damage their barrier or require a recovery period. I am not talking about at-home devices that offer professional studio or clinical-grade efficacy.

In haircare, they want salon-quality treatment effects at home, repair and prevention built into every product… please note: not just the masks they use once a week.

In makeup, they want long-lasting maximalism with skincare benefits woven in, this way getting all-in-one performance and skin health.

In fragrance, they want layering possibilities, long-lasting scent, gourmand notes that feel indulgent, plus hybrid formulas that deliver skincare benefits or haircare benefits, and/or neuro-benefits that affect their mood and nervous system.

The entire cosmetics category is moving closer and closer to this bridge between beauty and clinical, dermo-cosmetics, neuro-cosmetics, formulas that work on a deeper biological level than just making you look pretty for a few hours. And all of that must be offered at a “humble pricing”.

And on the communications level, consumers are so educated now, so literate in ingredient science and skin biology, that your typical “vitamin C is rich in antioxidants” reads like first-grade homework material to them, something they learned years ago and have moved far beyond. Yet, I hear from those ingredient-native end-consumers “I wish somebody in beauty industry could explain in simple words what’s really working, what’s just trend and so on…”.

We’re standing at the edge of this longevity era, and it feels like almost every brand feels it but doesn’t know 100% how to respond to it. Some of the brands integrate the word “longevity” literally everywhere: on their communications channels, on the product names… I also see a way of experts organizing conferences around “Longevity Rush”, brand collaborations happening around “longevity-driven” phylosophy…

So it’s clear that we’re in the longevity, problem-solution. high-credibility era, where consumers can smell “brain-washing / science-washing / science-washing / clean-vegan-washing” from a mile away.

Formulas need to be centered around cellular-level impact, nervous system regulation, long-term health optimization. Communications need to serve as a continuation of that longevity concept, offering genuinely valuable information that helps consumers understand their bodies and make better decisions. I am very happy to observe that just surface-level marketing that tries to convince the consumer they need another serum is not working any more.

Which brings me to the point: your marketing team structure needs to be updated!

If I were responsible for your beauty brand’s organizational structure in 2026, here’s what I would add to your marketing team, and I want to be very clear that I’m not talking about adding these experts to R&D only, I’m talking about embedding them in marketing as the bridge between R&D’s technical expertise and the consumer’s actual lived experience and problems.

First, I would bring a dermatologist into the NPD (starting from Ideation/Concept Phase) stage as part of the marketing team.

We’re talking about result-driven cosmetics now, problem-solution positioning where consumers expect visible outcomes and will abandon your brand if you don’t deliver. I like to prove my theory on the practical examples.

Let’s say, if your target consumer is a woman in the menopausal stage dealing with hormonal changes, mood swings, skin barrier disruption, sleep problems, stress that’s showing up on her face, it’s not enough anymore to have a product manager with strong marketing and commercial expertise doing competitor analysis and tracking market trends and writing product briefs based on what’s working for other brands. Product and Brand Manager is, of course, a must-have and crucial as never before (well, I am one of them). But, this expert needs another power-expert.

You need someone who understands skin biology at a clinical level, someone who can help your PM and your R&D team spot red flags before you commit to a formula, like potential over-reaction of sensitive perimenopausal skin to a fragrance component in a barrier cream, or texture concerns that might cause issues for skin that’s already compromised, or ingredient combinations that look good on paper but might cause problems in real-world use.

This dermatologist in marketing (and it shouldn’t be internal team member, it could be external expert who is doing consulting), becomes the voice of clinical reality, the person who can say “wait, let’s think about this differently” before you invest mabe months and significant budget into developing something that may not work the way it should work for the target customer you’re trying to serve.

Just a side note: I'm not talking about dermatologist-founded brands. I'm talking about brands who want to compete in longevity cosmetics adding that clinical / result-driven (problem-solution) expertise to their brand attributes system.

Second, I would bring an endocrinologist into your marketing team.

So, let’s go back to the practical example. Your menopausal customer, the one you’re trying to serve with that beautiful longevity-focused cream you just developed, might have hormonal imbalances that mean even your best formula with your most researched longevity molecule isn’t going to deliver the results she’s hoping for if her cortisol is chronically elevated and her skin is showing all the visible signs of that: thinning, accelerated aging, impaired wound healing, barrier dysfunction that no topical product can fully address, inflammation, breakouts in areas that weren’t problematic before menopause.

An endocrinologist on your marketing team (internal or external) gives you expert perspective on what’s actually causing the skin conditions you’re trying to address, the root hormonal and metabolic causes, and that perspective changes everything about how you position your products, what claims you make, what education you provide, what realistic expectations you set with your customers.

And third, on the communications level, let’s be completely transparent here because I want your brand to succeed.

We obsess over the science, we invest in developing sophisticated formulas, we work closely with R&D to get everything right, and then we hand all of that complexity and nuance over to an in-house or external communications team where the person actually writing your social content or scripting your campaigns or crafting your brand story is often someone who’s very good at copywriting and understanding social media algorithms and performance marketing metrics but has literally zero academic background or clinical expertise to write intelligently about what the best approach is for treating perimenopause skin, or how to actually prevent premature aging from a biological perspective, or what someone with very dry skin should be doing beyond just buying your moisturizer.

Of course they might ask ChatGPT, Claude or any AI for help, of course marketing and R&D have probably prepared lists of allowed and prohibited claims and approved benefit language, but we’re in the longevity era now, the problem-solution era, the high-credibility era, as I have mentioned before, where consumers are sophisticated and skeptical and hungry for real information that helps them living better and longer life.

With all my respect to communications teams, and I say this as someone who is also one of them, as a global brand and product marketing expert myself, I'm a devoted advocate of integrity and quality and creating positive impact, which means I believe we should be bringing experts who have real academic knowledge and expertise into our communications process to ensure the content we're creating is developed with the best possible angles taken into account: marketing insight and commercial viability, yes, but also dermatological accuracy, clinical relevance, endocrinological understanding, neurological impact, nutritional science, gut-brain-skin axis knowledge, exercise physiology, sleep medicine, behavioral psychology, and the complex interactions between all of these systems that determine whether your products actually work in real life.

And again, I keep repeating: you shouldn’t have those experts on your payroll. You could integrate them as one-off consultants, or collaboration partners you host podcast with them or co-create content that benefits both of you.

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Exercise Physiologist or Sports Medicine Specialist: Because stress management, circulation, lymphatic drainage, muscle tension all directly impact skin health, hair growth, body composition. Your customer needs to understand how movement affects the results your products promise.

Clinical Psychologist or Behavioral Health Specialist. Because stress, anxiety, sleep deprivation, emotional eating patterns all manifest visibly on skin and body. The mind-skin connection isn’t marketing claim, it’s neuroscience, and your longevity positioning falls apart if you ignore it, I believe.

Gastroenterologist or Registered Dietitian specializing in gut health. Because the gut-skin axis is real, inflammation starts in the digestive system, and no topical product can override what’s happening internally when someone’s microbiome is destroyed.

Sleep Specialist or Sleep Medicine Physician. Because skin repair, cellular regeneration, hormone regulation all happen during sleep. Your night cream is competing with chronic sleep deprivation, and consumers need to understand that connection.

Registered Dietitian or Clinical Nutritionist. Because what she’s eating is either supporting or sabotaging every product you sell. Blood sugar, inflammation, nutrient deficiencies all show up on skin before anywhere else.

… Because what your menopausal customer actually needs from your brand if you’re positioning yourself as longevity-driven, and it’s not what thousands of brands out there are giving her.

She doesn’t need to hear about your plant-based retinol alternative sourced from some super rare extract grown on a remote island, formulated to be 200% vegan and science-driven, harvested during some optimal lunar phase when Uranus meets Jupiter or whatever poetic copy your team came up with ;)

What she needs, what would genuinely help her and build the kind of trust that turns into long-term loyalty, is a nutritionist explaining how that processed oatmeal porridge she’s eating for breakfast every morning because she thinks it’s healthy is actually causing blood sugar spikes that trigger an insulin response that creates a hormonal cascade that leads to inflammation that shows up on her skin as redness, breakouts, accelerated aging.

She needs an endocrinologist explaining why drinking coffee on an empty stomach first thing in the morning, which she does every single day, is over-stimulating her cortisol production in ways that impair her skin barrier function, trigger systemic inflammation, disrupt her collagen production, make every skin concern she has worse.

She needs a gut health expert talking about the gut-skin axis, explaining which foods are causing inflammation in her body versus which ones support healing, how nutrition needs to shift based on her specific lifestyle and age stage and hormonal reality.

Because your best cream, no matter how beautifully formulated, no matter what groundbreaking promises you’re making that nobody else has made before, is going to deliver minimal results, possibly zero results, if your target customer is living in survival mode, inhaling sandwiches between back-to-back meetings, skipping meals because she has too much to do, running on cortisol and adrenaline and three hours of sleep, treating her body like a machine that just needs to keep going instead of a biological system that needs support and care.

I hope I could persuade you now that your brand may need restructure or elevate your marketing team to include real academic expertise from day one of NPD all the way through to final content output. I also hope you understand now that you can’t create genuinely longevity-focused products and communications without having longevity experts embedded in the team creating them.

You may think it’s too expensive, because it’s complicated, because it challenges existing team structures and reporting lines, and requires admitting that maybe the way we’ve been building our beauty brand isn’t sufficient anymore for the market we’re in now.

But I believe, this way, your ROI will be more impressive because you will squeeze out the maximum out of your launch and will have more chances to dominate your target market.

Well, that’s what I believe.

And that’s what I write about inside Beauty Market Intelligence private beauty briefings blog here for beauty founders and experts who are ready to think differently about how they’re structured to compete.

And if you want the market-specific growth strategy built specifically for your brand, mapped to your actual customer, your budget, your growth goals, that’s exactly the work I do with beauty founders and brand leaders. Reach me out in DM. Let’s talk about what makes sense for where you are.

Maryna Onyshchuk

Global Beauty Brand & Product Management | Marketing Strategy & Execution

Located in Munich, Germany | Available Worldwide

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My dear beauty founders and brand leaders,

I want to share some expert beauty marketing perspective that may completely change how you think about collaborations, your brand building and growth, about what makes someone fall in love with your beauty brand they haven’t thought about in at all.

Just some pre-history. I was scrolling through Instagram in last weekend without looking for anything specific, just enjoying some time without responsibilities and urgent emails. And I got stuck on this series of reels that I honestly thought was a movie trailer at first, something my millennial brain immediately recognized and loved, you know that aesthetic that’s romantic and light and wellness-focused and somehow makes you feel like you found another favourite relax-and-watch movie.

And then I realized it wasn’t a movie at all. It was Garnier, the mass-market hair care brand I used to love back in 2010 and then completely forgot, introducing Gisele Bündchen as their first global wellness ambassador in their 120-year history.

(Image Credit: Gisele Bündchen & Garnier)

And I got goosebumps from watching they way a hair care brand announce a collaboration.

That almost never happens to me anymore, and I watch brand launches and campaign rollouts every single day as part of my work. I’m not easy to impress as a beauty marketer;) I see through the tactics, I know when something’s manufactured, I can spot a “so-so” celebrity endorsement from a mile away.

But this felt different. This felt like someone at Garnier understood something fundamental about how people fall in love with brands now, something so many beauty founders are completely missing when they’re planning their growth strategy and collaboration initiatives.

So I want to walk you through what Garnier did right, and more importantly, I want to show you how to apply this to your brand even if you don’t have Garnier’s budget or access to Gisele Bündchen with her 23+ MIO followers only on IG, because the principle underneath this isn’t about money or fame, it’s about understanding what people are actually hungry for, what they are looking for, that feels like it belongs in their world.

One beautifully executed content series featuring the right person.

This Is Not Really About Celebrity Collaborations

What I’m not going to do in this article, and I need to be very clear about this because I don’t want to waste your time with advice you’ve already heard a thousand times: I’m not going to tell you to invest in celebrity collaborations. That’s very obvious. Everyone knows celebrity endorsements can work. And everyone also knows they’re expensive and the ROI is unpredictable and sometimes you spend a fortune and get nothing except some Instagram posts that your target customer scrolls past without feeling anything.

What I want to show you instead is something that’s been emerging over the last few years that works for brands with massive budgets and brands with almost nothing, and it is all based on interest marketing instead of influence marketing, something that fundamentally changes how you think about who you should be collaborating with and why.

And if you understand this shift and execute it correctly, you can move your revenue in ways that feel impossible right now without spending what Garnier spent on Gisele.

It No Longer Matters If Your Beauty Brand Is Premium or Mass. You’re Competing as a Lifestyle Brand.

The Underestimated Market Shift

Let me first take you back to what I remember very clearly from when I was working at a huge German beauty group years ago, where we had licensed luxury brands under our umbrella and our entire marketing division was organized into two completely separate teams: luxury brand marketing and lifestyle brand marketing.

Those teams didn’t talk to each other much. They had different strategies, KPIs, different ways of thinking about what made a brand successful. Luxury was about heritage and craftsmanship and exclusivity, and very carefully controlled brand image. Lifestyle was about accessibility and relatability and showing up in everyday moments and making people feel like the brand understood their lifestyle.

That distinction doesn’t exist anymore. It can’t exist anymore, and any brand still organizing their thinking that way is already behind.

Now, in 2026, every single beauty brand regardless of price point or positioning or category must be lifestyle-driven - that is my beauty marketing perspective. There’s no way around it. Premium, luxury, science-driven, clinically validated, clean, sustainable, whatever you’re claiming, it has to be wrapped in lifestyle.

And the reason this shift happened is because the market is completely saturated. Beauty brands at this point have more or less the same key ingredients. Everyone’s claiming clean or vegan or science-driven or longevity-focused. Those aren’t differentiators anymore and I keep repeating it, they’re a part of brand attributes but not a core USP.

So how do you attract new customers and turn them into loyal repeat buyers when everyone’s formulas are starting to look the same and everyone’s brand story sounds vaguely similar and everyone’s social media feed has that same aspirational wellness aesthetic or food marketing inspired?

You make people feel like your brand is their world within the first seconds of discovering you.

And just like in any kind of relationship, romantic or friendship or professional, people are drawn to those who share their interests, who understand their problems without needing everything explained, who offer solutions that feel like they were designed specifically for the life that person is actually living.

From what I observe, we’re in the middle of a revolution right now in how content and attention work, and how trust gets built between brands and customers, and it’s all about the booming creator economy, and I encourage you paying attention to how this is changing the rules of collaboration and growth, because it answers the question why your customer acquisition costs keep rising while your competitor brands are growing faster with less advertising spend.

If you hesitate in what I am going to tell you, first what I want you to do right now, just pause reading this for a minute and go open Instagram, and look at what content actually gets shared the most, what gets saved, what people send to their friends with a message that says “this made me think of you” or “we should try this.”

No, it’s not ads, it’s also not your product attributes, key ingredients and the interesting facts about your unique complex. It’s not typical influencer posts where someone’s obviously been paid to hold up a product and smile at the camera and say something generic about how much they love it;)

It’s recipes, drink tutorials, breakfast, dinner ideas, wellness tips that work, low carb and low sugar home-made dessert made within 5 minutes. Makeup hacks that save time. Book recommendations from people whose taste you trust. Routines that make daily life feel more intentional. Nervous system reset practices. Weight loss hacks, fitness exercises. Yoga, meditation, tennis, football… Ways to make Sundays feel sacred. And the list goes on.

It’s interest-based content that people genuinely want to consume and remember and come back to, content that adds value to their life in some small specific way, created by people who’ve built loyal communities around sharing one particular thing they’re deeply knowledgeable about or passionate about.

And these creators didn’t start with brand deals. They started by sharing content around specific interests, and they built trust with audiences who share those same interests, and then brands came to them later because the alignment was already there, because their community was already the exact customer profile those brands were trying to reach.

This is the fundamental shift you need to understand if you want collaborations to work for your business: you don’t need to pay for access to a huge audience. You need to find the people who already have your exact target customer’s trust around a specific interest that aligns with your brand’s world, and then you collaborate with them in ways that feel natural and valuable. I call it value-first marketing.

Let me show you what this looks like in practice.

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(Image Credit: David Beckham, Victoria Beckham, Harper Beckham)

So, it’s official all over the media, Harper Beckham, 14 years old, is launching HIKU, a K-Beauty inspired brand for Gen Alpha. I see the internet is split into two camps: Some are thrilled about another successful celebrity brand. Others are saying K-Beauty is oversaturated and questioning why a Western celebrity is jumping into a space already dominated by brilliant Korean brands.

I have a completely different take, and it comes from spending years building beauty and wellness brands across global markets and studying what actually works.

I’ve followed Victoria Beckham Beauty and David Beckham’s IM8 closely for years. From the outside, their brand DNA, category system and communications strategies suggest something more thoughtful than typical celebrity vanity projects. Victoria’s collaboration with Augustinus Bader signals serious commitment to science driven skincare. IM8 is a strong supplement brand built on credible efficacy and clear positioning.

These are structured businesses built with sophistication.

So when I look at Harper launching HIKU at 14, the part that excites me as a global beauty marketer:

Gen Alpha genuinely needs brands built for them.

This generation grew up with mothers who are already beauty natives. Harper has been showing interest in beauty, which is very authentic. She also comes from an environment that understands how to build brands with substance with all the access to expertise, strategic and experienced minds.

And honestly, she absolutely should use that advantage.

But one strategic element concerns me: if HIKU uses “Glass Skin” as brand DNA.

Don’t get me wrong, I love K-Beauty. I’ve worked across North America, Europe, DACH, Asia, Middle East. I understand the influence K-Beauty has on the global market right now. But what I also saw: trends that seem to be super powerful and loud come and go. K-Beauty won’t always dominate the Western beauty world, I believe.

If Harper builds her entire brand identity around “K-Beauty inspired”, to me it’s a specific brand concept that has a substance, but anchoring “glass skin” as a crucial part of brand’s DNA, to me, is a bit risky, because it’s something that could be completely irrelevant in a few years, if not earlier.

So, If I were responsible for brand and product strategy for this generation:

• Glass skin can be part of one product line but it should not define the entire brand.

• Gen Alpha needs problem solution driven skincare specifically designed for teenage skin.

• This generation is extremely exposed to social media influence and unrealistic beauty standards. They need proper education from the real experts: e.g. collaboration with dermatologists talking about solutions for the teenage skin, endocrinologists, nutrition and fitness experts, psychologists could create real value for this generation.

Oh, and talking about self-love… Our beauty industry often talks about self love while simultaneously encouraging overconsumption. Self care for teenagers may mean understanding that healthy skin rarely requires 10 products and learning how lifestyle, stress, hormones and nutrition influence skin condition. Or understanding that confidence does not come from chasing every trend.

Gen Alpha already influences household purchasing decisions and will soon represent one of the most commercially powerful consumer groups in beauty. And Harper Beckham clearly has the resources to build another strong brand.

And I genuinely wish and hope HIKU will be one of those Gen Alpha beauty brands that authentically serves this generation in a holistic way.

I work with beauty and wellness founders and leadership teams on market-specific signature and hero product marketing strategy and positioning that drives long term growth.

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