Most beauty brands waste their first year in beauty PR — not because PR doesn’t work, but because the strategy behind it is flawed from the start.
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Most beauty brands waste their first year in beauty PR — not because PR doesn’t work, but because the strategy behind it is flawed from the start.
The global cosmetics market is on track to surpass $580 billion by 2027 — a figure that signals not just growth, but saturation. Because for every brand that breaks through, dozens more quietly disappear. Which makes it all the more striking how many beauty brands, good ones, with credible formulations, considered branding, and a clear point of view, don’t make it past year two.
Not because the product wasn’t good enough.
Not because the market wasn’t there.
But because the strategy behind how they showed up simply didn’t hold.
In eleven years working in beauty PR, I’ve sat across from a particular kind of founder more times than I can count. Smart. Considered. Often deeply invested — emotionally and financially — in what they’ve built. The product is there. The ambition is there. The vision, in many cases, is genuinely compelling.
And almost without fail, they arrive at the same moment: just after their first PR retainer has run its course. Slightly disillusioned. A little shell-shocked. Wondering why, despite the investment, nothing materially shifted — no real traction, no meaningful cut-through, no sense of momentum.
The assumption is often that PR “didn’t work.”
But in reality, that’s almost never where the breakdown begins.
Having worked with brands at every stage — from kitchen-table indie launches to globally recognised names sitting on shelves at Sephora, one thing has become consistently clear: when first-year PR fails, it’s rarely about execution.
It starts much earlier. Before the agency is appointed. Before the first release is drafted. Before the brief is even properly formed.
And more often than not, it comes down to the same three misalignments, subtle at the start, but compounding quickly.
You hired PR before you had a story worth telling.
The brands that get the most from their PR investment – the ones who land the Vogue feature, the macro ambassador, the cultural moment – arrive with something the product alone can’t give them. They arrive with a perspective. A founder who has something to say about why this category needed disrupting.
A brand that knows exactly who it isn’t for. An aesthetic that makes a journalist reach out, rather than the other way around.
That’s the brief worth getting excited about. That’s where PR stops being a line item and starts being a lever.
The second thing that kills first-year PR relationships is timeline mismatch.
Mistake #2: Timeline Mismatch
Somewhere between signing the retainer and the six-week mark, a lot of founders quietly decide that PR isn’t working. Usually, they’re wrong. Almost always, they’re early.
Here’s a scene I’ve watched play out more times than I can count. A brand is six weeks from launch. They engage a PR agency. The product goes live, a handful of editorial placements land, and by month three the founder is disengaging – right when the media relationships we’d been building were about to deliver.
Earned media has a rhythm. You build the relationships before you need them. An editor doesn’t open your pitch and immediately file the story – she puts your name in a mental folder marked interesting, and six weeks later when she’s planning a feature on SPF innovation, yours is the number she calls.
That’s how it works. It’s a long game dressed up as a short one.
The third thing? Conflating press with strategy.
Mistake #3: Confusing Press with Strategy
Nobody says this enough, so I will: press is an output of strategy. It was never meant to be the strategy itself.
A lot of brands come to a PR agency wanting coverage. Which is fair – it’s in the name. But when a brand briefs us for “coverage” without a broader communications architecture behind it, we push back. Where does the coverage live within the brand’s world? What does it say to investors, to wholesale buyers, to potential brand partners? What story does it tell three years from now when someone Googles your brand name?
The beauty brands who build lasting market positions – the ones that become institutions – treat every media moment as a brick in a taller structure. They understand that the ELLE mention, the Byrdie write-up, the influencer partnership: they’re not wins to screenshot and move on from. They’re threads in a larger narrative that someone, somewhere, is reading in full.
In short...
Good PR doesn’t start with a pitch list. It starts with knowing what you’re building, how long you’re willing to build it, and what you want people to think when they finally find you.
That’s the thinking we bring to every brief at The Concierge Agency. Not just what gets you covered today, but what makes you worth covering forever.
If any of this is resonating, it probably means you’re ready for that conversation. Check in with us here.
