The Glossy Beauty Podcast: Daily Summaries Delivered

Tower 28 spent $200k on an interactive billboard. Was it worth it?

As competition in the beauty industry heats up, leaders are looking for new ways to stand out. “I've worked in beauty for 24 years now, and I don't think I've ever seen it more competitive than it is right now,” Amy Liu, CEO and founder of Tower28, told Glossy. “Maybe in five more years, I'll say that again. Who knows, right? But it feels like we are at a real peak right now, and a bubble of sorts.” In a lot of ways, the industry is moving away from speaking at consumers and leaning into a two-way dialogue — but what does that look like for out-of-home advertising? In June, Tower28 gave the industry one of its best examples: The company debuted a custom-made NYC billboard with a large button that spritzed passersby with its hero SOS Daily Skin Rescue Spray. The billboard was up for two weeks in June, located on Canal Street in SoHo. Developed with outdoor advertising agency MilkMoney, the billboard was a first-of-its-kind endeavor. “[The billboard] was very bespoke — and, actually, there were a lot of problems that ensued, which is normal anytime you do something that has never been done before,” Liu said. This included space limitations, technical challenges in the actual mister and storage of the product, and a liability issue that caused a last-minute location change. Luckily, Tower28 got lucky: The weather was hot and sticky – making a refreshing face mist especially alluring — and the city was busy and buzzing from its Knicks Championship win. The primary ingredient in Tower28’s SOS Daily Skin Rescue Spray is hypochlorous acid, an increasingly popular ingredient in the skin-care space because it’s safe and gentle, yet helps prevent acne, especially after sweating or working out. It's also great for conditions like eczema because it helps to reduce inflammation. Tower28’s SOS spray is a darling in the category and has been a hero for the brand since it launched in 2020. The brand sells various sizes of the popular mist, including a mini for $12, a 4-ounce bottle for $28 and a refill jug for $68. Overall, Liu estimates that Tower28 spent around $200,000 on the billboard investment — $150,000 to MilkMoney and another $50,000 on promotion, staffing and ancillary campaign. The billboard garnered industry attention and spritzed more than 188,000 New Yorkers during the two-week run. Liu sat down with Glossy Beauty Podcast host Lexy Lebsack to unpack the experience and investment, and discuss — knowing what she knows now — if she would do it again.

Gregg Renfrew is courting Gen Z with Beecee, but do young people care about clean beauty?

The beauty industry disruptor that brought clean beauty into the mainstream is back with a shiny new brand concept. Gregg Renfrew, the entrepreneur behind Beautycounter and Counter, is launching her third beauty brand on September 1 in an effort to reach consumers ages 14 to 30. The brand is called Beecee and, in a lot of ways, is an iteration of now-defunct Beautycounter. The line will launch direct-to-consumer with lip gloss, skin balm and face mist at premium price points. The company is currently in the midst of a community meet-up tour — hosting events with Renfrew in Nashville, New York, Chicago and Charleston, among other cities — to recruit and mobilize excited young brand advocates who can earn a commission on sales. But do young people care about clean beauty? “The answer is unequivocally yes,” Renfrew told Glossy. “I've actually been really surprised by how many of the young women with whom we've been interacting have said that this really matters to them.” In 2013, Renfrew launched Beautycounter, a first-of-its-kind beauty business built off ingredient transparency, independent sellers and ‘boots on the ground' industry advocacy in Washington, D.C. The concept struck a nerve and forever shifted the beauty industry toward better transparency. But Renfrew was very early to the "clean beauty" wave — something that, today, is very much table stakes for new brands. This has presented its own challenges for Renfrew’s ongoing success. “It's both a blessing and a curse to be the leader and the disruptor in any industry at any moment in time,” she said. “In some ways, I have the luxury now of coming back in through Counter and Beecee to see all the things I did well and all the things I didn't do well, of which there were many, and iterate on those models to do them better than I did before.” Beautycounter officially shuttered in 2024, giving Renfrew the opportunity to buy back her IP from the VC firm The Carlyle Group. Renfrew then parlayed her bestselling formulas and clean beauty mission into Counter, her brand launched DTC in 2025 to serve women 35 and older. Glossy Beauty podcast host Lexy Lebsack sat down with Renfrew to discuss Beecee, the future of clean beauty, how to best reach Gen Z and why the best days of specialty beauty retail are behind us.

What makes a successful pop-up? (RERUN)

To discuss what makes a successful retail pop-up, Glossy is joined by three powerhouse executives in today’s roundtable episode: Jacquelin Barrett, Patrick Ta Beauty svp of marketing; Matte Projects president Neda Whitney; and Michelle Lee, chief brand officer at Front Row Group, fractional CMO of Landing International and former editor-in-chief of Allure magazine.

How Supergoop CMO Lauren Weinberg is tackling Amazon and TikTokShop amid channel mix expansion

It’s tough to compete with Supergoop, the sunscreen startup that entered the market in 2006 and quickly became the industry darling before selling to private equity firm Blackstone in 2021. In many ways, the company created the modern sunscreen playbook by marketing it as skin care, not sun care. “[Supergoop started] with the mission of really transforming the SPF category, so that people wouldn't think of it as a seasonal thing,” Lauren Weinberg, chief marketing officer of Supergoop, told Glossy. “The way the brand did that was really by coming out with formulas that debunked, I would say, all the things that people didn't like about sunscreen. So, it wasn't sticky, it wasn't greasy, it didn't have an odor, and it could go as a primer underneath your makeup.” Today, Supergoop sells one unit of its cult-favorite Unseen Sunscreen every 16 seconds, but staying on top requires constant evolution, Weinberg told Glossy. For Supergoop, this has included evolving the company’s channel mix this year to better reach new and existing consumers. “Consumers don't really think about where they see and hear about brands,” Weinberg said. “One of the things I noticed when I came [into this role in February 2026] is that the way we were storytelling as a brand, or how we were communicating with consumers, was not really cohesive across all of our channels. So we've really been trying to focus on doing cohesive storytelling.” Small shifts this year have helped to grow sales through a more diversified channel mix. For example, Weinberg’s team is focused on promoting lesser-known SKUs on evolving platforms, such as TikTokShop, while launching its best-sellers across new channels, including Target in February and Amazon Premium starting in May. Weinberg joined Supergoop at the top of the year after more than two decades in marketing. Her CV includes six years at Yahoo, ending her tenure as VP of marketing, plus another six years at Square, where she was the global chief marketing officer. She held the role of CMO at Peloton before joining the Supergoop team five months ago. Glossy Beauty Podcast host Lexy Lebsack sat down with Weinberg to discuss everything mentioned above, plus the challenges of tackling Amazon in-house through a Premium storefront and entering mass retail at a prestige price point, and the power of emerging social channels and social commerce. The following conversation was recorded in front of a live audience at Glossy’s annual E-Commerce Summit in Miami on June 1.

How Nutrafol CEO Cindy Gustafson is reaching men, growing retention with tech and plotting expansion

Cindy Gustafson has checked off a laundry list of accomplishments during her first 18 months as CEO of Nutrafol. This includes an app launch designed to improve retention and a product release tailored to reach one of its smallest customer demographics in men over 50. These rollouts happened while she led the team toward double-digit growth during 2025, her first full year as CEO, on a path to soon reach $1 billion in annual sales. “You need a real commitment to delivering on something someone actually needs [in order to win this category],” Gustafson told host Lexy Lebsack. “We actually have quite a small portfolio of products, [unlike our competitor] brands that have hundreds and hundreds of SKUs. We are not that kind of a brand. We are not that kind of a business.” Instead, Gustafson has stayed hyper-focused on delivering on its main promise of improved hair growth. “We have been so fixated on really delivering against what a customer needs and what a customer is looking for, and staying very, very grounded in that,” she said. Gustafson is a veteran exec whose CV includes Weight Watchers, Bark, Mindshare and Unilever. She spent 18 months as chief marketing officer of Nutrafol before taking over the CEO role from Nutrafol’s co-founder Giorgos Tsetis after its Unilever acquisition. In today’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Gustafson unpacks her secret sauce for growth, how the supplement consumer has evolved and much more.

Inside Revlon’s comeback bet on fragrance with president Amber Garrison

How execs from Ulta Beauty, Tarte and Beekman 1802 are implementing AI into workflows

How are beauty and wellness business leaders actually using AI today? That was the question posed to three longtime industry executives on stage during Glossy’s annual E-Commerce Summit in Miami Beach earlier this month — and the answers may surprise you. For example, Jenna Manula Linares, vp of digital marketing and TikTok Shop at Tarte Cosmetics, has recently added 15-minute team check-ins at the end of each weekly meeting that require staffers to share how they used AI that week and whether or not it was successful. “We're creating a culture of experimentation,” she said. “So, what I challenge my teams to do each week is to use AI in a new or different way.” The team then tracks these challenges and results using Tarte’s internal AI program. Meanwhile, David Baker, chief revenue officer of the skin-care brand Beekman 1802, has found success in identifying early AI adopters within the brand and empowering them to learn new skills and own tentpole projects. “First and foremost, it's finding the people who have an interest in it, and giving them the room and space to play,” he said. Baker is teaching his team to think of AI as a colleague that works while the rest of the team is off the clock. “Finding and sourcing creators gets really hard, so we've built an agentic staffer. Her name is Zoe, and Zoe is designed to source [creators] and draft personalized outreach, so that we can find people who fit our ethos and fit our brand voice really, really well at scale, while we sleep,” he said. “AI has permeated every team and workflow we have at Tarte,” Linares said. “I'm constantly telling my team, if it takes you longer than 15 minutes to do something, there's a faster way, and you should learn and try to figure it out via AI.” Then there is Ulta Beauty, which rolled out one of the largest AI partnerships within beauty retail last month, with Google Gemini. The team has spent the past few weeks learning how its consumers actually use the new AI-powered features, which include an on-site and in-app chatbot. “We continue to find new data sets that we need to put into [the chatbot’s knowledge base, like] store locations, store hours — a lot of those things where customers are just asking generic questions,” said Josh Friedman, svp of digital and e-commerce at Ulta Beauty. “They're asking lots of questions about the brand, and we're seeing some really good use cases with our customer care agent, as well.” In today’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, host Lexy Lebsack takes listeners live on stage with Ulta Beauty’s Josh Friedman, Tarte’s Jenna Manula Linares and Beekman1802’s David Baker to learn about the actual impact of AI today.

UTA's Daniel Landver knows what makes an influencer brand work

Daniel Landver is the head of UTA's creators product group — a role most people may not even realize exists. While his job keeps him behind the scenes, Landver is behind some of the buzziest brand launches of the past decade. Think: Patrick Starrr's One/Size, Alex Cooper's Unwell (beverages), Mikayla Nogueira's POV Beauty and Alix Earle's recently launched Reale Actives, to name a few. Much has changed in the 10 years since Landver began working in the creator economy. During his conversation with co-host Sara Spruch-Feiner for the Glossy Beauty Podcast, he discusses how the creator-brand landscape has evolved since he first entered the space in 2015, what separates successful founder-creators from those who struggle and why, in an increasingly crowded market, product quality matters more than follower count.