The beauty industry is optimised for speed: fast and monthly product cycles, algorithm-led content and shrinking attention spans have made virality a core KPI, resulting in most marketing and product strategies being built for hyper-visibility, not longevity.
Merit is taking a different approach. Since its 2021 debut, the brand has slowly introduced 18 products to its line-up — aligned with a customer-considered marketing strategy that is pacing innovation and prioritising customers’ emotional resonance over rapid-fire launches and market pressure. Its latest release, the Great Skin Double Cleanse, announced on Tuesday and marks the next product in its skincare offering.
Rather than rush to market with a cleanser a few months after its Great Skin Moisturiser launch last August, the brand chose to move at its own pace. When asked why, Merit Beauty’s chief marketing officer Aila Morin says: “We’re not chasing hype, so we don’t need to launch constantly just to generate momentum.” She adds that new products are only introduced when there’s a clear role in the customer’s routine and the product (spanning innovation, creative, marketing, retail and community) anchors a complete brand story.
The slower approach drives both new product development (NPD) and the brand’s marketing system. “Brand always comes above performance. It’s the most important part of the business,” says Morin. “Sentiment and resonance matter much more to me than impressions, numbers or a rapid KPI [key performance indicator].”
Additionally, the Great Skin Double Cleanse rollout reflects the brand’s insistence on detail as a way of reinforcing Merit’s broader storytelling. Model Alva Claire, featured in hero visuals for the brand’s skincare campaign, had been on Morin’s brand mood board since 2019 — a detail Morin says speaks to Merit’s long-lead creative planning. “It allows the campaign to feel both relevant and rooted,” she adds. Storytelling also blends what Morin says is “hi-fi and lo-fi”, content — polished, art-directed assets paired with softer, more accessible social content. “If you only publish lo-fi, you lose visual identity. If you only publish hi-fi, you lose relatability. Both are necessary.”
In an industry that often equates relevance with speed and success, how does Merit remain in control of its narrative?
The marketing model
Morin explains that Merit’s ability to scale while resisting the speedy norms of the industry, stems from a deliberate pacing strategy that shapes how the brand allocates resources, structures campaigns and engages its customer base. The approach appears to be working: to date, Merit has generated “well over” $100 million in revenue, with retail sales alone reaching that figure in 2023, the company confirmed.
Central to this is a tightly integrated team that spans product development, creative, marketing and customer experience. “In most brands, you’ll have separate marketing, product development and creative teams. Then, marketing takes the product and pushes it out to the respective channels,” says Morin.
“We don’t treat marketing like a secular funnel,” she continues. “Someone might discover us on Instagram, buy from Sephora, then join our email list six months later. It’s more like a conversation over time, and so we need to be agile and constantly assess the customer journey and needs — everything and everyone is together, all at the same time.” This unified structure allows campaigns to be built from the ground up with shared objectives, avoiding the disjointed handoffs between product development, creative and marketing typical in siloed teams and beauty brand structures.
Instagram content
This was the case with 2023’s Solo Shadow eyeshadow, whereby the name and brand positioning were finalised before the formula was complete. Morin explains that this approach — marketing first, then product — is now standard practice for the company. It ensures that each launch serves a broader narrative, instead of being treated as a standalone event.
As for Merit Beauty’s broader marketing strategy and allocation of marketing spend, Morin notes that instead of chasing short-term wins and reactively doubling down on spend at one trending platform or viral product surge, the team enforces a strict rule: no more than 30 per cent of spend goes to any one platform. “That discipline is absolute,” she says. “You can’t build a brand if you’re at the mercy of one algorithm.”
To balance performance with innovation in a bid to scale, Merit follows an 80-20 model. Eighty per cent of the marketing budget goes towards “sure bets”, like strategies (leveraging UGC to extend the brand’s content marketing world) and platforms (Instagram) they know deliver. The remaining 20 per cent is reserved for what Morin calls “absolutely insane bets”, aka experimental ideas with no guaranteed outcome because a slower product model doesn’t mean avoiding new formats altogether, she notes. “That’s how we learn, and we’re very comfortable with learning and failing.”
Take podcasts as an “insane” 2022 bet. Morin says the brand tested the format but saw little impact, largely because it lacked baseline awareness. “We were only a year old,” says Morin. Now, she’s more confident given the brand’s growth and awareness that this year’s return to podcasts will land. Additionally, she says, channel experimentation also acts as a built-in hedge against platform volatility and content fatigue.
Flexing brand muscle memory
Where many brands chase visibility, Merit focuses on memorability. Morin calls it “emotional recall”: the brand recognition that comes from repeated, consistent interaction across every customer touchpoint. “The goal isn’t just to be seen,” she says. “It’s to be remembered.” It also reduces what Morin describes as “identity friction”, in which customers know what to expect, regardless of the platform.
Consistency also extends into collaborations. Past campaign tie-ups with fashion labels like Tove, Proenza Schouler and Brooks Brothers weren’t designed as traffic-driving stunts, but high-touch moments to deepen loyalty. “We give these products to our existing customers,” says Morin. “It’s a gesture, not a gimmick.” The same applies to the skincare launch and collaboration with towel brand Baina.
The goal, Morin explains, is to build a moment that feels lived in and repeatable. “We’re trying to build rituals, not moments,” she says. “We want this to be the product someone actually finishes and reorders.”
This philosophy carries through to retail. When Merit entered Sephora in 2021, it declined the retailer’s standard chrome product fixtures and backlighting — a plug-and-play merchandising system provided to most new brands — and asked to install its own pale-wood fixtures. That kind of customisation isn’t the norm: Sephora typically reserves it for a small group of brands with strong aesthetics, clear positioning and enough equity to warrant the extra lift.
“At the beginning, it was a huge risk,” says Morin. “Wood? In a sea of chrome and black?” But the brand’s decision paid off. The warm, minimalist displays stood out, were widely photographed by shoppers and creators, and helped reinforce Merit’s identity within a highly standardised retail environment. It also helped justify another unconventional move: remaining exclusive to Sephora.
Still, maintaining that level of brand control within retail environments requires constant negotiation. “Retailers want newness and fast turns,” says Morin. “But we’re committed to slower launches and sustained storytelling.” That creates tension. A slower cadence can test retailer patience, especially when novelty drives footfall and sales. But for Merit, performance offers leverage. Flush Balm became Sephora’s top-selling blush within three weeks of launch in December 2024, Merit says. “When you launch number ones, you earn the ability to do things differently,” says Morin. (Sephora didn’t respond for comment in time for this article.)
However, Morin is well aware of the pressure to deliver constant newness to stay top of mind with buyers and merchandisers. “I totally understand why brands end up in a four to six-week loop,” she says. “If your core assortment isn’t growing, you have to propel NPD because you have no natural growth.” At Merit, core products drive the majority of business growth, largely because they receive the bulk of airtime and budget.
This dynamic helps sustain retail trust, even with a reduced launch calendar. “Retailers are a lot more inclined to give you leeway when your launches perform, and that earns you the ability to maintain a differentiated brand,” she says. It also gives the brand room to grow without exhausting shelf space. “We’ll never deviate from making simple routines that make it easier to get ready. But the truth is, we still don’t serve all the clients we can serve.”
The same negotiation plays out in creator partnerships. “Our customer is 30-plus, but the creator economy still skews young,” says Morin. Tone, humour and platform behaviours often feel mismatched. However, instead of compromising brand tone for viral reach, Merit has broadened its definition of creators: tapping into voices across Substack, podcasts and even homeware spaces to reach its millennial, baby boomer and Gen X audience. Well-known faces like Grace Coddington, Kelly Rutherford, Issa Rae and Nicole Richie offer brand alignment without algorithm dependency. Speaking to finding the right creators, Morin says, “We’ve had to find her in newsletters, in podcasts, on Reddit. Places where she’s curating, not being sold to.”
This approach helps trade reach in for resonance. Campaigns take longer to execute and rely on trust rather than tactics. But Morin sees that slowness as a competitive advantage. “Slow influence,” she says, is more durable and more defensible in a fragmented digital landscape.
Resisting the whims of the algorithm
If building brand memory is Merit’s long game, resisting algorithm volatility is its operational defence and daily challenge, explains Morin. In a market where digital performance often dictates strategy, the brand actively designs around the risk of overexposure to any one platform.
In January, when TikTok engagement plummeted following the LA wildfires, Merit didn’t scramble. “No TikTok sales were coming through,” Morin says. “So we shifted the 10 per cent ad spend elsewhere. That’s the benefit of a diversified plan.”
Beyond spend, algorithms pose a subtler creative risk. “They serve everyone the same content, so art directors, marketers, creators all end up drawing from the same references,” she says. Morin actively encourages her team to work offline: sourcing campaign inspiration from museums, spending an “enormous amount of money” on vintage references such as ’90s magazines and Ebay ads — known for their strong art direction, disciplined typography and clear product storytelling — and in-person observation, all of which inform Merit’s pared-back, editorial approach to branding. An Amsterdam trip last summer, for example, influenced the brand’s updated blush colourways after Morin noticed locals wearing vivid, high-placed colour. “It wasn’t something I saw online, it was something I saw in the world.”
To counter algorithmic echo chambers, Morin herself uses multiple Instagram accounts with distinct algorithms to avoid creative tunnel vision. “Once you like one thing, it builds an entire world around that. You have to actively break out of that funnel to see something new,” she explains.
Still, platform performance varies and TikTok remains a challenge. “It [TikTok] functions off clickbait. If you refuse to do that — and we do — content doesn’t pick up the same way,” Morin says. Instead, the brand relies on lo-fi formats like showcasing five-minute makeup routines in the bathroom and working with recognisable cultural figures like actors Rae (known for TV show Insecure), Rutherford (Gossip Girl) and Lauren Graham (Gilmore Girls) to create resonance on their own terms. “That’s done exceptionally well,” says Morin, on average generating a 14 per cent engagement rate, fourfold the average according to Dash Social, a social media management platform. Though, Morin acknowledges the brand has yet to scale meaningfully on the platform.
TikTok content
Instagram, by contrast, plays to Merit’s strengths. “It prioritises storytelling and beautiful content, which is much more intuitive for us,” she says. Surprisingly, print has also proved powerful. For its fragrance launch, the brand ran ads and scent strips in Vogue and Real Simple. “The response from our audience was huge. We’ve had a lot of success scaling channels no one else is really looking at.” For Morin, the platform is just the delivery mechanism. “We want to build a brand people believe in deeply, and that’s our scale metric. Platforms change, products change — but if that connection holds, we’re in a strong place.”
Essentially, the brand is betting on repetition, not reinvention; resonance, not reach to compete — despite the sheer discipline that’s needed to reject the market pressures. It’s a slower play in a faster market. But for Merit, that’s exactly the point.
Great Skin Double Cleanse is available 12 August 2025.
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