Key Takeaways:
Independent beauty brands are rewriting the rules of connected commerce, and they’re not doing this by outspending, but by outsmarting. At BeautyMatter’s NEXT50 Summit, Christopher Skinner, Chief Revenue Officer of Front Row, moderated a panel on “The Indie Advantage: Agility in a Connected Commerce World,” during which Nicola Tucker Gray of Kate McLeod, Connie Lo of Three Ships Beauty, and Rosie Jane Johnston of By Rosie Jane unpacked how clarity, consistency, and community drive performance across an increasingly fragmented retail ecosystem.
Tucker Gray described how refining brand messaging at Kate McLeod transformed business outcomes. “It’s always been this sort of dual messaging in our brand. One is the incredible efficacy of our pure plant butter ingredients and what they can do for your skin. But then there's also this deeper message, which is around somatic wellness, connecting with your body, creating a moment of self-care in that ritual,” she said. “We’re up 75% year over year just by sharpening our messaging system.” That clarity allowed the brand to attract the attention of micro-communities like long-distance runners. “They started using our Recovery Stone as an anti-chafe balm, creating pre-race rituals around it.”
For Lo, brand alignment and process underpin agility. “Up until that point, our messaging was confusing for our audience because they didn’t know what we stood for,” she said. “After we got clear on our purpose, [which was] to ensure everyone has agency over the ingredients they use, we built a shared brand guide. Consumers now meet us in one Three Ships universe.” That discipline extends to data-driven decision-making. “DTC is our testing ground,” she explained. “We use insights to inform what we launch in-store, like product sizes, bundles, and kits.”
Founder visibility has also proven a powerful growth lever. “Founder-led storytelling really builds trust and connection,” Lo continued. “Our founder ads had double the click-through rates and one-and-a-half times longer watch times. For new founders, try live shopping. It’s low budget, authentic, and works.”
Johnston, who launched By Rosie Jane in 2010, echoed the power of consistency. “When I launched, clean fragrance didn’t exist. Now, people don’t shop by prestige or mass; they shop by what’s convenient and trustworthy. If where we are showing up tells the same story, it builds trust.”
Being indie also means staying nimble. “We manufacture in-house, so we can tweak fast,” Johnston said. “We also listen to our community. We want their feedback, as their voices are the most important. It drives us forward.”
That agility extends to retail. By Rosie Jane’s Amazon storefront is now its third-largest channel. “Amazon used to be scary for beauty, full of knockoffs, but we built a visual, storytelling-driven storefront. It feels like an extension of our DTC. That’s what builds trust.”
Across the panel, the theme of “connected commerce” surfaced as less about channels and more about coherence. “You can’t have different stories for different platforms,” Tucker Gray emphasized. “Lead with story, as it all connects.” Lo agreed, adding that agility requires structure. “People think agility is chaos,” she said. “But process is what allows you to move faster, catch mistakes, and scale profitably.”
And for Johnston, connection itself is the point. “We’re a small indie team, everyone wears multiple hats. Marketing and sales are one now. Every touchpoint is shoppable. So the connection between those two ultimately has the same goal, which is to help people understand what they're getting from us, why we are different, why we’re special, and communicating that together.”
The indie advantage is all about strategic clarity. Independent brands succeed by weaving consistent storytelling through every channel, while maintaining operational discipline behind the scenes. Agility stems from structure, not spontaneity, allowing founders to pivot quickly and scale sustainably. Today, as the commerce landscape becomes increasingly intertwined, authenticity and community drive conversion far more than budgets ever could. By grounding innovation in process and purpose, indie beauty players prove they can move faster, listen closer, and build stronger consumer relationships than their larger, slower counterparts. Ultimately, agility is less about size and more about focus, story, and connection.
