Overview:

Counts Consulting partnered with a celebrity brand team to explore the launch of a new face and body care brand. The objective wasn’t to simply validate demand, but to understand where the brand could scale sustainably across pricing, channels, and consumer scope before committing to a go-to-market path.

Rather than starting with a predetermined position, the work focused on pressure-testing the biggest strategic questions early: how consumers actually behave, where they are willing to pay and how different launch choices expand or constrain long-term opportunity.

Approach:

We took a consumer and competitor-led, economics-first approach designed to create clarity without locking the team into premature decisions. Key elements of the work included:

• Designing and fielding a 600+ respondent consumer study to understand skincare usage, purchase behavior, and willingness to buy across categories

• Mapping price sensitivity and trade-up behavior by category to distinguish where masstige vs premium in defensible

• Building bottom-up revenue scenarios across channel and consumer target positioning options to compare realistic year 1 outcomes

• Stress-testing demographic and positioning choices against total addressable market, highlighting where focus sharpens strategy and where it could unintentionally cap upside

• Working collaboratively with the client team to iterate hypotheses in real time

The goal was not to “pick a lane,” but to give the brand team a clear view of the trade-offs, risks, and unlocks associated with each path.

Impact:

The work helped the team move forward with confidence by grounding ambition in reality. Key insights included:

• Everyday skincare spend is overwhelmingly masstige, regardless of gender. Premium earns traction in select categories where consumers expect to trade up

• Overly narrow consumer targeting can materially compress market opportunity before product, price, or channel choices are even made

• Channels don’t create brand credibility, they need to amplify it, making early sequencing decisions critical

• Celebrity-backed brands must be formalization of the celebrity themselves to have the credibility to succeed in a highly competitive and fragmented market

• Celebrities alone may drive initial excitement, but the product must stand on its own to remain successful

Ultimately, the engagement reframed the conversation from “What should the brand be?” to “What choices create the most durable path to scale?”, equipping the team with a decision framework that will continue to guide future GTM refinement.