đź’„ | From Viral Buzz to Viable Business: The Creative Partnerships Driving Beauty's Next Wave
Jeff Mard at 2025 Beauty Connect LA
The global beauty industry, generating $677 billion in revenue, is a complex and intensely competitive environment, placing immense pressure on brands to achieve sustainable distinction. Insights from Beauty Connect LA (BCLA) emphasized that to survive and thrive, brands must look beyond internal innovation and strategically lean into creative partnerships and structural readiness to stand out and convert buzz into meaningful business impact.
The new blueprint for growth requires merging retail media with digital discovery, a process defined by authenticity, operational rigor, and deep creator collaboration.
The New Rules of Discovery Commerce
A seismic shift in consumer behavior mandates that brands prioritize social platforms for discovery. 73% of consumers find new products on social media. Critically, TikTok is noted as being 2.5 times more likely to be the search engine of choice for purchase-driven beauty queries compared to other social platforms.
This environment is driven by five key behavioral patterns:
1. Before & After Culture: Visual transformations that build trust and conversion.
2. Tutorials & Alternative Uses: Educational content.
3. GRWM (Get Ready With Me) & Ritualization: Turning routines into shoppable content.
4. De-influencing & Transparency: Leveraging honesty as a growth lever.
5. Ingredient-led Discovery: Connecting brand with what matters, beyond functional benefits.
For a brand, this discovery phase necessitates "retail readiness"—being prepared to capture the momentum when a video goes viral. The challenge is navigating the complexity where the average keyword search in Google is 6, but within GPT, it is 24, requiring brands to talk extensively about the why and how of their products.
Creative Partnerships: The Engine for Differentiation
In this landscape, authentic collaboration is the "secret sauce" for growth. The BCLA discussions highlighted that creative partnerships—especially with affiliates and creators—are an essential growth lever.
1. The Rise of the Creator-as-Affiliate:
The growth of affiliates is a predictable and significant pattern. There are approximately 2.5 million affiliates on TikTok today, with considerable anticipated growth. Brands are being driven by the platforms to work with these affiliates, as they serve customers who are watching and engaging with this content.
2. Embracing Authentic Storytelling:
Smart brands lean into experts for product advocacy, usage, and exploration. Collaboration will define creator partners, and brands must empower the creator to tell the story through their lens. Brands like E.L.F. BEAUTY succeed by embracing a "culture-first" approach and allowing the creator to shine, such as supporting Oliver Widger’s ocean sailing journey by supplying real value (Pringles, cat food, and sunscreen) without making the brand the sole "hero."
The connected commerce mentality requires authenticity, and follower count does not matter anymore. Instead, content strategy selection should prioritize: who consumers relate to, whether they trust the creator, and if the content is culturally relevant.
3. Blending Organic and Paid Strategies:
A major shift is the blending of organic and paid strategies, moving beyond just measuring last-click revenue. Partnership ads from creators are becoming the highest-performing content format because they are perceived as natively appropriate rather than "brand-forced creative." Forward-looking brands are leveraging the native toggle features on platforms, finding that the native usage works best, even when declaring paid content.
The Mandate for Authenticity and Substance
As consumers are flooded with content, brands are pressured to maintain a distinct voice while delivering verifiable results.
1. Cultivating Community as Currency:
Organic community and social engagement are the top non-negotiables for both breakout and mid-sized brands seeking retail placement. Retailers use metrics like follower counts, authentic consumer reviews, and high levels of comments and shares to identify brands with breakout potential. Community cannot be purchased; brands must consistently invest, be transparent, and communicate shared values. Brands must lean into reflecting community values through content creation.
2. Sticking to the "Third Rail":
To stand out, brands must have a distinct point of view and a long-term vision. They must know what to avoid—their "3rd rail"—and dismiss what insults their "soul." Being average "will never work. Period. Be extraordinary." An example of a brand maintaining cultural authenticity is SARELLY, which celebrates Latin identity by transforming Latin cultural references into high-performance products, such as the "Long Cow Lashes" mascara.
3. Substance Over Style:
Retailers are focusing on the "scientification" of beauty, prioritizing proven product benefits over unique visuals alone. They demand clinical validation, especially as the Beauty and Wellness sectors converge. For instance, Lion Pose is dedicated to clinically testing every product across all Fitzpatrick skin tones, setting a new industry standard for inclusivity and efficacy. Brands like VEDIC LAB combine ancient Ayurvedic science with Swiss biotechnology to provide clinically superior results, addressing issues like stress-related hair loss and skin aging.
Operationalizing Resilience: From Buzz to Business
To successfully scale the products sold through creative partnerships, brands must master operational readiness and financial rigor.
1. Retail Readiness and Scaling:
Proven product demand is the #1 signal for a brand being ready to scale in retail. Retailers look for consistent sales data like repeat purchase rates, order growth, and waitlists. A key mistake flagged by retailers is the lack of operational readiness and expanding distribution too broad, too early, which risks weakening buyer relationships or diluting the brand’s point of difference. Scaling should be done thoughtfully and carefully to avoid amplifying mistakes.
2. Supply Chain and Post-Purchase Trust:
Strong sell-in to retailers requires strong supply chain rigor. Brands must assess their post-purchase experience and ensure transparency in messaging and physical delivery to build consumer trust for long-term sustainable growth. Furthermore, brands must strategically plan their distribution and fulfillment; for example, leveraging 3PLs (Third-Party Logistics) can provide volume-based shipping discounts and crucial knowledge regarding compliance, such as FDA guidelines.
3. Financial Discipline:
Buyers and investors are now less risk tolerant and highly focused on profitability and structural soundness. Brands must reliably explain their profitability and ensure expenditures tie back into their financials. This requires detailed understanding of sales and contribution margin by SKU, customer, and channel, especially for brands expanding into omnichannel retail.
Creative partnerships are no longer optional for beauty brands; they are the essential mechanism for creating the authentic connection and social buzz required to penetrate the market and drive sales. However, this virality must be supported by a disciplined, resilient, and ready business infrastructure that can translate clicks and collaboration into profitable conversions.
A successful beauty brand in today's market operates like a symphony orchestra: the creators and partnerships are the charismatic soloists drawing the crowd, but the internal operations—the data rigor, the supply chain, and the financial preparation—must function as the perfectly tuned rhythm section to ensure the performance doesn't fall apart under the spotlight.
