By: Syed Haye
Syed Haye is a full-stack, hands-on marketing leader with over 15 years of experience scaling global and U.S.-based consumer brands across DTC and retail. Having held leadership roles at L’Oréal and Unilever, and served as a founding team CMO for HERbeauty and Neuvian Skincare, he brings a unique perspective from both sides of the beauty ecosystem. His expertise lies in building high-performance brand and growth systems from zero to scale, balancing creative clarity with commercial discipline.
Over the last decade, the direct-to-consumer (DTC) model has transformed how beauty brands are built. While global CPG companies have scaled with efficiency, it is founder-led startups, operating with constrained resources and sharp consumer instincts, that have consistently captured relevance, velocity, and loyalty in today’s fragmented market.
Despite billion-dollar balance sheets and decades of dominance, many legacy beauty companies remain fundamentally misaligned with DTC’s core principles. Intimacy, speed, and continuous feedback loops are often missing from traditional brand strategies. This gap is not caused by lack of resources, but by a deeply embedded culture that is slow to change.
The Structural Disconnect
In large CPG organizations, product development is a lengthy and multi-layered process. Innovation pipelines often take 18 to 24 months, moving through regional alignment, legal review, compliance, and stakeholder approvals. By the time a product finally hits the market, it may already feel outdated or overly diluted.
DTC brands do not operate within that luxury of time.
Digitally native brands are engineered for immediacy. They adapt daily to consumer feedback, measure performance in real time, and refine products based on actual use rather than projected trends. The feedback loop is short, actionable, and continuous.
Yet many global players still treat DTC like a digital version of retail. They invest in glossy websites, expand SKU counts too quickly, and launch broad campaigns that fail to engage the right audience.
According to McKinsey’s 2023 report on the state of beauty, fewer than 10 percent of global beauty CPGs have built profitable DTC businesses. In contrast, founder-led brands such as The Ordinary, Hero Cosmetics, and Drunk Elephant (before acquisition) found rapid success with streamlined product lines, focused messaging, and tight retention strategies. These brands consistently outperformed incumbents in areas like customer acquisition cost (CAC), lifetime value (LTV), and cultural relevance.
The Founder’s Advantage
Having built and launched multiple beauty startups, I have seen firsthand how the founder mindset changes everything. In a startup, every decision is tied to margin and mission. Product strategy, creative output, and channel selection must all drive both brand purpose and business performance.
With fewer stakeholders involved, decisions are faster and sharper. Messaging stays intact. Creative assets are produced with clarity rather than compromise. Most importantly, founder-led brands are constantly tuned into their audience.
In corporate settings, I had access to large budgets and global reach. In the startup world, I gained the advantage of speed, focus, and financial discipline. That discipline often outperforms scale.
The strongest DTC brands are not just creative or scrappy. They are rigorous. They know their unit economics, retention curves, and growth levers. They track metrics like contribution margin and blended CAC while maintaining a crystal-clear understanding of their customer journey.
What Big Beauty Often Gets Wrong
Across both corporate and startup environments, I have seen four repeated errors in how traditional players approach DTC:
- Disconnected storytelling. Campaigns are often beautiful but lack a direct tie to product benefits. DTC requires specific, benefit-led narratives that resonate instantly.
- Neglecting retention. Too much emphasis is placed on paid acquisition, while post-purchase experience and loyalty loops are underdeveloped.
- Platform confusion. There is often inconsistency between the DTC site, Amazon presence, and retailer.com pages, leading to pricing issues and fractured messaging.
- Weak digital teams. Many brands still rely on outside agencies for performance marketing and digital operations. Strong DTC brands build internal capability and own the learning curve.
Where the Market Is Going
Beauty’s next chapter will be driven by brands that understand each platform’s psychology, economics, and creative expectations. This is not just about selling across multiple channels. It is about designing consistent, high-converting brand experiences wherever the customer engages.
In 2023, Amazon accounted for over 41 percent of U.S. online beauty sales according to eMarketer. At the same time, customer acquisition costs on DTC platforms increased while trust declined. Meanwhile, TikTok emerged as the most influential discovery tool, with 75 percent of Gen Z beauty shoppers learning about new products via short-form video, according to NielsenIQ.
Winning brands will need to optimize across multiple fronts, including conversion, credibility, and consumer education. They must lead with product performance, build content systems that support full-funnel journeys, and deliver frictionless shopping across all environments.
Final Thought
The future of beauty will not belong to the loudest or largest brands. It will belong to the ones who listen better, adapt faster, and build with intentionality.
DTC is not just a channel. It is a way of thinking. A business model built on transparency, precision, and value creation. Founder-led brands did not just disrupt the industry. They revealed what was broken. The challenge now is for legacy brands to rewire not just their digital strategy, but their organizational DNA.
