Building the industries category leader in beauty dupes in 3 years
The Challenge
How do you stand out and win in a market flooded by beauty giants like Charlotte Tilbury, Rare Beauty and Glossier… when you don’t have their budgets?
Revolution Beauty came to us with a mission: own the dupe space.
They already had the formulas. But what they needed was hype - to position their products as the go-to, affordable alternatives to the most in-demand cult beauty buys, and do it faster, louder, and at scale. We used always-on PR, trend driven launches and a product first approach to own the conversation and the category.
Revolution wanted traffic and sales directly to D2C commerce but also wanted a strategy which would drive footfall and traffic to their online retail partners like Superdrug.
Going after the beauty dupe category
What We Did
We built a real-time dupe intelligence engine. Every time a beauty trend surged, whether from TikTok, YouTube hauls or new celebrity launches, our radar picked it up.
Instead of trying to compete after the moment, we got there first:
🔍 We tracked viral demand signals (like “Charlotte Tilbury dupe” or “Rare Beauty blush alternative”) across Google, TikTok and Pinterest
🧠 We mapped Revolution’s product catalogue against these spikes to uncover hidden dupe opportunities.
👄 We activated creator armies to review, react and recreate viral looks using Revolution products.
📰 And we dropped PR bombs in MailOnline, GLAMOUR and Refinery29 - claiming the dupe crown with headlines that made you click and buy.
All while feeding SEO and marketplace content to clean up in search.
We launched some of the beauty industry's most iconic moments, from the sold-out Miracle Cream to the most in-demand beauty advent calendar of the year. A total of 35 large-scale product launches, collaborations with celebrity faces, events and creators, we spent 3 years building what was to become the underdog brand on L’Oréal’s radar.
Driving £6.3m in attributable revenue D2C using PR and Social in 3 years
The Results
Since April 2022, we’ve driven an increase of 295% in D2C traffic to Revolution Beauty’s online store, contributing to £6.3m in revenue directly to the site for our product PR pushes. That's a 21X ROI on our agency spend.
Retail revenue also went up £55m in the 3 years working together, totalling 41% growth. We achieved 1486 media placements during this time, so much we had journalists come to us for stories, products and early access.
Our press releases were also voted the best press releases of the year by Harper's Bazaar and Elle magazine.
We increased search demand by 2015% using PR and social, and at one point, selling one unit every 60 seconds online. Rev Beauty also has the highest share of voice (73%) in LLMs for beauty dupe category keywords.
We went on to win other beauty brands from LookFantastic, Dermalogica, No7, Beauty Pie, Glow Hub and more.
