The beauty brand Lush has now spent five years in what might be called social media exile, and the curious thing is that nobody seems to have told its customers.
In 2021, the British retailer made the unusual decision to stop posting — and, more significantly, stop advertising — on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat. The company cited concerns about data privacy and algorithmic harm to young users, a position that hardened after the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen's disclosures about the platform's internal research on teenage mental health. By 2023, Lush had abandoned X as well, following Elon Musk's acquisition of the platform.
"We don't engage in any paid advertising on social media, in that we don't invest in paying the platforms for advertising," said Julia Hamfelt, head of marketing for Lush North America. "Our philosophy really is to invest in people over platforms."
To the modern direct-to-consumer marketer, this might sound like a company explaining why it has decided to stop accepting money. Paid social advertising, after all, has become something close to table stakes for consumer brands hoping to reach younger shoppers. (The platforms would certainly like everyone to believe so.)
But Lush, which sells bath bombs and handmade cosmetics, has redirected its marketing dollars toward its own channels: a mobile app that Ms. Hamfelt said now has 2.8 million users, an email list reaching more than six million people globally, and a network of content creators and in-person events. The company has also joined Bluesky and started a Substack account this year, and maintains an active presence on YouTube and Pinterest — though without paid promotion.
"There was a period of time where we had to rebuild avenues and ways to directly connect with our customers," Ms. Hamfelt said.
The strategy has not, apparently, been fatal. Lush says it is growing, though Ms. Hamfelt declined to specify how much the company had been spending on social advertising before it stopped. (The answer may help explain why the departure was survivable.)
Jeremy Ekes, vice president of client service and strategy at the agency January Digital, noted that brands have increasingly diversified their media spending as measurement tools have improved. "Social is where eyeballs follow and a lot of reach can be garnered," Mr. Ekes said, "but it's not the only option."
The timing of Lush's departure looks somewhat different now than it did in 2021. Just last week, Meta was ordered to pay a $25 billion penalty in New Mexico in a case stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Australia has moved to ban social media for children under 16.
"I think what we're seeing now is that conversation has hit the mainstream in a much bigger, more powerful way," Ms. Hamfelt said.
Lush's TikTok account, with its single post and 344,900 followers, remains a kind of monument to the road not taken — or, perhaps, to the one that turned out to have more than one lane.
Original story published in Digiday: "How Lush quit social media ads and still drove growth", by Kimeko McCoy