[00:00:00] Phillip: Hello, and welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast at the intersection of culture and commerce. I’m Phillip.
[00:00:04] Brian: I’m Brian.
[00:00:06] Phillip: And today we’re asking the question, what makes a beauty product prestigious? Is it the ingredients? Is it the results that it produces for you? Brian, you know, I’m into beauty. You… Is it the price point? Is it the price that we’ve been taught to associate with quality? Maybe it’s all of the above. Milani is making the case that what’s inside is everything. And with prestige-quality formulas, mass prices, they’re part of a new generation that’s helping to drive through creation and through creators. And nineteen consecutive quarters can’t be wrong. And there’s a lot behind what’s driving that kind of growth. And our guest today has spent more than two decades building brands across beauty and beyond, from Aveda and Sally Hansen and Kopari to MeUndies, and now he’s helping to write Milani’s next chapter, where they’ve taken a cult-favorite blush to TikTok-first launches, and we’re gonna hear all about it today. He is the chief marketing officer at Milani Cosmetics. Jeremy Lowenstein, welcome to Future Commerce.
[00:01:08] Jeremy: Thank you for having me.
[00:01:09] Phillip: Thank you. What’s driving the growth? What do you think is catching lightning in a bottle for Milani right now?
[00:01:17] Jeremy: Yeah, I think, you know, we’re not a new brand. Milani is 25 years old, started in 2001 by a brother and sister who, like you said at the introduction, saw this opportunity to democratize prestige-quality formulas at accessible price points for a totally inclusive audience. Twenty-five years ago, there was no Fenty Beauty. Milani was really one of the first brands on the market to address skin tone, especially in the mass market. So I’ll jump to answer your question to twenty-five years later. We’re sort of at that intersection now where consumers are looking to be smarter in how they shop without compromising on performance and quality, while also looking for brands that meet their skin tone and undertone needs. And Milani is that brand and has always been that brand. So there hasn’t been a need to reinvent ourselves. We just continue to contemporize ourselves based on the consumer and the conversation today.
[00:02:21] Brian: Mhmm. So cool. Yeah. And I mean, I was kinda blown away by your recent campaign, What’s Inside Is Everything, and that just seems to reflect this twenty-five years of history. Tell us about the process behind this. How did you sort of come… I mean, it seems like this is consistent with your brands and your brand messaging for forever, but it’s a pretty unique campaign. How did you get to this point?
[00:02:49] Jeremy: Yeah. So I’ve been with Milani for about five and a half years at this point. The entire C-suite has been together really through this journey. And I think for us, it was about brand transformation, looking at how do you run a successful makeup brand, fixing the fundamentals, thinking about the categories and segments that we needed to play in, meaning winning in mascara, winning in foundation and lip color, which make up the largest portions of the makeup category, while also thinking about our brand messaging. So five years ago when I joined, I sort of recrystallized the brand ethos based on how Laurie and Ralph, the brother and sister, had imagined it, who continue to sit on our board. We reshot the whole brand to bring forward this sort of elevated look and feel for the brand, from our products, the ingredients and the performance, and the consumers that we were serving. Fast-forward sort of, like, two years into that journey, you know, I think everybody, every marketer, especially in beauty, started to lean in to the creator world and the TikTok world. And we all benefited from that in many ways, especially for Milani as an indie brand. You know, we were the number 10 player in mass color cosmetics. So, meaning, resources look different than if you’re part of a strategic. And where we started to benefit was these creators who are amplifying our message and being sort of picked up through TikTok, through organic virality, and really sharing what Milani stands for. That really put the brand on the map.
[00:04:23] Jeremy: We also started to lean into culture the same way other brands were doing it. So thinking about women in sports, then the nineties come back. We were one of the first makeup brands to sign female athletes. We actually had Jordan Chiles, Sabrina Ionescu, who are Olympians, and this is before they went to the Olympics. Then they helped us sort of bring our leading Make It Last Setting Spray to the masses and really telling them why it’s all about endurance and the product quality. And if it works for athletes, it works for the everyday athlete as well. We leaned into, like I said, the nineties culture. We had our Blur Out Primer made in Korea, and we capitalized on America’s Next Top Model, which was having its moment, and we shot this campaign of America’s Next Top Primer. All that being said, the brand was already moving the needle in conversion, and we’re in our place within the top 10 rank, moving up to the number nine to the number eight position. But about two years ago, like every marketer, sometimes you need to take a minute, hold the mirror up to yourself into the category and say, where are we winning? Where is there opportunity for change, and how do we continue to remain true to that brand? And when we did that, what we saw from a consumer perspective in the research we did was that all brands were leaning into the creator-influencer sort of component of the ecosystem, the same cultural conversations. Not a bad thing, but it lacked differentiation, and for a brand to have longevity…
[00:06:03] Jeremy: So sometimes this word “legacy brand” gets thrown around as a bad thing. Legacy to me, I’ve always said this, is a positive note. It means you can actually sort of sustain the test of time. And as a brand, you’re just getting bigger, and it just takes a minute to sometimes adapt. And so for us, we said, okay, if we’re going to continue our twenty-five-plus-year run and go beyond that, how do we make sure that consumers know what we stand for? How do we break through the clutter of what was out there around cultural conversation and make sure that it was relevant to the way consumers needed to think about the category and were shopping it? So with that being said, we said, let’s go back to our brand book again. I brought Laurie and Ralph back in and had conversations with them, always going back to why the brand exists. Because for me as a marketer, I’m a purist. I want to go back to what was the ethos, what was the DNA, because what got us here had a purpose. What gets us to the next chapter isn’t always the same thing that got us here, though. So those are, like, the tactics, the levers. So we thought about what makes Milani unique, and it was really our exceptionalism. We said, great. There’s, like… there is a nugget there. And how do we now unpack that? What is our exceptionalism with Milani? Well, it’s our quality, it’s our craftsmanship, it’s the ingredients, it’s the countries where we manufacture our products.
[00:07:23] Jeremy: Like, our products are developed and made in Italy, Korea, the US. So really the birthplace of makeup in Italy, the sort of leading technology in skincare comes out of Korea these days, and then obviously the US always leading in the categories. How do we now Milani-ize all of this and rethink how we show up? So with this baseline of exceptionalism, or really North Star, what would be an ongoing platform that Milani can sit on? And we came up with What’s Inside Is Everything, which is our consumer-facing… It’s not a one-off campaign. It is meant to really ground us as we think about our product and communication strategy. So What’s Inside Is Everything, again, layers in what’s inside our product. So those unique qualities that we bring to the market, while also celebrating the consumer, because we’re not here to help you change who you are. We’re here to help you reveal what you think is your best self. Like, that’s it. We’re not here to dictate trends to you. We’re here to tell you sort of what we see is trending. If you decide to adopt that, that’s fantastic. And we have the tools and techniques and products to get you there. So that’s how we landed on What’s Inside Is Everything, which coincided with the relaunch of our iconic Baked Blush collection.
[00:08:44] Phillip: I so appreciate you talking us through the mindset and how you got to What’s Inside Is Everything, because I think that’s often missed. What everybody looks at is the end result and the tactical output. Right? They see playing into cultural tastes or cultural currents, so they see the nineties, right, come back. They see the bringing back of a beloved product, right? They see some of these tactical examples of ways that they might be able to institute the same playbook. They don’t understand the thinking behind it. Right. Or they envisage it as a campaign.
[00:09:32] Jeremy: And that’s why I don’t call it a campaign, because people think of campaigns as a fleeting moment, and here’s a three-month thing that’s going out there. And even internally, I tell my team and the rest of the company, it’s a platform. It’s not a tagline. It’s a platform that enables the communication strategies to really take shape and bring sort of consistency to our messaging and recognizability to our consumer, especially as an indie brand.
[00:09:58] Phillip: How does What’s Inside Is Everything… How does… I believe you launched it earlier this year.
[00:10:03] Jeremy: In January. Correct.
[00:10:04] Phillip: In January. So how has that taken shape throughout the year? What is it? What did it look like earlier this year? How does it look going into holiday?
[00:10:12] Jeremy: Sure. So What’s Inside Is Everything is not just a digital communication platform. It is a comprehensive three-sixty brand platform. So how do we show up in store, online, and in person for experiences? And then, like I said, in our product communication. So, like I said, it coincided with the relaunch of our iconic Baked Blush, and there are a lot of brands today that have relaunched products. Brands do it for a multitude of reasons. It could be either ingredients are banned in certain countries, it could be ingredients are now discontinued, could be there are material changes to product performance that they’re making. It’s a heavy sort of task to undertake, from both a product development perspective and a consumer perspective, to relaunch something that is so fundamental, or a cornerstone of your brand. And Baked has been with Milani for almost ten years at this point and is something we’re recognized for, because it actually is, I think, the epitome of what we stand for around the quality and craftsmanship. It is made in Italy. It is handcrafted. So there are men and women who are sitting in our factories there with our supplier partners who are hand piping the formula onto terracotta tiles, baking them in an oven, hand dusting them off, and then actually putting them into the compacts. They’ve worked for our consumers because the formula is such that we load it with enough pigment that it shows up across all skin tones. Again, going back to why we exist as a brand.
[00:11:55] Jeremy: We decided to relaunch the product because I wanted to lean into this skincare trend, better-for-you ingredients that were taking shape within the makeup category, and not just, here’s marketing puffery. Like, what does it actually do for you? So the decision was made: how do we protect what’s working and enhance it for new consumers while bringing this new message out to the world? So we reformulated. The formula performs as good as, if not better than, our original. And we enhanced it with olive oil and grape leaf extracts that are skin nourishing. So putting those in there to tell that story of, this is why we’re coming out with a newly reformulated Baked, with new shades to enhance the portfolio. We launched our Baked bronzers, our Baked highlighters, and then with Ulta this past June, we extended to Baked blurring finishing powders. That is actually what brought What’s Inside Is Everything to market. And we did it with a video series from upper funnel, to really thinking about unpacking that phrase, so going deeper on the consumer and on the product, to mid funnel, lower funnel, talking about unearthing sort of the product messaging. But then offline, bringing that in store. So how we show up on our displays, or off-shelf displays in our retail partners, on our retail media investment, and then doing consumer experiences. We did a three-day pop-up in West Hollywood to allow consumers to experience Milani in a way they haven’t before.
[00:13:43] Jeremy: So we actually created a three-room series where consumers were invited in to the atelier, essentially, where they saw the Baked Blush product sitting on the terracotta tiles, museum style, where you can actually see terracotta all around you, with a video that explained how the product was made. Then from there, they went into another room where we had makeup artists who teach consumers how to best identify which shade of blush, bronzer, and highlighter were best for their skin tone and undertone, because not everyone understands how to actually shop that category. From there, we then took them into the world building of more of the emotional, sensorial piece of it. So the original film was meant to mimic as if you were in the Italian countryside, which is where our product is made, and you had these olive trees that were inside the room. But the emotional piece was, again, What’s Inside Is Everything is affirmations for us. So we had consumers come in, and they were given prompts on little note cards, and they had to respond to them. And then they went to the olive tree, which I started calling the giving tree, and they would hang their note, and then they would take one down. So you had this sort of community building as well. [unclear] They’re, like, receiving something from someone else who they do not know, while also giving something back, so that whoever comes through that experience can receive in the same manner.
[00:15:12] Brian: Brick-and-mortar shopping is… It’s not going away. It’s evolving, but you’re highly invested in pop-ups and activations. And I’m curious, like, how are you seeing a pop-up and its role in that touch and feel versus, like, the sort of walk-in, maybe more habit-formed type in-person activity?
[00:15:37] Jeremy: So let me start with retail first and then what the role of pop-ups are. So, you know, we’re in 25,000-plus stores. One of the biggest challenges of US mass retail, because other countries… like, we’re in the UK, we’re in Australia, retail plays a little bit differently there. We don’t have the benefit of testers, product testers. You go into Sephora, you can go touch and feel the formula. There are a limited number of doors, so you don’t have to deal with… If you’re going to replace those testers, it’s not as expensive. When you’re replacing testers for 400-plus products in 25,000-plus doors, that becomes a big expense and also laborious at the retailer level. So you’re sort of challenged with selling your product without being able to touch and feel it. So you’re essentially creating a candy shop. So being able to see the color, see the formula, without actually being able to touch it before you leave, which is also a cost of investment then. At that point, you’re at an under-$16 price point. So there’s a little bit more forgiveness of, I’ll buy this. If it doesn’t work for me, I can return it, or, you know, I just… It wasn’t a $55 experience. So with that being said, of the barriers in a mass retailer, there comes the pop-up.
[00:16:53] Jeremy: So, the two types of experience. So there’s the brand experience that we talked about in West Hollywood, which we replicated for Ulta Beauty World. Then we did it in London. We did it in Australia. That was world building. That was, come touch and feel the product. Then there’s the Shelby Ann piece of it. So Shelby Ann, if you don’t know her, is a beauty creator who is a trained wedding makeup artist. That is her full-time job. And she is a ride-or-die for drugstore mass makeup. It is a relationship that my team has cultivated for well over two or three years at this point. So it is an authentic relationship. It’s something like… she started talking about the brand, we sent her product, and it just goes back and forth. That is the important piece. Influencer marketing is grounded in an authentic relationship with the brand. Fast-forward to about a year and a half ago, two years ago, we launched our Cheek Kiss Cream Bronzers, made in Korea. She did a multi-brand video about products she loves, or used in one of her makeup routines, and our bronzer, cream bronzer, was featured. It sent our product skyrocketing in sales. We didn’t know she was going to use it. She kept going back to it, and it just has become this organically viral and fast-growing product of ours, mostly in part due to her, and other influencers have picked it up since then.
[00:18:25] Jeremy: We wanted to think about, how do we bring the Milani world and the Shelby Ann world together? One of her favorite shades is called Spilling Tea. So I’m like, great. How do… So my team, like, riffed off of that idea, and we dug deeper with her and with, you know, the local Atlanta area and found a coffee and tea shop and did a takeover for a weekend. And Shelby Ann came, and we invited consumers and said, like, this is your chance to, like, experience the brand. And then subsequently we said, come and show up. You may want a chance to come to a makeup artist class taught by Shelby Ann. And so it was… it’s like the Wonka golden ticket style. So we did that, and then we held a, you know, a makeup class taught by Shelby Ann, where we had, you know, dozens of consumers and makeup artists there to learn her craft through the lens of Milani product. So it was a naturally organic partnership between us and Shelby Ann that we continue to be appreciative for and want to continue to lean in with.
[00:19:34] Phillip: I think that, to me…
[00:19:35] Jeremy: Major props to my team. I have one of the best teams in the market. Like, they are fantastic. They have, like… it’s like ear to the ground, finger on the pulse, conversation going. They are what makes this engine run.
[00:19:47] Phillip: And to build on that too, it’s not just creating your own world. It’s participating in worlds that other people are building and then co-creating together.
[00:19:56] Jeremy: Correct. And it’s finding the worlds that align with your brand’s values, purpose, and sort of distinct properties. So it’s like, again, they work well together.
[00:20:09] Phillip: Yeah. It’s something we have been talking about for years, Brian. We wrote this book called The Multiplayer Brand many years ago, talking about a coming time where, you know, the… not just technology, but the desire among people to no longer just take what was given to them in the world, but for them to exercise their will upon the world around them. You know, we… So many people have been raised in an environment where things are collaborative now, and we want to collaborate with everything around us. We can also, you know, exercise our will through social media and get brands to change campaigns. Why not… Why can’t we have brands co-create with us? And we’re starting to see glimpses of that everywhere, not just in UGC. Right? It’s actually in experiences, and that we bring into the real world. It’s the products that they co-create together beyond collabs. It’s like, how do we actually shape what brand and experience mean together? I think it’s a really good example of this.
[00:21:11] Jeremy: And I think, I think to your point, to build on it, is I think there was a time where sometimes brands were getting lost in the co-creation, and they can sometimes defer to who they’re collaborating with to reshape their brand identity. And I think that was part of, like, the holding the mirror up again a couple of years ago, is brands have to sort of stand the test of time. So it’s the yes-and. Yes, co-collaborate and build with partners, whether that’s a creator or another brand, like you see brand collaborations happening all the time, but know who you are as a brand, what world you’re creating, because ultimately you still have to be able to stand on your own. So how do you find the right partner where you’re building together with the right purpose in front of you?
[00:22:06] Brian: You said it earlier, it’s a relationship. And relationships where you’re completely absorbed by the other person are actually not a good relationship.
[00:22:16] Phillip: Not healthy. It’s not healthy.
[00:22:18] Jeremy: It’s like, look, you look at these brands, like I said, and you said, I’ve been in this industry for twenty-five years now, and I’ve worked on celebrity brands, and I’ve worked on brands that have celebrity endorsements. And it’s, you know, there’s always… and those can be influencers today. They’re basically another version of a celebrity. Does the face of the brand eclipse the brand itself? And then what do you stand for?
[00:22:41] Phillip: We just did a report on celebrity and creator brands, 600,000 public reviews that we analyzed, and, you know, we… You’d be surprised. I mean, you wouldn’t be surprised, Jeremy. You’ve been doing this a long time. But I think many folks who actually work in the industry would be surprised at how little the creator has to do with their perspective and outlook of the product if the product doesn’t actually serve them directly. Like, the halo of the creator doesn’t necessarily always extend to the product experience. I think product comes first. Right?
[00:23:16] Brian: Proof of work is so essential right now with AI. And…
[00:23:19] Jeremy: Yes. Exactly. Like, it is real.
[00:23:21] Brian: Yeah. So we… We’ve been tracking this trend for a while now. It’s interesting. You sell in, like, 25,000 stores. And so how does the sort of shape of the reformulated Baked Blush and new packaging and everything, and this sort of, like, incredibly hands-on campaign that shows, like, the… this proof of work all the way through world building, how does that make its way into these 25,000 stores? Because that’s… I think that there’s a translation piece that’s required, or an extension piece that’s required, when you’re in so many retail locations.
[00:23:57] Jeremy: Yeah. I think sometimes, you know, it’s hard to put yourself in… remember yourself as a consumer, but when you’re shopping any store, that work that you’re seeing there is done a year to eighteen months in advance. So there’s a lot of preplanning and bringing your retail partners along the journey. So as I was going through with my team this sort of, I’m gonna call it, a brand self-reflection as well as industry reflection, I would bring my retail merchants along that journey to share with them what I’m uncovering, and then what am I doing with the information, and how does that shape Milani going forward. So as we were thinking about the relaunch of Baked Blush, that then started to take shape in the off-shelf display animation. So when she or he is in store, and you’re going to the beauty department, and you see it, like, these big corrugated end caps or sidekicks, depending on the retailer, it would have similar messaging that I anticipated bringing into brand films, as well as other experiences. So it created a cohesive universe. I think we take for granted, like I said, our work as marketers, especially in the makeup space. We start our product development eighteen months in advance. Like, I’m working on 2029 right now. So it is starting to think this far in advance of, once the product comes to market, how will that messaging then play across all the consumer touchpoints, all through this lens of exceptionalism, like I said, our North Star, but What’s Inside Is Everything. And it can sort of adapt as we get closer and closer to artwork release dates, content release dates, briefing for influencers. But again, it’s about building that consistency of messaging, so it feels like a brand world.
[00:25:54] Phillip: I think the question too is that in retail, you’re reaching all of the audiences. Right? Whereas as you’re, you know, beginning to… I don’t wanna say experiment… as you’re cementing your new audiences and you’re growing into things like TikTok Shop, I would assume, and maybe I’m assuming wrong, that you’re reaching very specific demographics and psychographics in something like a TikTok Shop. How does that play out, and how are you thinking about, you know, What’s Inside Is Everything and how it shows up at, say, something like TikTok Shop?
[00:26:30] Jeremy: Sure. So, you know, like I said, Milani is an indie brand. So we are the… And when I say that, it means our brand awareness is low relative to the other top 10 brands in mass color, and we’re the only independently owned. Everyone else is part of a strategic or a multinational. Like, we’re owned by private equity, and we’re a standalone brand. Why I say that is it requires us to be sort of maniacally focused on what products we want to support and what consumers we’re going to go after. And to your point, we’re still a mass brand. So we are touching the 25,000-plus doors that we’re in and the millions of consumers that shop them. And while, yes, I would love everybody to buy Milani, the opportunity for me as a brand is, who’s the core? Who are we going after? Who shares a similar mindset about the category and where they are in their personal makeup journey? So Milani’s core consumer is, I hate to say this, like the elder millennial, because it’s not about the generation. It is about where they are, like I said, in their life stage. And Gen Z will also eventually become a 38-year-old. So why I say that is the typical 38-year-old average-age female customer is someone who is making more discerning choices about their sort of product selection and purchases. They typically are now well into whatever their career is, so they have a little bit of a higher level of disposable income.
[00:28:18] Jeremy: And they also most likely, depending on where you live, may be married with a family or starting that family journey. Why that’s important for us as a brand is, what does Milani offer to them that’s different than everybody else? So it goes back to our brand proposition. We are all about the quality, craftsmanship, and performance without having to sort of break the bank. So you’re making smart, discerning choices for products that offer multiple benefits. They all have great either skincare ingredients, nourishing hair ingredients for lashes. So they are working harder for you, and for that consumer, they are getting more out of it. For those who are looking for the right products with pigment that show up on their skin tone, we offer, like, 25 shades of Skin Tint Stick, 45 shades of a foundation, eight shades of Baked Blushes. So we have something for everybody, and we’re never leaving you behind. So we are meeting the consumer at the moment where she or he is in their life stage. So for us, it’s about being focused on that person while still welcoming everybody else into the brand, because they will either graduate into it, or maybe they’re going to come down from the prestige market and say, hey, we don’t want to spend, you know, $55 or whatever it is on a skin tint stick. We want to spend the $16 that it is for Milani, and we know we’re getting the same great product and performance.
[00:29:49] Brian: It’s incredible. You know, I think about you… I wanna kinda get back to the social angle. It seems like what you’ve done is a very hands-on thing. It’s obviously… It’s something that goes on you. You’ve sort of crafted this very in-person angle, being in shops, 25,000 stores, build… You know, creating and making your products in Italy and showing the process. But you’ve absolutely crushed it on social and on TikTok. And you… I think there were… We were reading some stat about how your tubing mascara…
[00:30:29] Jeremy: Yeah. We prelaunched it on TikTok Shop. Yeah.
[00:30:31] Brian: Yeah. Yeah. Just absolutely unreal results with that. Yeah. I mean, like, the first two weeks, you beat your sales goals by a lot. And so are… Do you see yourself sort of as a social-first brand now? Like, is that sort of the… so is that where it’s heading?
[00:30:47] Jeremy: Yeah. I don’t know if it’s, like, where we’re heading. I think every brand is by default social first, but I think that this… like, well, let’s define social now.
[00:30:59] Brian: I like that.
[00:31:00] Jeremy: Where does CTV play in that mix? To me, it’s like, what screen are you on, really? So it becomes, like, a screen-first launch. I think we do play. Yes, we play on TikTok, TikTok Shop, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, within the Google suite. So we’re kind of all there. I think it’s about what role do each of those channels play in the discovery of the brand. So to go back to your other question around why TikTok Shop again: TikTok, if you go ask them, they have the most diverse audience. And that’s true because, again, [unclear] launched and really took off. So everyone’s sitting in their houses during COVID, and you’re looking for entertainment. But I think for us, it’s how do you use the platform? And, like I said, what role? Pinterest is about inspiration. Instagram is product education from the brand point of view, mostly. TikTok can be education or edutainment. And where does the brand have a voice? Where do their creators, influencers, affiliates have a voice? And it’s about being mindful as you bring those messages to market. There’s… I don’t know, I probably get, like, flak for saying it. Everyone’s like, oh, the funnel is dead. The funnel is not dead. The funnel just looks different. You know, I always describe it to my team. Like, it’s basically a piece of string that looks like spaghetti now, and it takes you all over the place. You’re still touching the consumer somewhere. You just have to touch them more often to get into their consideration set. So that way, when they go to the store, at least they have an inkling of who you are as a brand, what makes you different. So when they’re making choices, you’re at least part of that consideration set.
[00:32:57] Phillip: But you mentioned CTV, and you bring up such a good point, because I’ve thought of CTV, or I’ve heard, you know, folks like yourself sitting in your sort of seat talking about CTV as both top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel, you know, activity. I’m curious how you see it for the brand and what type of, you know, that works in your… across other types of investments, because I have to imagine that your model would be very different to something like a Wayfair’s approach, where there’s a long consideration and planning in that cycle. Right? Although people in beauty, I think, it’s probably safe to say there’s an irrational consumption, because you’re always in pursuit of improving the way you look. You’re always in pursuit of…
[00:33:54] Jeremy: That’s why beauty is recession proof.
[00:33:56] Phillip: Right. For sure. So I’m curious how you see that and how it ties into all of your other channel investments.
[00:34:03] Jeremy: Yeah, you are right. CTV does play upper and bottom of funnel. It depends on what platform you’re using and how you design the content. Same thing… you think about, like, TikTok Shop. Everyone thinks it’s net new. It’s basically QVC on steroids. And CTV, we’ve used both ways. We’ve done tests through Amazon streaming TV, where you put the QR code and it’s about shop now. So it’s there, and, you know, at that point the messaging is really about product benefits. So you’re now really selling, versus upper funnel. So, like, our What’s Inside Is Everything, our Baked campaign, we have more emotional content that is bringing you into our brand world, and then eventually we can start retargeting you and saying, okay, now you’ve experienced this, let me tell you more about the product. So it is all about, where does it play within your own brand’s media mix, and what’s the goal? How are you measuring success? And I, you know, I’m very open with my team. I think marketers’ jobs… you know, some marketers will say we’re here for the creative, and, like, no, no, we’re here for the growth. Like, this is what our job… we are…
[00:35:15] Jeremy: We are tasked with growing a brand financially. We just play it in different ways, because it takes time to build brand, yet there are some things that we can drive immediacy and conversion. So with every marketing tool we are going to put to market, my team is tasked with, how are we measuring it? What will it do for us? CTV has a little bit of a longer road, because you’re building the brand world, the identity, like, bringing them in. Whereas something that’s going to be conversion oriented, I’m going to measure on ROAS. So how effective is it? Ultimately, what a brand should see is the more you are spending upper funnel, it should drive efficiency down, because if all you’re doing is driving a sort of bottom of funnel… Consumers don’t know who you are. You’re constantly educating them, because you have to convince them why you are better than, you know, brand Y. So I think it’s about how do you use it? Where are you in your journey as a brand, and where are you with your consumer in awareness?
[00:36:19] Brian: You know, that’s a good point. And, you know, you’re an indie brand, but you’re in a lot of places. You do have quite a lot of…
[00:36:27] Jeremy: We have our scale.
[00:36:28] Brian: Your scale. You have scale. And, you know, you have a price point that sort of puts you competitive with sort of mass-market brands, but you sort of have the reputation and the quality of being a prestige brand. And I think this is a really good point you’re bringing up. Like, this is why it’s so important to invest in top of… Yeah. You have to, you have to…
[00:36:51] Jeremy: [unclear] So there’s… Yeah. It’s easy. We all talk about this in the category. It’s like, it’s easy to start a brand in beauty. It’s hard to stay in it.
[00:37:02] Phillip: Gosh, that’s…
[00:37:03] Brian: That’s the quote.
[00:37:04] Phillip: That’s a clip right there. That’s… I don’t think I’ve heard that. I’m not in the beauty space, but I… That tracks. Something that we hear a lot, Jeremy, is this… there’s extreme ends. It’s like, brand building is something that’s almost impossible to do today, because everybody’s so direct-response focused, and there’s some performance marketing that happens. You sort of have to abdicate the performance marketing, direct response angle altogether to build a brand in 2026. It’s almost this… You disagree?
[00:37:37] Jeremy: I also… I’ve… you’ve talked about sort of my career. I’ve worked on brands that are pure-play D2C, and I fundamentally hate the phrase “performance marketing,” because as marketers, we all got addicted to ROAS and last-click attribution, my favorite, sitting here with you guys. Everything that marketers do has to perform. That’s why I go back to, what are you tasking it to do? So an off-shelf display sitting in a Target or an Ulta has to perform. It has to sell product. The goal is sell-through there. When you think about a, like I said, a CTV that’s about brand world building, it has to perform. It has to be able to scale. So how does that thing start to build resonance and bring down CPMs so it can touch more of the consumer you’re going after, that ultimately drives efficiency to the mid funnel, which is all about click-through or view-through rates? And then ultimately down to the lower funnel that maybe is sitting on an Ulta.com to drive conversion. So… but performance also has to happen. And we talked about our in-person experience. Well, how do you measure that?
[00:38:55] Brian: How do you track it?
[00:38:56] Jeremy: Right. So we talk about that. It’s like, okay, I calculate how many people we think we can get through an experience in an hour. How many hours are we going to be open? Then at the end of the day, did we get the people there? Was there enough sort of guerrilla-style marketing to get local consumers to line up around the block, which we had, to come in and touch Milani? How many creators came when we invited… was it, like, 150 creators? How many of them showed up? How many editors came? How many pieces of coverage did you get? What was the earned media value? All of that works together to create consumption and ultimately growth. So I go back to: every piece of marketing has to perform. It’s just what kind of performance are you tasking it to do?
[00:39:45] Phillip: Do you believe, then, with all of your experience, that a brand that begins pure-play ecommerce D2C and, you know, is performance-marketing bound can make the leap?
[00:39:57] Jeremy: Yes. Yeah. Yes. Because I think consumers are not sort of myopic in how they shop. I don’t… maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t believe there are consumers who only shop on Amazon and never walk into a store. Consumers, people, humans by nature are tactile. They want to touch, feel, interact, both with product and people. So, you know, there was always… there was conversation when sort of D2C was in its hypergrowth mode of, this is the death of the store. But the opposite: stores just had to evolve to, like, what are they becoming? Are they showrooms? Are they experiences? You know, what other things are you getting by going in there? So I do believe that pure-play D2C brands can and should make the leap to in person, whether it’s, you know, wholesale distribution. It expands your addressable market. It allows consumers to experience you in new ways. And we see that with a lot of DTC brands now, because it becomes expensive to buy the consumer. At some point, you got to reach them in new ways.
[00:41:16] Phillip: I think the thing is buying them over and over, Brian, because what we hear is this: you’re not just acquiring them anymore into your own .com. You also wind up reacquiring them in retail media. You’re reacquiring them through CTV.
[00:41:32] Jeremy: Are you double paying?
[00:41:33] Phillip: You’re triple paying, right?
[00:41:34] Jeremy: I don’t see… you know, as a brand, like, look, we’re an omnichannel brand. We have our own D2C. We’re on Amazon, Ulta, Walmart, Target, Walgreens, CVS, Meijer. I can see what I’m converting on D2C. Ulta is not sending me their consumer list, so I can’t necessarily always tell, have I double paid? Yeah. You do all the lookalike building, you know, on the media. But, you know, Ulta, Walmart, Target also have their own media engines. So to your point, are we double, triple, quadruple paying for the same consumer? But ultimately, we just want to bring the most number of people into the experience. Milani has been a great success story, and, you know, we say internally, like, we’re feeling like we’re just getting started. You know, we’ve seen our rank grow. We are now the stronghold number seven brand. So in five years, we’ve doubled our business. We’ve held strong at going from number 10 to number seven, and we have the ambition of doubling our business again in three years. So we are a contender, and we are a challenger brand. It’s like… I don’t know if you see it in the background, it’s the Believe sign, à la Ted Lasso. Mary van Praag, who’s our CEO and someone I’ve had the privilege of working with in my prior days at Coty… We all sort of, like, we started together on this journey during COVID, and Ted Lasso had just sort of made its debut, and we all were like, there’s a there there in Jason’s messaging through his character. And “believe” is something we just continue to rally around. And it’s, like, in our offices, it’s in our conference room, and we just keep marching together with sort of this single-minded approach of what we want to accomplish.
[00:43:25] Phillip: Well, I was going to ask you, you know, what all has to be true in the next three years to double? Like, what environmentally has to be true? What has to be true about creators and retail and beauty and all the rest? But it sounds like belief. You have to believe that you can do it. And that has to come first. Clarity of vision and conviction, I think, has to start internally first.
[00:43:49] Jeremy: I agree. Clarity of conviction, purpose, unique proposition that you’re bringing to the consumer, and really understanding what will get you to that next chapter. And it is, like I said earlier, the partnerships with our retailers. While we’re in 25,000 doors, there’s always more space to be had in them, bringing to market the right innovation at the right time with the right messaging to meet the consumer where they are in their journey. And then build those relationships. Like, community matters, both at the consumer level or the influencer level. It is one big ecosystem. And I think for marketers out there, we have a really hard job. It is… you have to be comfortable living in the gray, be open to taking risk, and just learning along the journey, because you’re not going to get everything right. Everything comes with, what have you learned, and what do you do next? Because there will always just be tomorrow. And, you know, ultimately you get some sort of forgiveness from consumers if you sometimes make a misstep. But the goal, as long as you have the one goal in mind of what you’re trying to achieve… And I tell my team that every day. It’s like, guys, you are living and breathing this, and the voice of… and to the consumer. So let’s just keep going forward.
[00:45:09] Phillip: Yeah. We talk about that at our summit, Jeremy, which you should come by. We’d love to have you. There’s the… At the very top is vision. You have to have clarity of vision, but you can’t set appropriate goals without knowing where you’re headed. And I think you have to be able to communicate that. Now more than ever, you know, you’re not just communicating… We didn’t even talk about AI, but, like, you’re not just communicating your vision to people in your organization anymore. Nowadays, people are trying to autopilot their organizations. And if you don’t have clarity of vision, I don’t know how you can communicate to anybody. Yeah. What an amazing time. I don’t think we’ve had a conversation like this in a little while. Would love to have you back.
[00:45:51] Jeremy: Love that.
[00:45:52] Phillip: Congrats on all the success, and wish you good luck for the future.
[00:45:55] Jeremy: Team effort. So I appreciate that.
[00:45:57] Phillip: Thanks, Jeremy. Jeremy Lowenstein. He’s got a big job over there at Milani, but he is the CMO at Milani Cosmetics. And he… Where can people find you? Are you on LinkedIn these days?
[00:46:09] Jeremy: I’m on LinkedIn. I’m there.
[00:46:10] Phillip: Dropping thought bombs over on LinkedIn?
[00:46:13] Jeremy: Yes, when I have the time. Yes, I try. I’m more about the personal connections. Like, I wanna have a…
[00:46:20] Phillip: I love that. And we are too. I appreciate you coming by, and thank you all for listening to this episode of Future Commerce and checking us out wherever you may be getting your podcasts. Leave us a star rating or review. It helps others to find this. And if you want to drop by our summit, it’s coming February 10 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Go to visions.futurecommerce.com to get your ticket. There’s still just a couple left. Would love to have you. And remember, commerce shapes the future because commerce is culture. We’ll see you next time.
