Retail Expansion
Leading brand repositioning and go-to-market strategy that took a beauty and wellness brand into national retail.
01 — Overview
Vanity Planet had a strong product and a brand story that hadn't caught up to it. I led the full repositioning — identity, messaging, and a plan to carry it through product, retail, and e-commerce — that took the brand into national distribution at BlueMercury and Walmart.
02 — Business Challenge
Vanity Planet held a competent product in a beauty and wellness category where competent wasn't enough — the brand's positioning was undifferentiated, its customer experience inconsistent across touchpoints, and its retail ambitions outpaced the marketing infrastructure needed to support them. Without a unified brand identity and a plan to carry it, national retail expansion wasn't realistic.
Closing that gap fell to me. The mandate wasn't to make the marketing look better — it was to decide what the brand was actually for, then hold product, creative, and commercial teams to that decision across a full concept-to-launch cycle, at a point where it would have been easier to let each function keep optimizing for its own definition of good.
03 — Opportunity
A repositioned brand and an integrated marketing engine could open retail conversations the product alone couldn't. The strategic bet was to treat national awareness, premium repositioning, and retail expansion as one growth engine rather than three separate initiatives competing for the same limited budget — a brand story credible enough to give retail buyers a reason to say yes, and a demand system built to convert that story into purchase.
04 — Research
A category and competitive review, alongside an audit of every customer touchpoint — website, packaging, retail collateral, email — confirmed the core diagnosis: the product outperformed the expectations the brand set for it. That gap, more than any single campaign underperforming, was the evidence that made the case for a full repositioning rather than a creative refresh.
05 — Strategy
I made the call to lead a full repositioning of the brand's visual and verbal identity — not a refresh of existing assets, but a redefinition of what Vanity Planet stood for across every digital and retail touchpoint. Every decision that followed, from creative direction to channel mix, was tested against one question: does this make the brand more believable as a premium, self-care label, or does it just make more noise?
06 — Creative Direction
Setting a consistent point of view for messaging and storytelling came first, then holding the designers, photographers, content creators, and production partners I worked with to that point of view — rather than letting each new campaign quietly reinvent the brand on its own terms. The result was a visual language calm and premium enough to hold its own on a BlueMercury shelf, not just in a deck.
“Growth doesn't come from picking a lane. Creative, product, and marketing have to move as one, or the story falls apart on the shelf.”
Nick Farkas
07 — Execution
Repositioning a brand doesn't stay inside the marketing department for long — it touches what product teams build, what retail sales promises buyers, and what a customer sees at checkout. I aligned product development around customer insight rather than internal assumptions, worked with retail sales and e-commerce so the brand's premium story showed up the same way in a Walmart aisle as it did online, and brought influencer, PR, and external creative partners into one shared point of view instead of letting each relationship run its own version of the brand. None of that alignment was automatic — it meant convincing people who reported to other leaders that a shared decision was worth more than autonomy over their own piece of it.
08 — Marketing Rollout
The commercial rollout ran across paid and organic social, search, email, influencer partnerships, and content — but the channel mix was never the strategy, it was the delivery mechanism for one. Every touchpoint was built to move a customer through the same journey, from a stronger, more premium brand impression to a purchase decision, without breaking character along the way. That same discipline extended into retail: the refreshed positioning and creative system became the basis for conversations that helped bring Vanity Planet into BlueMercury and Walmart, because the retail story was no longer riding on the product alone.
One consistent visual language, carried through every seasonal drop.
09 — Business Results
2
Major National Retail Partners Added — BlueMercury & Walmart
Nationwide
Brand Awareness Campaign Reach
1
Unified Brand Vision Across Product, Creative & Marketing
Beyond the retail placements themselves: brand consistency across digital, retail, and e-commerce that held up under scale, creative standards durable enough to support long-term brand equity, and an organization where product, marketing, and retail were finally reading from the same script.
10 — Lessons Learned
National retail expansion isn't won by the product alone — it's won by whether every function, from product to creative to marketing, is telling the same story at the same time. Retail doesn't reward the best product on the shelf. It rewards the brand a buyer already believes their customer wants.
This project taught me the difference between a brand that looks premium and a brand that's organized to behave like one. It's possible to elevate photography and tighten messaging and still have the underlying business tell a different, less disciplined story the moment a customer looks past the campaign — in a product spec, a retail presentation, a customer service interaction. Real repositioning has to reach further than the marketing function is usually given permission to go.
The through-line for me was alignment as a leadership discipline, not a nice-to-have. Every function in this business had a reasonable, defensible version of what the brand should be. My job wasn't to have better taste than any of them — it was to make one version win, clearly enough that people stopped relitigating it campaign by campaign. That's the instinct I bring to every organization I've led since: the brand isn't the thing you launch. It's the thing everyone eventually has to agree on.
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