On Wednesday, WWD Beauty Inc. kicked off Day One of its 2025 Beauty CEO Summit at Casa Cipriani in New York City. Themed “The New Leadership Mandate: The Issues, The Innovators, The Insights,” the event brought together industry leaders to discuss pushing the boundaries of product and retail innovation; navigating the complex global environment, and keeping up with culture.
The day’s speakers included Ulta Beauty chief executive officer and president Kecia Steelman, The Estée Lauder Cos. CEO Stéphane de La Faverie, Monday Haircare founder Jaimee Lupton and more.
Here, the top 17 takeaways from the the first day:
- When in doubt, double down on core strengths: For Ulta Beauty CEO Steelman, driving emotional connectivity in stores via in-person activations has been the cornerstone of Ulta’s differentiation — and a key aspect of the Ulta Beauty Unleashed strategy she is pioneering as retailer competition stiffens.
- Beauty moves with culture: “Beauty is extremely resilient,” de La Faverie said. “Beauty moves with culture, and culture moves constantly.”
- Incrementality Is an Art: “Curate your collection so it’s a natural next step, consistently finding ways to add meaningful value to your customer’s lives,” said Cassandra Morales Thurswell, founder and CEO of Kitsch, which is netting upward of $350 million in annual sales.
- Dupes Present More Opportunity Than Meets the Eye: Contentious as they may be, dupes boost consumer engagement, research and product testing for products on all ends of the pricing spectrum, Circana’s Larissa Jensen said. Proprietary data from Circana and WWD shows price is important, but not the only motivator for buying dupes — in fact, 68 percent of consumers believe dupes have a similar quality to that of the original product, and 77 percent of consumers either have purchased or would consider purchasing a dupe.
- Move Quick to Stay Relevant: “You need to move at the speed of light. You need to be at the front of cultural trends,” said Lupton, founder of Monday Haircare, Being Haircare and Daise Beauty.
- Make Time to Daydream: Spanx and Sneex founder Sara Blakely has found that making time to daydream is an overlooked key to fostering not just ideas, but potentially the next million- or billion- dollar ideas — and she would know.
- Beauty Goes Beyond Clinicals: For plastic surgeon and skin care brand founder Dr. Julius Few, the future of the category relies on raising the bar from just standard clinical studies to peer-reviewed publishing.
- Content Never Sleeps: At Supergoop, content is 24/7, per CEO Lisa Sequino, as the sunscreen brand has a team in Asia creating overnight. She emphasized that the brand has increased its content by five times this year alone.
- Staying Ahead of the Consumer’s Needs: “We ask ourself the question all the time: ‘Is there something that we can do that the consumer can’t express or doesn’t know, and we can define or explore a possibility that’s not defined by them,’” said Freddy Bharucha, president of personal care at Procter & Gamble.
- Culture Is King: For Revlon CEO Michelle Peluso, as hard as adapting new tech tools and navigating macroeconomic factors may be, keeping up with culture — and cultivating a positive internal one — is even more so, but just as important. “I have spent my entire career [keeping up with] how technology changes things, and what I have learned is the tool piece is the very, very easy piece; data, standards, data governance — that’s harder — training, that stuff, that’s hard — and culture, really hard.”
- Thriving in the Unknown: “This is a very uncertain time, and one of the hardest things for M&A and transactions is uncertainty. People really get nervous, they get ‘risked off’ is the term that people use,” said Venette Ho, managing director and head of beauty, personal care and wellness at Raymond James. “But at the end of the day, it’s an industry that really thrives on M&A.”
- Tap Into Measured Magic: For all of the fun in escapist branding, all of the Willy Wonka-type products, the dirty little truth is that behind it all the scaffolding is actually very traditional and very boring in methodical and meticulous strategic marketing.
- Make It Frictionless: Taylor Hamilton of Recom stressed the need to make the user journey as easy as possible along every step of the way.
- Power Personalization With AI: With technology such as AI/AR continuing to expand in the beauty industry, Perfect Corp. has been a leader in this intersection for the past decade. Alice Chang of Perfect Corp. and Lynda Pak of Estée Lauder Cos. discussed how the two companies have worked closely together to provide customers with the ultimate experience, from mapping skin care concerns to makeup try-ons to shade matching — all to allow consumers to be their most beautiful selves.
- Thinking About the Holistic Shopping Experience: Amazon’s Melis del Rey is embracing health as well as beauty in her role and it’s presenting new opportunities to innovate on behalf of consumers and programs, with one of the most exciting opportunities being around creating a holistic shopping experience.
- Maximizing the Impact of Beauty Tech: “If you look at the impact of beauty tech across different brands, what you find is that there are some cases that it has a tremendously positive impact, and the biggest differentiator is not the brand category or market segment or even provider technology. The biggest differentiator is user experience,” said Parham Aarabi, CEO of Pre.
- Put Authenticity Over Transactions: Beauty is a high touch category — brands are touching peoples’ skin and their hearts, making every interaction important. Brands fostering loyalty are putting authenticity over transactions, ensuring that the story they are telling makes an impact.