In a rapidly evolving market where consumers are more digitally focused than ever, customers’ expectations are also shifting and demanding more.

Jennifer Weil, WWD’s European Beauty editor, sat down with Taylor Hamilton, founder and chief executive officer at Recom; Cristina Nuñez, cofounder and managing partner of True Beauty Ventures and Lisa Sequino, chief executive officer of Supergoop, to discuss how brands can be their most successful in this digital-first age.

“Whether it’s Gen Z customer in São Paulo or a Baby Boomer in Albuquerque, N.M., customers expect the entire journey, from discovery and education to consumption and replenishment, to be completely frictionless,” said Hamilton. “[Brands] needs to have a strategy to accommodate that need at each stage. This notion that channels are individually siloed doesn’t exist anymore. In today’s day and age, each channel is an individual act in a single play.”

Nuñez shared that across the True Beauty Ventures portfolio of brands with diversity in DNAs and consumer profiles, the most successful brands have “evolved thoughtfully and not reactively.” She said that brands that continue to home in on their brand identity and not chase trends but are still agile enough to meet consumers where they are is key.

“Digital platforms have transformed and removed traditional boundaries,” said Nuñez.

Seamlessly evolving a brand through doubling down on authenticity and cross-functional agility is a core strategy — with a prime example being the premium hair care brand K18, which was bought by Unilever in 2023. K18 rapidly grew its consumer base across “generations, channels and geographies,” Nunez said, while remaining true to its brand identity of being science-backed, biotech-driven hair care. K18 leveraged these core values and goals across salons, TikTok content and on the shelves in Sephora to drive the mission to its prospective customers.

“With Supergoop, sunscreen is such a growing category, it’s easy to get distracted to go for every single opportunity out there,” said Sequino. “But having the KPIs to drive a healthy and sustainable business is the core of what we do. Looking at KPIs on whether we’re acquiring customers efficiently. And asking, ‘What are our repeat buys and hero products?’ If something’s working, we lean in.” Moreover, Sequino said that fostering ownership across channels to allow mistakes with testing and learning is paramount.

With social commerce being a growing channel across platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Amazon, Hamilton said that capturing a viral moment and converting it to sales and revenue is top of mind. “It’s not easy to do because there’s a lot of friction when there’s a customer that is on one channel and can’t necessarily convert and then has to leave that channel to log in.”

Brands can mitigate such conversion issues by making sure that they have the systems in place to identify data in real time when these viral moments happen and leveraging Amazon as a fulfillment space for the consumer demand, he said.

Hamilton cautioned against brands that use DTC for exclusivity and newness with products. He shared a story where a brand created a huge nationwide campaign, including Super Bowl ads, but lost out on high-level conversion rates when viewers went on Amazon looking for new products but couldn’t find them. The brand then decided to launch its entire offering on Amazon to help drive consumer purchasing.

The main takeaway? “Content is king,” said Sequino. She shared that this year, Supergood has created five times the amount of content versus last year. “When you see something is successful, you want to jump on it and then execute it really well and track it so you can develop more of it. We have content being created 24/7; we have a team in Asia that creates it overnight for us and we have a huge ecosystem that creates the magic speaks volumes to the success of our products,” concluded Sequino.