TikTok, inclusive beauty, the US women’s gymnastics team: What do these seemingly disparate topics have in common? They are all part of Milani Cosmetics’ glow-up strategy. Launched by siblings Ralph Bijou and Laurie Minc in 2001, Milani Cosmetics is an affordable cosmetics brand that aims to provide the performance of luxury products at an accessible price point. Milani Cosmetics CEO Mary Van Praag told Inside Retail the company was valued at $200 million last July, and grew 30 per cent year-over-year, making it one of the fastest-growing mass brands in the color cosmetics space.For any business that has been around for over two decades, it can be difficult to retain relevance to the modern consumer, let alone grow profits. However, with the help of social media virality, consumer-conscious product development and a few “golden” marketing moments, Milani has cooked up the perfect recipe for a glow-up.Reintroducing Milani Cosmetics to a new audience The first step in the brand’s glow-up was to redefine and reintroduce the original mission statement to a new audience of consumers. “It started with just really understanding the DNA of the brand and modernizing it and making it more relevant,” Van Praag commented. As part of this, Van Praag redirected the company back to its original core focus on color cosmetics. “When I first got there, there was a whole plethora of innovation focused around skincare, but we hadn’t necessarily grown into the space that would allow us to launch into skincare,” she told Inside Retail. “We still had so much opportunity in color cosmetics, so we really refocused our architecture on our core hero items.”Hero items like the brand’s best-selling Make It Last setting spray, which was featured in the ‘Face Set. Mind Set.’ campaign led by Milani Cosmetics’ chief marketing officer Jeremy Lowenstein, and its Fruit Fetish lip oils which are often described as high-performing “dupes” of Dior. “We’re quality, prestige products at an accessible price point, especially through the outlets and [retail] partners that we have,” Van Praag said.Tapping into the consumers’ emotional connection to makeupVan Praag told Inside Retail that the brand is also working on developing its multicultural audience “to a point where they’re actually highly engaged and part of our community” through social media marketing. When Lowenstein took on the CMO role at Milani Cosmetics in July 2021, he had a mission, to “democratize” prestige beauty and make it inclusive. These were also the original tenets of the brand when it launched in 2001. “Everyone identified [that] Black women at the time were really the underserved consumer in mass [market] and that’s actually how Milani started,” Lowenstein said. He revealed that 45 per cent of Milani Cosmetics’ consumer base identifies as non-white, which prompted the brand to ensure that it was authentically representing consumers across the shade spectrum through its product imagery and social media content. Lowenstein recalled that the brand spent almost two years reshooting all of its brand content, reviewing product packaging and formulas to provide a more elevated and modernized look and feel.He elaborated that great marketing is a combination of “art and science” and relating to customers on an emotional level. At the end of the day, it is emotion that drives customers to do what they do, to use up a product, and to go back and buy several new shades of the same item. Milani’s medal-winning marketing strategyOne recent example of Milani Cosmetics’ authentic connection with its community is the ‘Face Set. Mind Set.’ campaign, which launched in June and featured several star female athletes, including Jordan Chiles from the US women’s gymnastics team, WNBA star Sabrina Ionescu, volleyball player Chiaka Ogbogu and weightlifting champion Mattie Rogers. While many brands are now working with female athletes on product launches and marketing campaigns, Milani was able to do so in a way that was highly relevant to its brand, since these sports women were able to demonstrate the performance power of its setting spray, which can last through hard-core training and competitions. Chiles, especially, was a vital and organic part of this campaign, Lowenstein explained. “When we approached Jordan about this opportunity, I’ve never heard someone say ‘Yes!’ so fast,” he said.Jordan and her older sister Jasmine, a makeup artist, were both longtime fans of the brand. As Lowenstein noted, it was one of the only affordable luxury brands with products that matched their skin tones. The partnership was a “natural fit” and demonstrated “the symbiotic relationship between the brand, the product, and the athlete(s)”.“We got to follow them along their training journey and when we shot the campaign, none of them were even going through the Olympic trials. So it was amazing to watch them and see how they performed [at the Olympics] and what it took them to get to that competitive level and how it [the makeup] played a part in their routine,” Lowenstein said. The fact that Chiles is now the proud owner of a gold medal certainly doesn’t hurt the brand’s image of being an award-winning, high-performance brand. TikTok was one of the main platforms used to spread the brand’s ‘Face Set. Mind Set.’ campaign and it helped Milani gain traction with Gen Z consumers.“You could say that TikTok really helped us. We launched on the platform in early 2020 with a TikTok challenge and found that the organic content continued to go viral,” Van Praag said. But above all else the CEO emphasized: “Your brand message is important in building the equity of the brand, but it’s oftentimes what these content creators, influencers and your own community are saying about your brand” that drives a brand’s relevancy and growth.