Business of Fashion and global commerce accelerator Front Row gathered beauty founders, executives and investors at Kith Ivy in New York on 22 September for a leadership breakfast, held under Chatham House Rule. The discussion covered how content, the evolving channel mix, brand consistency and AI search are reshaping the path to purchase.

Front Row co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer Christopher Skinner and BoF content strategist Yasmine Dahlberg led the conversation. Attendees included leaders from Orveon, Revlon, Skinfix, Kulfi Beauty, Maude, Sulwhasoo and Be Now, as well as consumer investment firms Prelude Growth Partners and TSG Consumer Partners.

The market context

• USA prestige beauty sales rose 7% to $17.1 billion in the first half of 2026, according to Circana, with gains concentrated among digitally native brands that innovate fast and market sharply.
• Amazon has overtaken Walmart as the largest USA beauty retailer, according to Circana.
• TikTok Shop is now the fourth-largest USA health and beauty e-commerce retailer, according to NIQ, with more than $4.4 billion in sales last year.
• Sephora opened a storefront on TikTok Shop in September and is piloting an app in ChatGPT that uses beauty customer profiles to personalise product advice.

A recurring theme was that growth depends less on how many channels a brand invests in than on how clearly and consistently it shows up across each one, for shoppers and algorithms alike. “Consistency builds trust,” said Skinner. “When a customer discovers a product in one place, then goes to validate it somewhere else and the experience doesn’t match, that trust starts to fracture.”

Key insights from the discussion

• Build brand alignment across teams – As content volume grows, consistency can no longer sit with one person or team. Rina Yashayeva, Senior Vice President of Brand Strategy at Front Row, said: “Internally, teams are broken out by Amazon, Sephora and DTC, and they almost compete. But the consumer doesn’t think that way.”
• Evaluate content by engagement, not volume – Skinner cautioned against measuring content by scale, recommending that brands deepen engagement on existing assets by optimising them for their environment. In practice, that means testing variations side by side, tracking performance from click-through to add-to-cart and sale, and feeding the results into the next brief.
• Scaling distribution requires tailored content – Target’s new Beauty Studio is preparing to bring 90 brands into 600 stores, with 60 of those brands new to the retailer. “When brands enter a new retailer, that’s often the moment they realise they need more content,” said Yashayeva.
• Tailor product information to how customers search – Shoppers increasingly search by need, ingredient or concern rather than by brand. According to Yashayeva, roughly 90% of beauty searches on Amazon are non-branded, per NIQ, and Amazon titles have gone from 200 characters to 75. One attendee shared that their brand had redesigned its packaging around the keywords consumers search for.
• Turn AI search behaviour into a growth opportunity – Chris Murphy, Senior Vice President of Marketplaces and Partnerships at Front Row, argued that AI search is democratising the path to growth, as many AI shopping agents don’t favour scale and AI overviews now appear on most beauty and wellness searches on Google. “If you know how to communicate in the right way, across reviews, blog posts, images and content, it can level the playing field,” he said.

“Customers discover on social media, research on an AI platform, test at Sephora and maybe convert on Amazon, and that’s okay,” said Yashayeva. “What matters is that they chose your brand, and that you showed up consistently at every touchpoint.”

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