Attending BITE 2025 by Beauty Independent was an incredible opportunity to connect with beauty and personal care industry professionals who are all working towards more efficient and effective ways to create products people love.
I walked away with a list of learnings from the brands and product innovators that shared their success stories. Read on to get a taste of what it takes to innovate successfully today.
One of the most powerful sessions came from Aaron Hefter of Imarais Beauty, who shared how he transitioned from the world of fitness to beauty. What stood out was how deliberate he was in choosing Sommer Ray as the face of the brand.
It wasn’t about chasing the biggest following; it was about alignment, trust, and storytelling. The right partner can shape your brand’s identity. The wrong one can dilute it.
Over and over, speakers reinforced the same message: authenticity is the currency of modern marketing.
Consumers see through forced content, especially fake “podcast-style” ads. They’re looking for entertainment and sincerity. It’s better to have a strong, focused presence than to spread thin across every channel. Publications have shifted fully to digital, so where and how you show up matters more than ever.
The founders of London’s AKT Natural Deodorant shared how they have seen much more success with real, in-the-moment testimonials and the ripple effect they have vs. overly staged creative campaigns. With the pair being former actors themselves, their background in creativity and entertainment has taken them far with engaging content.
The team at Maesa shared how they use foresight and white space analysis to guide their product strategy from day one—and build strong relationships with retailers like Target to ensure shelf success.
As Maesa’s brands don’t offer DTC, there is a need to ensure every launch is impactful, which means always introducing a complete set of 8–10 SKUs. With that, they have developed a formal playbook for new product development and activation. This reminded me how powerful it can be to incorporate platforms like Highlight into these playbooks to bring consumer input in earlier—helping teams move faster and with greater confidence.
FROMM carries over 2,000 SKUs, and their CEO, Marty Okner, empowers teams to make fast, data-driven decisions with processes in place to support them.
This really underscores something I believe deeply: speed and data are not opposites. With the right systems and tools, they fuel each other. Highlight is built for exactly this—giving marketing, sales, and PD teams quick-turn consumer feedback to power decisions across communication, sell-in, and sensory evaluations.
A key theme was speed. The old 24–36 month product cycle just doesn’t work anymore. Brands need to bring products to market in 12 months or less.
When asked about the biggest bottleneck, Sarina Godin from True Botanicals undoubtedly stated: Testing. Without upfront process planning, shelf stability tests and other checkpoints create long delays. Platforms like Highlight can help eliminate these bottlenecks by giving teams faster, easier access to the insights they need to keep development moving.
And while speeding up is crucial, so is cross-functional alignment. Product development and marketing often operate in silos, even though they’re collecting insights from the same consumers. The brands that win will be the ones who break down these walls and collaborate to bring the best products to life with a strong story to tell
With so much evolving in the beauty industry so quickly, there is always something new to learn. Tish Poling—President and co-founder of International Products Group—is a product development veteran with 30+ years of experience who reminded me how critical it is to stay plugged into industry trends and tools, as she is regularly reading product reviews, McKinsey reports, and similar reports. Learning never stops, no matter how long you’ve been in the industry.
If I had to summarize the message from BITE in one line, it would be this:
Move fast, stay authentic, and never lose sight of your consumer.
For beauty and personal care brands, that means:
With the right culture and the right tools—like Highlight to streamline insights and accelerate decisions—brands can build products people truly love, faster than ever before.