Osh Savur loves building brands. As the chief marketing officer of Maesa – a portfolio of beauty brands – she sees her role as cultivating an environment for incubating brands. She helps turn insights and TikTok trends into sellable products on the shelves of retailers like Target and Ulta Beauty that appeal to Gen Z and Gen Alpha.
“Maesa is a next-gen beauty company. We operate brands. We incubate brands. Four of our brands are projected to be crossing $100 million thresholds by the end of this year,” says Savur. “We are scaling brands, but also at the same time successfully launching new brands. Our hit rate in the market is two out of three versus an industry average of 1 out of 10. Launching new brands is quite hard, but we do it really well.”
The company’s portfolio includes haircare brand Kristin Ess Hair, fragrance brand Fine’ry. wellness brand Being Frenshe and itk, a skincare brand founded by Gen-Z influencers Brooklyn and Bailey McKnight. Savur attributes the company’s success to insights and finding white spaces in the market place.
“We’ll look out for a sleepy CPG giant category –one where there hasn’t been a lot of innovation – and there is room for innovation,” explains Savur. “We unearth those unmet consumer niches, beyond just the needs – subcultures on TikTok that inspire us to create brands that then become culturally relevant.”
For instance, Being Frenshe aimed to disrupt the body wash and lotion categories at Walmart and Target. “It ritualized the utilization of all these personal care items under one umbrella and made it be all mood boosting scent orientation,” says Savur.
Prior to joining Maesa, Savur held senior marketing roles at Charlotte Tilbury Beauty, Revlon and Unilever. Brand Innovators caught up with Savur from her office in New York to talk category disruption, cultural relevance and how insights drive innovation. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How do you work within culture to create viable products?
When we’re talking about incubating a new brand from scratch, our cycle typically begins with looking at macro consumer trends beyond just beauty trends. We look at what’s going on in the geopolitics of the world, how consumers are utilizing time, their relationship with death and life. We go into the deep consumer psyche and think about macro trends from that perspective. Then we distill it down to what it means for beauty and how the beauty needs are going to evolve.
We have very strong relationships with our retailer partners. We’re often in the kitchen with them when we’re incubating a brand. There’s a lot of art and science that goes into it. We’re reading a lot of data and trends, then we identify a few ideas for our retailer partners. They also share what they are seeing and we start putting a little bit more seriousness around the brand proposition and design aspiration and then go from there.
Can you give me an example of a brand that started with a consumer insight?
Fine’ry launched in February of 2023 when the world was coming out of COVID, a time when fragrance was a breakthrough category in beauty. It just blew up unexpectedly. It befuddled all of the beauty marketers. We saw that prestige markets were really gaining from it, but mass businesses had actually started to walk away from fragrances. Target didn’t even have a fragrance aisle at the time. Maesa shared what was going on in the marketplace and how prestige was winning with Target. Then we reimagined what fragrance could look like in their store. We were working against a lack of space. We knew that there was a trend out there, but was that trend going to be relevant to mass?
We reimagined the fragrance aisle for Target. We created in-store disruption with testers that looked cool, sexy and had pick-me-up value to it. TikTok blew up. TikTokers discovered the brand in store and started to talk about it. The brand went viral right at launch because it was so culturally relevant. We doubled down on that and honed on our influencer marketing strategy and invested in TikTok to build demand. Within two years, the brand is doing phenomenally well, we’ve doubled the Target business.
That pick-me-up value drives a lot of UGC for our brands, which is a big part of how we go to market. In December of 2024, we were selling one unit of Products like our Frenshe Hair Body and Linen Mist. Cashmere Vanilla every six seconds. We have a founder partner on this brand, Ashley Tisdale. The storytelling from Ashley amplifies the UGC and influencer engagement. It’s a gorgeous bottle and a surprise and delight price point. Once UGC starts, that’s when you’re onto something. Then we throw in the brand fuel on top of TikTok engagement, influencers, and that’s primarily how we go to market.
Can you talk about how you are trying to evolve the conversation around intimate health with Niches & Nooks?
When you walk down the aisles, especially in mass, you find that the way the brands are talking to women about intimate health, it sounds like it’s a dishwashing aisle. When you read the front of pads, odor blocking this or that. It literally sounds like it’s a dishwashing detergent that we are selling. We thought that there was a way to bring femininity to this aisle, an appreciation for scent and design. But more importantly, making it okay to talk about these topics, which were forever in the dark corner. It’s okay to talk about your vagina. It’s just a normal part of your body. It’s okay to design a beautiful product that you can display in your bathroom aisle versus hide it in your drawer. That was the driving factor of it.
When we started to look at data points, we saw that with every generation, there was more openness to talk about the topic. TikTok views are going up in Intimate Wellness. Gen Z has a 43% openness to talk about intimate wellness, but it also points to the fact that 57% people are still not okay to talk about Intimate Wellness, even in Gen Z. The room to grow is so big. We thought that there was a real way to educate the consumer by bringing comedy into the space. The comedy makes it okay to talk about it.
Can you talk more about your retailer strategy?
We currently have business in almost any mass retail environment you can imagine, but we’re very thoughtful in our distribution expansion. Oftentimes, our brands start as exclusives with a certain incubation retailer. And over time, it’s a mutual decision when we start to expand the brands out. The retailer footprint is quite wide depending on the brand.
For instance, Kristin Ess is almost nationally distributed versus Niches & Nooks are largely exclusive brands with Target and then we have brands in between. When it’s an exclusive relationship, the retailer really believes in the brand too. They want to help create that brand’s incremental growth. A lot of the brands we create for our retailers to drive incrementality of growth because we bring in a younger or social media-savvy consumer. The footprint of the retailers we work with has a very high penetration in American households. When you activate there, you’re building awareness from the very bottom of the funnel awareness building. Then we layer on social media, founder marketing, influencer marketing and so on.
