As more beauty brands turn their attention to Amazon, the playbook for success on the platform is becoming increasingly intricate.
“By the time a consumer sits down to shop, 84 percent of them already know the top three brands in their consideration set,” said Christopher Skinner, chief revenue officer at Front Row Group, in a keynote speech presented by Front Row at the 2026 Beauty CEO Summit. “That means if you have not done some bias-building up front, you are competing with that 16 percent.”
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Due to the sheer amount of choice consumers have today, the potential of losing them when even one part of a brand’s offer is inconsistent — whether its price or shipping time or trust or anything else — is greater than ever.
“There are a lot of places that leaks can start to happen,” said Skinner, likening a brand’s Amazon presence to a garden, where different teams and agencies are all interconnected, sharing the same irrigation system, and thus, any leaks in that system. “If you think about everything you do, we have that single source of truth of brand, and we have to get it connected all the way to the point where a consumer makes a choice — and then ultimately repeats that purchase.”
Skinner pointed to Medicube, one of Amazon’s biggest recent success stories, as an example of this harmony. The brand had zero revenue on Amazon nearly 18 months ago. Now, it is the number-one brand in skin care and has surpassed more than $100 million in the first quarter of this year.
“If you know Medicube, they have a pretty strong promo game,” said Skinner, referencing the K-beauty brand’s routine sales. “Promo layered on top of no demand is just discounting, but promo layered on top of demand is a flywheel, which is ultimately helping them become more successful.”
He also said that branded search is a key part of Medicube’s growth, indicating customers come to Amazon with the intention to buy Medicube more often than they make a browsing-induced Medicube purchase.
“Brand foundation is everything. The stronger the foundation, the higher the building you can construct. The weaker the foundation, the weaker the building and the lower in terms of height the building you can construct,” Skinner said.
He also noted how beauty’s convergence with health and wellness makes it that much more competitive a market. For instance, in the first quarter of 2026, the number-one selling beauty product was neither a treatment, serum or tool; it was the Nutrafol women’s hair loss pill.
The most frequent customer leaks on Amazon occur within price, trust and creative discrepancies. “If you have a simple algorithmic error that changes your ship date, you can actually lose 60 percent of that stock keeping unit’s sales overnight,” Skinner said, adding also, “if the creative that a customer discovered off Amazon doesn’t match the creative on Amazon, the trust breaks.”
“Brand is the ownable, defensible thing that you can do that no one else can do. And business is that thing that is scalable and actually can compound over time versus being reliant upon something that will go out of fashion,” Skinner concluded.