Coty · Philosophy Skincare · The Birthday · 2013
I founded the influencer department at Philosophy — and built the operating model that turned a brand voice into a community.
2M
Data points collected over a social based 5-day campaign
100K+
Facebook followers added
300K
Blog subscribers within 1 year
1 — THE CHALLENGE
The hardest brief isn't a turnaround. It's a blank page.
Philosophy didn't need saving in the early 2010s — it was thriving at Sephora, Ulta, QVC, and just beginning to find its voice online. What it needed was someone who could hold the emotional center while everything else was being invented in real time. A small internal team, leaders willing to trust, and an open question: who could this brand become?
2 — THE APPROACH
The answer was already in the brand's DNA.
The Philosophy Girl wasn't a persona or a mood board. She was aspirational and grounded, wise and still figuring it out — all the things women actually are. Most brands flatten that complexity into something manageable. We held it, and built a voice that could carry all of it.
What emerged wasn't a content calendar. It was a weekly ritual — Fridays, Holidays, Birthdays — each one a signal that the brand noticed the same moments its customers did. The audience didn't just follow. They belonged.
The output was a voice. The outcome was a community that knew it was seen.
3 — THE WORK
From experiment to channel worth building around.
When the Birthday campaign finally had the production to match the emotional equity behind it, it didn't just perform. It revealed who the Philosophy Girl actually was — and how many of her there were.
The training wheels came off the day the brand started believing in social not as an experiment, but as a channel worth building around.
3 — WHAT THIS WORK TAUGHT ME
The most strategic thing you can build inside a thriving brand is a department that didn't exist yet.
Philosophy taught me that the hardest leadership work isn't fixing what's broken — it's identifying the thing that doesn't exist yet and building the operating model to support it before anyone else realizes it's missing. Department-building is a specific muscle. It's not management, it's not creative direction, it's not strategy — it's all three at once, in service of capability the company doesn't yet know how to ask for. Every brand I've worked with since has had one of these blank-page opportunities. The discipline is recognizing them early.
